Mariners manager Scott Servais talks golf, cigars and baseball

When the quarantine first hit, Mariners manager Scott Servais figured it was an opportunity — a few extra weeks to coach up his young staff, and then bring everyone back together. Then, a few weeks became a month, then two, then three.

“That’s when it started to wear a little thin,” he jokes.

Servais has spent more than 40 years in baseball, so to be without it this spring has been one of the stranger experiences of his life. An 11-year MLB veteran, Servais had front-row seats to the careers of some of the greatest players in the history of the game, including Jeff Bagwell, Craig Biggio, Sammy Sosa, Barry Bonds, Larry Walker and MarkMcGwire. In fact, not only was Servais in Chicago during the epic 1998 home run chase, he called the pitch that Big Mac lined over the left-field wall for the record breaking No. 62, and was the first player to greet McGwire at home plate.

At least the quarantine has been good for Servais’ golf game. A self-taught, single-digit handicapper who takes his golf clubs with him on any Mariners road trip that includes a scheduled off day, Servais has been making his way around the Seattle area’s top courses over the past few weeks, from Aldarra to Chambers Bay.

That’s all going to come to an end soon, though. In late June — less than 24 hours before this interview — Servais, and the rest of the world, learned that Major League Baseball would be officially returning in July to play a 60-game season, with an abbreviated spring training starting July 1.

So, we picked up the phone to find out a little more about that golf game, whose name has more pull at golf courses around the country — his or his daughter’s — and exactly how one goes about planning for a season unlike any other in baseball history.

CG: I believe your daughter, Jackie, works for the PGA TOUR? S

S: “Yeah, she does PR and media stuff for the Champions Tour. The guys she’s around are all the guys my age — Fred Couples, Jay Haas, the guys that I was watching on TV back when I was still playing. So, getting the chance to be on the driving range and talk to those guys about whatever — baseball, golf, different things — has been really neat. Last year, at the Boeing Classic, she was able to hook me up with a spot in the Pro-Am, where I got to play with Miguel Angel Jimenez. It was awesome. He’s one of her favorite players, and was really great to play with. Miguel knows nothing about baseball, so it was fun to be able to have a conversation that was just about golf, and learning about him.”

CG: Did he have an extra cig ar for you?

SS: (laughs) “Yeah, actually, he did.”

CG: Where do you play golf around here?

SS: “I’ve been pretty fortunate to touch just about all of the better courses in the area — Aldarra is at the top of the list for me, Snoqualmie, Sahalee, Seattle Golf Club, Overlake, Chambers Bay. The first time I ever played Chambers was last fall, after the season was over. It was just me and one of our scouts. We got lucky and got one of those perfect days, probably 60 degrees in mid-October with not a cloud in the sky, and I shot 82. I walked away thinking I had the course figured out, then went back a couple of months ago and ... didn’t shoot 82. (laughs) But, that was a really fun round. I have a friend visiting from out of town this weekend and plan to take him there if I can.”

CG: Do you have a regular group that you play with?

“No, not really. I play a lot with my fellow coaches, especially when we get off days out on the road. I don’t play on game days at all, but we do try to find a good course in the area when we have an off day. Last year, we had an off day in Milwaukee and got out to play Erin Hills; played Firestone, in Akron, on an off day in Cleveland; played Harding Park, in San Francisco, where the PGA Championship will be this year.”

CG: Why is it that so many baseball players play golf?

SS: “I think the eye-hand coordination is similar. And, guys love the challenge, they love the competition. Certainly, when guys get older and can’t play their sport, it’s a way to keep competing and bullshitting with each other. People say golf is a lot easier than baseball, but even though the ball is just sitting on the tee, and not moving, it isn’t so easy some days.”

CG: How did you pick up the game?

SS: “I grew up in a small town in Wisconsin, where there weren’t many opportunities to play golf. There was a par-3 course in LaCrosse, though, where my mom would drop me and my brothers off when she had to go into town to run errands. We were nine, ten years old, and could play as long as we wanted for like ten bucks. So, that was really how I got started. I’ve still never had a lesson — that’s the next thing I really need to do.”

CG: How is your game?

SS: “It’s OK. I don’t hit it very far, but I am probably indexed around eight-and-a-half or nine. I upgraded my equipment a couple of years ago and that’s made a big difference. I had been playing with an old set of Nike clubs that someone had given me years ago, so it was great to get a new set. I hit a bunch of different clubs and ended up being fit for some PINGs, which surprised me, because it wasn’t what I had gone in there planning to get. They made them a little bit longer for me, with a thicker grip, and the ball really jumps off the face. That said, I can still shoot 92 with the best of them, and then go shoot 79 or 80 the next day. But, that’s golf.”

CG: Do you have a go-to club or shot?

SS: “I like my 8-iron. I get a good feeling when it’s in my hand.”

CG: Do you have a favorite round you’ve ever played?

SS: “Back in the day, there used to be a thing called the World Series of Golf, where a bunch of big-league baseball players would get together at different locales — Pebble, Palm Springs, Kapalua. It was at Pebble for a long time, and we’d basically just take over the courses for four days — you’d play a competitive 18 at Pebble or Spyglass with your partner, then another 18 in some sort of different game, like a racehorse or a skins game. That was a lot of fun. You really got to know players from other teams, which was a totally different vibe. And, I’ll tell you, I’d much rather stand at the plate with 50,000 people in the stands than stand on that tee box with 40 fellow ballplayers standing around watching me hit a tee shot.” (laughs)

CG: What do you like best about golf?

SS: “The mental side of it. My first exposure to a mental skills coach came when I first started getting into golf. The guy I worked with worked with a lot of professional golfers, and also with the Astros, where I was playing at the time. It really helped me understand how powerful your mind is. In golf, you’re really competing against your inner thoughts, and all the swing adjustments and other things that are going through your head at all times. What happens when you make double. Can you bounce back and recover before the next hole? Or, the kiss of death, when you look at your scorecard and think, ‘Man, I just need to go one-over over these last four holes to shoot whatever,’ and then you know what happens. The wheels fall off. That’s exactly what happens in baseball.”

CG: What are the biggest ways in which baseball players have changed over the last 20 years or so?

“First of all, they’re just physically bigger, stronger and faster. When I was playing, the strength and conditioning coaching was just getting started, but players now are training 11 months out of the year with highly trained specialists who know exactly how to get the most out of their bodies. Even the pitching and velocity — back when I played, each team might have one, maybe two guys who threw 95 miles an hour; now, a team might have 10 guys throwing that hard. The next thing that’s changed a ton is the information that we have on not just the opponent, but about our own players, too. And, really, a lot of that comes from golf. When Trackman came from golf into baseball about seven, eight years ago, that really changed things. We can measure and track everything now — spin rates, the spin and axis the ball comes out of the pitcher’s hand, the exit velocity off the bat, the launch angles. And, then we can use that information to analyze what guys do and don’t do well. Back in my day, any adjustments you made or coaching you got was mostly off of memory, off of feel, or maybe watching some video. Now, the scouting and analytics just blows away what we used to do. And, the last thing that’s really changed the game is social media, and just how accessible the fans are to the players, and vice versa. Everybody weighs in, everybody has an opinion. And, that can be hard, especially, for baseball players, because there’s so much failure in the game — no matter how good you are — that there’s going to be a lot of negative feedback out there. That’s obviously something that didn’t exist at all when I played, and represents a unique challenge for today’s players to navigate.”

CG: What has this spring been like for you?

SS: “This is probably the first time since I was five or six years old that I haven’t had baseball in my life. It’s kind of gone in different modes for me, personally. When the virus first hit and we got shut down, I really looked at it as an opportunity. We have a number of new, young coaches this year, so I looked at it as an opportunity to really coach those guys up and learn more about each other. And, that was good — for about six weeks. (laughs) One of the things we did over the last two months was to run a computer program that simulates games against real teams with our real players. We would basically just decide who was in the game, and then the simulation would run it just like a regular-season game. In terms of our preparation and our in-game decision-making, we treated it just like a real game, and it gave some of those younger guys the chance to see how I like to work during a game, and get up to speed on our terminology and process. I want guys around me who are giving me good input and advice, so that gave me an opportunity to model for them how I think, and to figure out the ways in which they can challenge my thinking. I learned a lot, and our staff learned a lot. The hardest part is losing touch with players. Those relationships are my favorite part of the job. We did Zoom calls and different things, but it’s just not the same as having that back-and-forth that goes on in the clubhouse or on the field, building relationships. This whole thing has had its challenges, no doubt, and hopefully it’s something we’ll never have to see again.”

CG: It was just announced yesterday that players will be returning in one week, to prepare for a 60-game season. What will that next week look like for you as you have to suddenly gear up for this season under unprecedented circumstances?

SS: “The only thing I can compare it to is when we had the strike in 1994. That was a short spring training. So, we can take some lessons from that experience, but then we also have to be open to new ideas, because we’ve never been in a situation quite like this. When you have 60 players in spring training, you usually have four or five fields that you’re working with. Now, we’re only going to have one field, so we are going to have to get creative with maybe morning groups or afternoon groups — that’s what I’m going to be on calls over the next few days trying to figure out. The most challenging thing is that, with the protocols in place, you can’t really have any team meetings. So, I can’t sit in a room with 60 guys and talk about building our culture and our environment, which is something I’d usually spend a lot of time on at the start of the season. So, that’ll be the biggest challenge. It might have to be like what we used to do in high school, and just have guys sitting out in the stands at the ballpark and have the meetings outside. And, realistically, I don’t quite know if it’s behind us yet. I still question whether we are going to be able to start the season based on what’s going in different parts of the country right now. It’s one thing if you’re going to put us all in a bubble, but we have to get on an airplane and fly and go play games, and there’s so much stuff that can happen when you start moving around. So, we’ll have to wait and see.”

CG: It sounds like you have some doubts as to whether this season will play out as MLB has proposed.

SS: “I don’t know. Nobody knows. When everybody starts reporting to their cities and they all get tested, a lot of people are going to show up positive. And, I know a lot of people say, ‘Well, that’s what the taxi squads are for.’ Well, OK, but what happens when one team loses eight to ten of their key players? What does that do to the game? Now, our situation is a little bit different; we are planning to give a lot of young players opportunities this season and then looking to build upon that, so we’re in a much different mode than teams like the Dodgers, who are built to win right now. And, with just sixty games, there’s a lot of things that can happen. There will definitely be some surprise teams, and I hope we’re one of them. But, the biggest thing will be that hopefully we can play, give our fans something to be excited about, and kind of distract from all the things they’ve had to deal with these last couple of months.”

CG: Do you have any coaching advice for youth sports coaches, maybe something you wish you’d known earlier in your career?

SS: “I coached my son for years, so I’ve gone through the whole gamut. The biggest thing — and, quite frankly, it’s the same thing I tell our coaches at the Major League level — is that they have to have fun. Kids often quit baseball not because they couldn’t hit the curveball, or because they had an injury, but because it’s not fun anymore. Baseball is challenging to coach, because there is so much failure involved. So, trying to keep it fun is so important. Make practices competitive, come up with creative games and contests when running the bases, fielding ground balls, etc. If you do that, then kids want to come back, because they enjoy it.”