Mariners must be mindful of recent big-money MLB manager contracts

It's a little soon to be thinking about Dan Wilson as a potential forever-manager for the Seattle Mariners. He just got the job last August, with the ensuing 34 games accounting for the entirety of his experience as a major league skipper.

But in case the Mariners are eventually convinced that Wilson should be a mainstay in their dugout, they may need to be prepared to pay handsomely for the privilege.

It's a train of thought worth having because of how the earning power for experienced, successful, and respected managers has shifted in the last year or so. It started when the Chicago Cubs lured Craig Counsell away from the Milwaukee Brewers with a five-year, $40 million pact in November of 2023, and two more skippers have struck it rich since.

In July of 2024, the Boston Red Sox inked Alex Cora to a three-year deal that pays over $7 million per season. And just this week, the Los Angeles Dodgers signed Dave Roberts to a four-year deal that tops Counsell's $8 million average salary.

Managers are back, baby

When Counsell signed with the Cubs, his new salary nearly doubled that of Terry Francona, who had previously MLB's highest-paid manager at $4.5 million per year for the Cleveland Guardians.

"What's going on here?" was a pertinent question, and the most straightforward answer was that the MLB coaching market was overdue for a correction. As ESPN's Jeff Passan observed, it had become easier for qualified coaches to find lucrative salaries in the college ranks:

Yet as rich as Counsell's deal was, it wasn't entirely new ground for a manager. Joe Torre made $7.5 million in his last season with the New York Yankees in 2007. Adjusted for inflation, that's a little over $11 million in 2024 dollars.

If it's a question of why Torre's pay did not lead to similar manager salaries in the intervening years between his heyday and Counsell's payday, one logical answer is that the George Steinbrenner-era Yankees didn't offer a spending model that other teams could feasibly follow.

However, there is also how the job changed. The 2010s were a time when the philosophy and day-to-day leadership of MLB teams increasingly flowed not from the manager, but from the front office. Jayson Stark of The Athletic wrote all about in a 2019 article that pondered: "Are MLB managers becoming obsolete?"

Evidently not, if the paychecks of Counsell, Cora and Roberts are any indication. And if there are two things that tie these three together, it's that they're strong in-game managers and gifted in the art of communication.

These have always been valuable skills for a manager, but communication has perhaps never been as important as it is today. Even if it's still the front office that sets the agenda, the manager can't get players to fall in line by barking marching orders. Buy-in needs to happen, and it must be organic.

As Dodgers shortstop Miguel Rojas said of Roberts, per Bob Nightengale of USA Today: “He embodies what it means to be a good leader. And that’s what I really care about, the personality, the character and always communicating with everybody."

Wilson sure seems like a special manager

As for how all this reflects on Wilson, well, just think about how much he changed the Mariners last year.

Though they still missed the playoffs, they went from being 64-64 under Scott Servais to 21-13 under Wilson. And it wasn't just the wins, as he and Hitting Coach-turned-Senior Director of Hitting Strategy Edgar Martinez breathed life into a deceased offense. Seattle scored 3.9 runs per game under Servais, and 5.1 per game under Wilson.

The Mariners brass was obviously convinced enough to keep the 55-year-old Wilson in the manager's chair, and the reviews he's gotten amid the build-up to 2025 have been glowing.

As Mariners catcher Cal Raleigh told Daniel Kramer of MLB.com: “It's going to be his team. His philosophies, his way of thinking, his style of baseball, and you're going to see more of that this year — more so than I think last year — because, it’s hard [to establish that in 34] games. But I'm excited, I really am."

And here's Passan from last week's interview with Seattle Sports’ Brock and Salk show: "I think [the players] really like Dan Wilson and like playing for him and have a pretty deep respect for him. And for him to have engendered that over less than a year in his seat is impressive, and I think he’s an impressive guy.”

None of this is to suggest that Mariners owner John Stanton and president of baseball operations Jerry Dipoto must arrange a Brinks truck for Wilson right now. But since spring is a good time for optimism, there's nothing wrong with wondering if the faint magic-manager energy that Wilson gives off could eventually become undeniable.