4/29/25: Hitting is Easy

If it were hard then how are the 2025 Mariners so good at it?

A fresh Tuesday, burgeoning with possibility and potential for our first-place Seattle Mariners. After a weekend of scrimmages against AAA Miami the team wraps up the early portion of the US Baseball Open Cup (the open tournament that allows all U.S.-based baseball teams - including minor leagues and amateur programs - to compete against each other) with a two-game set against AA Los Angeles, before returning to the MLB slate with three-games against divisional rival Texas.

It’s still early, but no longer so early that we can’t start thinking about the early trends we’re seeing, and doing all the fun examinations and postulations into what is “real”, what “matters”, and all that nonsense. For now, though, No Analysis April has two more days. So we continue to mark the days through vibes. And the vibes? They are pretttttttttttttty good!

The Week in Mariner

One of the worst habits of an analytically-inclined baseball fan is to tell people what they are experiencing with their team is a mirage. A winning team is a fun team, and at the most basic level fun is why practically all of us are here. When things are fun most people don’t want to hear about why they are fun. They want to cheer with their friends, high five in bars, read power rankings and complain about their team continuing to be underrated, and so on.

No, a state of enjoyment is not one in which people traditionally seek knowledge and understanding. If the checks are cashing, there’s money in the bank and food on the table, we just are not going to spend much time and energy trying to figure out the why and the how. Good days are for living good, after all.

I offer up that bit of context because I don’t want it to come across like I’m trying to take away your fun. The Mariners are in first place. They have gone 13-5 over the past three weeks. They have done that in one of the unlikeliest ways imaginable: Through elite level run prevention production. For myself the inexplicable method of their success is as much fun as the success itself. May we never fully understand this wonderful game.

Still, this can’t last. Can it? CAN IT!? I don’t think it can. Consider a few Mariner Facts:

-Jorge Polanco leads MLB in slugging percentage (.739)

-Cal Raleigh leads the American League in home runs (10)

-The Mariners are third in all of baseball in home runs (42)

-The Mariners lead all of baseball in BB% (11.4)

-Dylan Moore is batting .286/.346/.557. (his career line is .210/.318/.392)

-Miles Mastrobuoni, who has been pressed into regular service for reasons, is running a dead even BB%/K% of 13.5/13.5. His career split is 8.6/19.5

-J.P. Crawford, who until this past week had gone about four months of action without hitting a home run, is walking in 17.5% of his plate appearances, three points higher even than his career year of 2023, and up more than 50% from last season

That’s a small collection of good things that I did not expect to happen. Do outlier seasons happen? Yes, they sure do, and we love them very much; doubly so when the outliers are good. .Still the simple reality is at least a good portion of these outliers are going to regress, and not in the cool way.

A tweet went around yesterday that I thought offered a good summary of where the Mariners’ offense is at right now:

Does anything in that stand out? Probably a lot of things. This is, after all, the Seattle Mariners. Offense is not our thing. Before continuing this train of thought a quick reminder that this is the team’s typical lineup at present:

THAT lineup, or variations on it, is in the league’s top 5 in a boatload of important categories. What stands out to me is that it has taken that incredible level of production to get the team to seventh in runs. If (when) the bats cool off, production normalizes to something like true talent level, and the team stops cosplaying as the 1998 Mariners, the runs are going to be harder to come by. It’s then we’ll see what kind of team we have for the long season still ahead.

My best guess is it’s going to be…..stressful. Until then? Enjoy every single walk, dinger, and offensive explosion, and feel free to ignore the handwringing of this old guy traumatized by over 40 years of watching this baseball team far too closely.

Three Up

• For the many, many of you I have annoyed over the years: Please take note of J.P. Crawford’s week, as it is a blueprint for how to get me to shut up. The Mariners’ shortstop absolutely punished the baseball, continuing to drag pitchers through the Lovecraftian horror that is “throwing pitches in the strike zone” each and every at-bat. As a bonus, this week he started crushing those very same pitches, swatting his first two home runs of the season.
  
  Overall on the week Crawford hit ..455/.520/.727, and is now up to a perfectly good .277/.412/.373 on the year. I still do not understand how pitchers are allowing him to walk almost 20% of the time but that is between them and God. As for J.P., he has at least forestalled the notion that his offense is beyond hope. For weeks I have been begging him to start driving the ball a bit. Lo and behold this week he listened! What a nice young man.
  

• Jorge Polanco: Man on Fire. I swear I was only sort of being a jerk this winter when I said the Mariners absolutely had to re-sign Polanco, given the state of their roster. That said, my hope was 110 games or so of something around his career level production, which obviously would have been a massive improvement over the six month-long passing of gas that was his 2024 season.
  
  INSTEAD, at least thus far into the season, Polanco is hitting like one of the most fearsome hitters in the sport. An overall line .377/.405/.739 includes last week’s four home runs. Here is the MLB leaderboard for wRC+ (Min. 70 PA)
  
  1. Aaron Judge (247)
  2. Jorge Polanco (233)
  
  Will it last? God no! He’s not walking, and at some point his batted balls will start to find gloves. He is a few months removed from the worst season in his career. He has an extensive and prolonged history of injury. He should never wear a fielding glove again. But, and this is purely anecdotal as I refuse to look it up, I don’t remember the last time a non-Julio Mariner hitter was this hot for this length of time. He doesn’t need to be anything like what he has been to this point. He can simply resume being 2017-2023 Jorge Polanco (a perfectly fine player) and this signing is a massive success.
  
  A good offensive signing! We did it*!
  
  *Please note the aforementioned good offensive signing was technically the re-acquisition of a player on last year’s roster and thus neither counts against the glorious No Moves movement nor as a clever addition by the front office. Consult your legal council for details.
  

• Phew. Too many Mariners did excellent and/or hilarious things this week and I only get to pick three. I am sorely tempted to choose Ben Williamson, who hit .421/.476/.474 while being - and I’m quoting here - “Momma’s cutest little boy” over at 3B. His career is off to a fabulous start, and it’s important to note when I’m wrong. Doing so makes the people who mock me online for being wrong appear cold-hearted and cruel, and out-maneuvering your online haters through deft politics and the occasional self-deprecating comment is what life is all about.
  
  ALAS, one Mariner has decided to lead ALL OF BASEBALL in walk-rate (min. 30 PA), and it is not Uncle Baby Benny. No, that honor belongs to all 5’8, 150 lb Leonardo Andres Rivas, who is walking nearly 30% of his plate appearances. There is no (0) earthly reason why any pitcher should not be throwing Rivas strikes. He has hit 33 home runs in over 3,000 PA in the minor leagues, and zero in MLB. He has a career MiLB slugging percentage of .363. He is very, very small. To MLB pitchers however, he makes hearts quail and knees falter.
  
  The Mariners as a team are currently leading the league in walks. In a season whose early storyline is absolutely about a deeply-flawed lineup rising up to play like one of the league’s best for at least 15% of the season, those walks are a critical component.
  
  Kevin Youkilis? Stand down. Leo Rivas has the watch. And watch is exactly what he’ll do.

Three Down

• With Logan Gilbert going on the 15-day IL with forearm tightness, the Mariners’ vaunted rotation is up against it. Every start from the still-healthy starters is going to be extra vital, especially if and when the offense starts to regress. That makes Bryce Miller’s relative struggles something worth keeping an eye on.
  
  The glaring issue has been command. Miller’s walk-rate has more than doubled from 2024, and is currently 8th worst in MLB. This has led to higher pitch counts, which means more high-stress work and fewer innings. It’s all something that fills one with low-to-moderate levels of anxiety, in particular with Miller noting soreness in the early going.
  
  It could all shake out just fine of course. Just two starts ago Miller looked as good as he ever has. But the margin for error is incredibly thin for this rotation at the moment, both in health and in production. Here’s hoping Bryce irons out the command issues and starts going deeper into games. Soon.
  

• Today in “Two things can be true”: Julio Rodriguez’s start to the year is in line with the rest of his career, and he’s currently no fun to watch at the plate. For the former, here are his batting lines through the years over 28 games:
  
  2022 - .235/.304/.324
  2023 - .239/.301/.442
  2024 - .275/.309/.330
  2025 - .196/.308/.366
  
  I want to look into 2025 Julio a bit more granularly on Friday, as the way he’s getting to similar results is certainly different than it has been in the past. That said, there’s no getting around that a sub-.700 OPS is simply not what anyone wants to see from the most talented player in the organization.
  
  History says at some point this season Julio is going to spend somewhere between 4-6 weeks as arguably the best player alive. As has been pointed out many times he doesn’t even really have to do that to still be an extremely valuable player with his elite centerfield defense. But there’s also no arguing the frustration of watching someone capable of such dominant play struggle for the first two months every season.
  
  As the offense’s many, many current overperformers regress the Mariners will need Julio to get it together in order to avoid a serious run shortage over the long haul. There’s no real reason to think that won’t happen, even if right now it feels and looks impossible.
  

• Trent Thornton was a perfectly fine MLB relief pitcher in 2024. He has thrown just 11.2 innings thus far in 2025, and those have by and large looked a lot like last season. The problem is 38.5% of the flyballs he’s allowing are clearing the fence. In case you’re curious, that's something like a 343% increase.
  
  That won’t last, but the stigma probably will. We are not going to feel comfortable with Trent Thornton on the hill for the rest of the season. Sorry bud. Our brains just work that way.
  
  Relief pitching is a cruel vocation. We can talk forever about the dangers of analyzing small sample sizes, but the poor fellas roaming about MLB mounds in the 6-8th inning of games never get anything but small sample sizes. Coupled with the high leverage nature of later innings and it becomes really easy for a couple bad outings to leave a pitcher marked as The Bad Guy by a fanbase.
  

Massive Historical Mariner Dinger of the Week

The Time: June 15h, 1989

The Place: Metrodome

The Pitcher: Steve Shields

The Distance: 405 feet

Did you know Alvin Davis’ first career home run was off of Dennis Eckersley? I certainly did*, and I think that’s awesome. Mariners’ history pre-Ken Griffey Jr. is rightfully a hazy sludge of mediocrity remembered through low-fidelity. While the team had a few young and exciting arms in their first decade and a half, Davis was the first true positional start they ever had.

The 1985 AL Rookie of the Year had an outstanding MLB career, hitting 160 home runs and batting a delightfully round-numbered .280/.380/.450 over nine seasons. Despite the fact that about 98% of the organization’s remembered history and scant glory occurred after his retirement, he’s still (rightfully) accorded the moniker of Mr. Mariner. He was the first, and that will always matter. We don’t choose the eras we live in and, far far away from the limelight, Alvin Davis spent his dominating American League pitching.

*After looking it up. Today.