Mariners manager fired by his longtime colleague

John McLaren's two-decade-long journey toward a baseball dream job he'd always coveted came to an abrupt, emotional end Thursday.

McLaren was abandoned on the field by the players he'd spent nearly a full year covering for at every turn. He was discarded by upper-management types who, just a few days ago, had been prepared to let him finish the season. And his job was terminated by a colleague of nearly 20 years.

Interim Mariners general manager Lee Pelekoudas, who had grown up alongside McLaren, both personally and professionally, on Mariners teams of the 1990s, persuaded his bosses this week that McLaren had to go. Both chief executive officer Howard Lincoln and president Chuck Armstrong had been prepared to keep McLaren around, until Pelekoudas approached them Wednesday and talked them out of it.

"There wasn't one game, there wasn't one homestand, there wasn't one series," Pelekoudas said Thursday, after completion of the official part of a news conference to announce McLaren's dismissal and replacement by bench coach Jim Riggleman. "It was just a culmination of watching the team play over a certain period of time."

Pelekoudas admitted it wasn't easy. The move came just three days after the team fired general manager Bill Bavasi and named Pelekoudas as his interim replacement.

"You have to separate the personal from the professional and have the best interests of the organization in mind," Pelekoudas said.

McLaren was unavailable for comment. He is expected to speak to reporters in a conference call today.

"John took it hard," Pelekoudas said. "He's an emotional person, I'm an emotional person."

In what would be his final day on the job, McLaren was asked by a reporter before Wednesday's game how he felt about his own job security.

"It's business as usual for me," McLaren said. "I came out here with the positive attitude ready to grind. It's a new day. I'm not happy where we are, but I know where we want to go. I'm here to work hard and do what we have to do to win."

He added: "I have no control right now other than to win this game tonight."

The Mariners lost 8-3 to the Florida Marlins.

Riggleman returns to managing for the first time since 1999, when he was fired after five seasons at the helm of the Chicago Cubs. He'd managed the San Diego Padres for two-plus seasons before that, compiling an overall record of 486-598.

"With 90 games left in the season, we thought we owed it to our fans and ourselves to win as many games as we possibly can," Pelekoudas said.

Riggleman was on a team flight to Atlanta, where the Mariners open a series today, and was not immediately available to speak to reporters. Pelekoudas says Riggleman will bring a different style than McLaren had, but added that he'd rather his new manager explain what that style is.

Lee Elia will take over Riggleman's job as bench coach, while Jose Castro becomes the hitting coach. But Elia will also continue to oversee the hitting program he implemented the past 10 days after the firing of Jeff Pentland.

Pelekoudas has spent nearly 30 years serving the Mariners' organization, starting his front-office career as a traveling secretary. He'd met McLaren in the early 1990s when the latter arrived as a bench coach under new manager Lou Piniella.

And Thursday, what will likely be the final day of their longtime professional association came to an end.

"We hadn't shown any improvement the last couple of months," Pelekoudas said. "In fact, we were probably regressing at this point."

McLaren had less than a full calendar year to implement his managerial style. He was thrust into the job on July 2 of last season, one day after manager Mike Hargrove suddenly resigned.

McLaren guided the team to an 88-win finish, but his reputation took a serious hit during a late-season swoon when the club lost 15 of 17 to fall out of playoff contention. All eyes were on McLaren this season, given his team's $117 million payroll and the addition of starting pitcher Erik Bedard in a controversial five-for-one trade.

But after what McLaren termed a very strong spring training, his players stumbled out of the chute. The team was swept four straight on the road by Bedard's former Orioles in the season's first week and never recovered.

Seattle sits with a 25-47 record and is on pace to become the first team in history to lose 100 games with a payroll of more than $100 million.

But even after all that, Armstrong admitted he was prepared to keep McLaren longer. Bavasi, a couple of weeks before his own firing, had insisted the team's problems were player-related and not "a field-managerial issue."

Armstrong seemed to go along with that. Right up to the day when he and Lincoln allowed Pelekoudas to talk them into firing McLaren.

"Clearly, he'd been giving it a lot of thought," Armstrong said of Pelekoudas. "He presented his reasons to Howard Lincoln and myself and after we talked about it for a while, we agreed with him."

Armstrong would not reveal what Pelekoudas said to talk them into such an about-face.

The firing of McLaren leaves the big question of when players are going to pay the price for the team's failures.

Both Pelekoudas and Armstrong insisted the move should not be seen as a vote of confidence in the current players and that further moves are being contemplated. They say they simply want to see whether Riggleman can get any more out of the existing roster to both improve the on-field product and pump up potential trade bait.

Pelekoudas disagreed that firing a manager, GM and hitting coach within a 10-day span — while keeping the players intact — sends the wrong message.

"I don't think it does because they know the other shoe could drop any day," Pelekoudas said. "They should know it's always there."

Geoff Baker: 206-464-8286 or gbaker@seattletimes.com