Paul Sullivan: No shortage of candidates for baseball’s biggest dope of 2021

CHICAGO — Baseball got through many a major doping scandal in the early part of the 21st century.

Now it hopes to get through its latest self-made crisis: a proliferation of dopes in positions of power.

One of the brainiacs already is gone — Seattle Mariners President/CEO Kevin Mather resigned in disgrace after bragging to a Breakfast Rotary Club about screwing players out of their service time, along with several other ignorant comments made on a stunning Zoom call.

Another MENSA reject, Los Angeles Angels pitching coach Mickey Callaway, was suspended during an investigation of alleged harassment of women during career stops in Cleveland, New York and Anaheim, Calif. And we can’t forget fired New York Mets general manager Jared Porter, who set a high bar for stupidity while allegedly harassing a female reporter with lewd messages and photos during his stint in the Chicago Cubs front office.

All three escaped notice for their transgressions for quite a while, but now the jig is up.

Thanks to modern technology — mainly Zoom videos, smartphone photos and text messages — all three left digital records that baseball historians might study for years to come. The lesson is this: When handed too much power with too little oversight, you can start believing your own hype.

Players might enjoy watching the higher-ups fall but know they can’t cackle out loud. Who knows who will be the next player to do something foolish or say something inappropriate on social media? The smart money is on Mets pitcher Noah Syndergaard or Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Trevor Bauer, both of whom are enabled by their respective teams.

Syndergaard called one fan a “bitch” recently on Instagram and suggested to another that his wife would be thinking of him during private moments. Bauer, a professional Twitter troll whose followers like to join in on the bullying, then tweeted at Syndergaard to “treat the fans better,” adding there was “no place for personal insults, especially about someone else’s wife.”

This “Thor vs. Bauer” Twitter beef is a made-for-TMZ affair that can end only one way: with one or both issuing a forced apology demanded by his team president.

Anyway, the baseball season is off and running, and competition for Dope of the Year is fierce, even amid COVID-19 protocols.

MLB surely will try to curtail the unrelenting spread of “Dumb and Dumber” episodes as best it can, but you can’t really stop stupid. You can only try to contain it.

The league has begun investigations into the incidents involving Porter and Callaway and updated its workplace code of conduct regarding sexual harassment and discrimination. Anti-harassment and discrimination training for executives will be conducted in spring training, just like the closed-door meetings players have every spring about topics ranging from media relations to drug-testing protocols.

As for what to do about Mather’s mixtape of ignorant comments, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred only can hope people see the former Mariners boss as an outlier who doesn’t represent the thinking of the rest of his former peers. Good luck with that.

It’s no secret teams have been forcing top prospects to spend extended time in the minors to get an extra year of service time out of them before free agency. But no one admitted to the manipulation out loud until Mather blathered it out over waffles and bacon.

“At first I was just like, ‘Wow,’ ” Cubs third baseman Kris Bryant said Thursday on a teleconference from Mesa, Ariz. “I’m just surprised he said it. We kind of know that’s the standard operating procedure. Some of the other things he said were not OK, in terms of speaking (ill) of the interpreter and stuff like that.

“But you look at the baseball business side, and I’m just surprised he said it, that’s all. Because I know that that’s obviously what I’ve been through before. That’s what they think most of the time.”

Cubs player representative Ian Happ said Tuesday that he was happy the issue was finally out in the open.

“I’m glad that fans and more people are able to hear that and process it,” Happ said. “Because as a fan of the game you don’t want to think of your favorite players being viewed that way. And if you’re a Mariners fan, (that) the team you’ve rooted for your entire life that hasn’t been to the playoffs in 20-plus years is doing things deliberately to not compete with the rest of the league.

“It’s unfortunate fans would have to endure that and we as a league aren’t putting more things in place to make it as competitive as it can possibly be.”

Happ thinks service-time manipulation will be a topic in the upcoming collective bargaining talks. If so, he might need a history lesson. The last time the CBA came up was in 2016, well after Bryant had filed his grievance against the Cubs for being sent down in 2015 after mauling Cactus League pitching during spring training.

Everyone knew it was a problem, but the players union declined to make it a priority in talks with owners. There were no changes to the rule in the 2017 CBA, which gave executives such as Mather five more years of doing likewise to their own top prospects.

The success of the Cubs in 2015 and ’16 also helped make tanking in baseball more popular than ever, and it has worked for teams in other sports as well, including the Philadelphia 76ers. Three years ago the NBA fined Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban $600,000 for admitting “losing is our best option,” making him that league’s version of Mather.

Former Cubs President Theo Epstein said during his farewell news conference in October that his blueprint for a rebuild — lose a ton of games and get high draft picks — since had become the “default mechanism” of too many teams and wasn’t healthy for the game.

“That’s not something I’m particularly proud of,” Epstein said, adding: “What we did was right for us.”

As long as there are no rules in place preventing teams from not competing, it’s not going to end anytime soon.

But Mather’s fateful Zoom conversation with the Rotary Club should ensure no one again will admit to not trying to win, at least in public, so his baseball legacy is secure.