Just over five years ago on Feb. 5 2021, then Seattle Mariners President and CEO Kevin Mather took part in a zoom conversation with the Bellevue Breakfast Rotary Club. It was an event which garnered little to no attention initially, even when the video was subsequently downloaded onto YouTube by the Rotary Club on Feb. 19.
However, the following day on Feb. 20, lifelong Mariners fan Eric Hess was the first person to watch the video and he unwittingly became an infamous part of team history. Adam Jude of The Seattle Times did a tremendous job of breaking it all down at the time, but essentially, Hess shared the video on Twitter and Reddit and it quickly exploded around the social media world thanks to several careless, weird and downright ugly comments by Mather.