4/8/25: So, You've Started 4-7

Fear not! Everything is proceeding according to plan

Every week dawns new and fresh, and yet the Seattle Mariners roll ever on, fast and unbreakable. With 11 games safely tucked away into our dreams/nightmares there is plenty to talk about, so let’s get to it!

The Mariners have started the season slowly. Again. In the Dipoto Era only three Mariner teams have finished the first 10 games of a season above .500 (2018, 2019, 2021). If you want to be encouraged history tells us it doesn’t matter very much, as none of those teams were particularly good (although the 2021 team was extremely fun and funny).

Still, last night’s thrilling victory aside, 4-7 is not where you want to be. History reminds us that the Mariners started the last two seasons 4-7 before both of those teams ended up being fairly ok. Of course - and this gets very close to the central issue with the entire Dipoto era - they were nothing more than exactly that: “fairly ok”.

If your primary concern is that the 2025 Seattle Mariners do not suffer a season of catastrophic failure, losing 95+ games, and co-mingling with the league’s worst teams then I assure you that nothing I’ve seen over the first few weeks of the season makes me think that is likely. There are plenty of good, talented players on this team that should keep them competitive through the 5.5 months left in the regular season. Now, If you were hoping that the 2025 Seattle Mariners are on the verge of winning the American League West and competing with the sport’s best teams for a pennant and trip to the franchise’s first ever World Series appearance? Well, of course, the answer is they don’t look like that either.

The Mariners appear, very early on, to be largely the same as they ever are. This is a franchise with one back-end playoff appearance in a quarter century that is scientifically designed to approach and, with good fortune, reach exactly that level year after year after year. Any outcome greater or lesser than that means something weird and unexpected happened.

Look this has all been stated and re-stated so hopefully it doesn’t catch you as overly negative or cynical. All I’m trying to emphasize is that the Mariners came into the season projected to win 83-87 games. As of right now they’re projected to win 85-87 games (and make the playoffs!). We’re all carrying the baggage of decades around with this team, and I think that’s understandable and even ok. But I don’t want to let a week+ of suboptimal outcomes and below average play get the narrative too far out ahead of the results. We’re not analyzing this month for a reason, folks. Give them some time.

The Week in Mariner

Three Up

• A longtime Mariners’ truism has been the thought that the team is overly reliant on Julio Rodriguez quickly and emphatically establishing himself as one of the very best baseball players alive. Well, the numbers say he has been. By fWAR he’s the fourth best position player in the American League since his 2022 debut. That’s a fantastic baseball player.
  
  What Julio has not been, at least not for any significant stretch of time since 2022, is a great hitter. You can contextualize and park-adjust all you want but when your team’s best player is hitting .253/.309/.357 on August 26th, as Julio was last year, it still sucks. That kind of offensive struggle is simply not fun to watch, especially for your team’s greatest hope.
  
  So this week offers some real encouragement. Julio blistered the baseball all week, including two home runs over the weekend in the Bay. With three home runs already he now has as many dingers as he did through 53 (!) games in 2024.
  
  After a rough opening series in Oakland his at-baths have looked markedly better and more disciplined. He is probably going to struggle to approach a double-digit BB% over a fully season. He is just not that kind of hitter. But Julio Rodriguez with a .350 OBP and hitting for power is a devastating player, a strong MVP candidate, and exactly the kind of lineup fixture that can wash over a multitude of sins. And Lord knows the Mariners are sinners.
  

• Look, uh, the Mariners went 1-5 this week so this list is gonna have to stretch a bit to get three people in here but I am going to go with the newsletter’s first back-to-back bright spot recipient in Jorge Polanco.
  
  The Mariners - a team for whom the DH position has proved a dark and mysterious riddle - may have stumbled onto something here. Polanco absolutely does not belong anywhere on a baseball field with a glove on his hand. He is made of glass, he moves sideways with the grace and ease of a cruise liner, and is perhaps the sports first 3B to experiment with an all-eephus pitch arsenal on throws to first.
  
  BUT, he can hit. His at-bats look just like pre-2024 Jorge Polanco. He’s seeing the ball, he’s finding the barrel, and he’s giving the team a hitter pitcher’s have to account for. His game-winning single last night was blistered, the result of a consistent and steady diet of quality contact.
  
  The Mariners probably did not plan on Jorge Polanco being their primary DH, but at this point there is literally no one keeping him from being so. As long as his bat doesn’t suffer significantly in the transition they should just make the switch, and make it today.
  

• Baseball is the ultimate noise sport. There are thousands and thousands of games, each containing dozens of at-bats, each at-bat containing a variable numbers of pitches, and each pitch containing practically limitless possibility. It is not a new observation but there is SO MUCH baseball that you can find practically anything you want to confirm or disprove a theory. Want to pretend Luis Arraez can’t make contact? Here’s a strikeout. Do you believe deep in your bones that Sam Haggerty has the untapped power potential of a 20+ home run guy? Here he is going out of the stadium in Baltimore.
  
  I mention this to acknowledge that you can watch a baseball game or two and, depending on what occurs, craft all sorts of wild opinions. But sometimes, if you’ve watched a lot of baseball for a long time, you can actually form an accurate opinion based on precious little observation. I am not smart, or particularly insightful, but I have watched a lot of baseball so here we go:
  
  Gabe Speier is B-A-C-K, y’all. The fastball velo is popping, the slider is biting, and the swagger off the mound has returned. One of 2023’s pitching lab triumphs, Speier was hurt and noticeably down last season. His return give the team a legitimate weapon from the left side in high leverage situations. I am very confident this is a real thing that will last, and if it doesn’t I’ve written it in this newsletter for posterity so you can come back and make fun of me.

Three Down

• Donovan Solano is hitting .071/.071/.071, with just 14 plate appearances through 10 games. The Mariners infield is sufficiently littered with hurt/bad/non-infielders that you would think getting their free agent infielder playing time would be simpler. When he has played he has looked extremely 37-years old, which is exactly how old he is.
  
  I’m not going to make an issue out of 14 plate appearances but I will say at this point in the season watching Solano play is definitely giving AJ Pollock vibes.
  

• As a free agent signee with millions of guaranteed dollars in salary I don’t expect much to change with Donovan Solano, at least not soon. Rowdy Tellez, on the other hand, has no such sunk cost and that makes him vulnerable. Well that and hitting .056/.143/.056.
  
  I’ve never understood the thought process behind Tellez making this roster. There are younger players in the organization that are, while not necessarily better, at least more interesting. Dominic Canzone and Tyler Locklear may never be playable at the MLB level, but they are young enough that the possibility still exists. To start the year with a guy who needed to hit 35 home runs just to post his lone 1.0 fWAR season (and three years ago at that) felt and continues to feel pointless.
  
  He’s going to have to run into a fastball, and soon. I can’t imagine there’s any positional player on the roster with a shorter leash. No cost, no upside, no real downside in moving on.
  

• I talked about eye tests earlier when I was writing about Gabe Speier, and I’m here to do the same on the Bad Side of this column with our guy J.P. Crawford. There is no real way to sugarcoat that watching J.P. Crawford to start this season has been a deeply unpleasant experience.
  
  Everything about J.P.’s game looks slow. The feet, the bat, you name it. He still has excellent hands, terrific eye-hand coordination, and a phenomenally patient approach at the plate*, but the tools necessary to occupy a major league shortstop role have eroded and appear to be continuing to erode quickly.
  
  Worse, if Crawford doesn’t start hitting soon, the team is hard-pressed for an alternative. While the Mariners have a bevy of middle infield prospects only Cole Young is close to the big leagues, and he should not be playing shortstop (additionally the Mariners also need a lot of help at second base, Young’s best position). There is no one coming to forcibly take J.P.’s job before 2026 at the very earliest. He and the team are going to need to figure out how to make this work. The speed - which was never great - is not coming back. So they are going to need to squeeze out some pop from his bat, and soon.
  
  I like J.P. Crawford a lot. His 2023 was one of the greatest shortstop seasons in club history. But guys without elite athleticism are not long for the middle infield world. It’s starting to look like the end is approaching here. I hope I am wrong.
  
  *J.P. currently has a 22.5% walk-rate. Pitchers simply do not throw him strikes and I think it’s very funny.

Historical Massive Mariner Dinger of the Week

The Time: August 22nd, 2021

The Place: Minute Maid Park

The Pitcher: Ryne Stanek

The Distance: 423 feet

https://www.mlb.com/video/sam-haggerty-homers-1-on-a-fly-ball-to-right-field-j-p-crawford-scores

The sun lazily circles over a hazy Carolinian field. The air buzzes with the sounds of cicadas and the rhythmic hum of hard labor. The hammer rises and falls; the energy and inertia of gravity slowly gathered and then released downward with a ringing, sonorous “clack”. Rise and fall. Rise and fall.

Clack! Clack! CLACK!

After innumerable hours the arm holding the hammer - its tanned muscles sinuous from work and gleaming with sweat from the midday heat, pauses. The air contracts as silence blooms sudden and cold. The arm sets down the hammer, and picks up a tall glass of lemonade. It raises it to the man’s lips, and then he speaks:

“Stocks!? The only stocks I know anything about are the livestocks over in the barn! Yessir I keep it clean and simple. Corey’s the one with all the money anyway and Justin is the one with the brains. That’s why I don’t worry about any of that. If they’re called smartphones then why do they seem to make folk so dumb?

Anyway, I’ve got to get back at it. Thanks for coming by and tell Jerry I said [REDACTED}”

***
Quick reminder that The Blight Bat: The Light Bat Podcast debuted last week. You can find it anywhere you get your podcasts. Thanks all! See you Friday to break down some issues with the team, and what they can/can’t do about them.