SEATTLE NEWS ARCHIVES & FEATURES
The 23-year-old intern who helped engineer a Mariners trade
Jun 2, 2018, 12:00 PM
Seattle Mariners' Denard Span, right, is congratulated by Kyle Seager after scoring against the Texas Rangers in the sixth inning of a baseball game Monday, May 28, 2018, in Seattle. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)
(AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)
When Mariners second baseman Robinson Cano received an 80-game suspension for the use of banned substances last month, the M’s could easily have panicked over the loss of their best hitter.
Instead, the team got down to business and found a replacement. The Mariners traded pitchers Andrew Moore and Tommy Romero for Tampa Bay Devil Rays pitcher Alex Colome and outfielder Denard Span. Helping the Mariners with this momentous decision was none other than 23-year-old intern Skylar Shibayama.
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Shibayama, a Seattle native and Shorecrest alum, told KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson that interning for “the hometown baseball team” in the Mariners’ analytics department was a dream come true for him.
“Everybody wants to be here — it is an awesome spot,” he said.
After graduation from Yale, Shibayama returned home to coach girls high school basketball — where his team played opposite Dori. Through Everett Aquasox pitcher and fellow Shorecrest grad Ted Hammond, Shibayama scored the internship at Safeco Field.
Shibayama said that his first thought after hearing the Cano news was, “Oh man, there’s no way — how could this happen to us?”
There was no time for shock, however – the Mariners had to take quick action to turn a problem into an opportunity.
“We were trying to flip the switch as quick as possible, to be thinking, ‘Okay, what do we do with this, what kind of opportunity does it open up?'” Shibayama said.
Shibayama held a meeting with other newer members of the Mariners Front Office in which they filled a whiteboard with “pretty much every name that we could realistically have seen us getting from every team in baseball.” The whiteboard had “four or five names from every team,” Shibayama recalled.
Mariners management not only loved the idea of trading Moore and Romero for Colome and Span, but was also willing to give the young interns credit for the notion.
“It was so cool to see them really embrace this, and also really cool of [General Manager] Jerry [Dipoto] to mention us,” Shibayama said. “He definitely didn’t have to do this — it was very unexpected.”
The day the trade that began as an idea on a whiteboard came to fruition was, in Shibayama’s words, “very surreal.”
“It all becomes very not-real to very real in just the snap of a finger,”Shibayama said.
Dori told Shibayama that it says a lot about his bosses at the Mariners Front Office that they would listen to a 23-year-old intern’s ideas and let him take some of the credit on the radio for a trade. Shibayama agreed “100 percent.”
“It’s certainly been a crazy first month-and-a-half for me on the job,” laughed Shibayama.
