5/9/25: How 2002 Willie Bloomquist Are Your Seattle Mariners?

Big Willie Style (Derogatory)

It’s Friday, my fellow modernity-endurers. You’ve made it through five more days of grueling customer interaction, high-pressure sales, and mindless drudgery. Your boss’ jokes have been duly laughed at, your co-workers placated with benign compliments, and the shelves - at least for now - are re-stocked. Excellent work. Let’s kick back, set the out-of-office auto-reply at noon, and do that Light Bat. Today we’re gazing directly at the offense of the 2025 Mariners. Please remember to wear proper eye protection.

Through nearly one-quarter of the 2025 season the Seattle Mariners have one of the very best offenses in Major League Baseball. That’s a sentence that makes no sense to type, but it’s the truth:

The players driving this explosion of walks, dingers, and runs are a collection of talent I would have described as “extremely mid” coming into the season. And yet they are producing at or near career-best levels. I mean, ALL of them are*. Look at the wRC+ list of Mariners with a minimum of 50 plate appearances:

*Except for Donovan Solano. You know which number is Donovan Solano.

That’s 13 hitters, and only one of them is producing in the Wong/Pollock Zone. Perhaps more telling to how potent this offense feels compared to its predecessors is the top-end, as the Mariners currently have three hitters with a wRC+ greater than 160. Three felt like a lot, so I did some digging. Turns out I was right.

Here is the list of Mariner seasons with a wRC+ greater than 160 in the Safeco Field/T-Mobile Era (2000-2025, min. 150 PA):

2015 Franklin Gutierrez (167)

Yes. That is the entire list.

Now here is the list of 2025 Mariners with a wRC+ greater than 160 (min. 50 PA)

Jorge Polanco (215)
Cal Raleigh (167)
Leo Rivas (161)

It is not going to last. I am growing increasingly willing to believe in the changes that Edgar Martinez and Kevin Seitzer have implemented. It is entirely possible we are seeing the best Mariners offense since the Cano/Seager/Cruz era. But this is simply not a group of hitters that is going to be one of the league’s elite over the course of a 162-game season. Thus far in 2025 they have overperformed collectively and individually. If I’m wrong, I’ll refund your 2025 Light Bat sub to the charity of your choice. If you don’t have a paying sub well, there’s an offer to get you on board.

For today, I want to quickly examine the Mariners’ six best 2025 hitters thus far and try to figure out just how much they are overperforming. To do so I’m going to compare them to the Patron Saint of Small Sample Size Overperformances: 2002 Willie Bloomquist.

For the uninitiated, Wilie Bloomquist debuted for the Mariners on September 1st, 2002. From then to the rest of the year (38 PA) he batted .455/.526/.576, with a .484 BABIP. That single month of play accounted for 70% of his career fWAR, despite going on to have a 14-year career with more than 3,000 plate appearances. I’m not sure that career lasts 10% as long without one crazy hot streak in the last month of a lost season.

That groundwork set, let’s start with the biggest, baddest boy around:

Jorge Polanco

2025: .348/.396/.707, 6.9 BB%, 10.8 K%, .315 BABIP, 215 wRC+

2024: .213/.296/.355, 9.8 BB%, 29.2 K%, .274 BABIP, 92 wRC+

Career: .265/.332/.443 8.7 BB%, 19.2 K%, .300 BABIP, 112 wRC+

Our man is simply doing everything right! Red graphs go brrrrr!

Of course as out-of-character as Polanco’s poor performance was in 2024, his Barry Bonds cosplay in 2025 is at least as unlikely, if not moreso. (Cutting your strikeouts down 67% in a single season is not a real thing that hitters do!) The likelihood, assuming health, is that Polanco is something like a solid above average hitter the rest of the way. That has plenty of utility and, again, is a huge improvement over 2024, but his current numbers are simply far, far, beyond anything anyone should expect moving forward.

2002 Willie Bloomquist Rating (out of five):

Cal Raleigh

2025: .246/.365/.567, 14.5 BB%, 25.8 K%, .259 BABIP, 167 wRC+

2024: .220/.312/.436, 11.1 BB%, 28.0 K%, .251 BABIP, 117 wRC+

Career: .220/.302/.454, 10.0 BB%, 28.6 K%, .254 BABIP, 116 wRC+

Cal Raleigh is the Mariners’ best position player, and probably has been since at least 2023. Numerically he’ll be the best catcher in franchise history sometime later this year. Spiritually he claimed that title the second his playoff-clinching dinger banged off the foul pole in 2022. There is an excellent case to be made that he is presently the best catcher in the sport.
But, is he actually this good offensively now? It’s possible, but I don’t know.

Nothing about his rate stats screams outlier with the exception of how often he’s donging, and given the still-largely-unknown quantity that is the torpedo bat it’s possible Cal has simply progressed into a legitimate 40-home run guy. If so he’s going to be in the “MVP If Aaron Judge Did Not Exist” discussion, and rightly so.

My only tempering comments are that he has a long history of hitting home runs in bunches going back to the minor leagues, and the Mariners need to figure out how to give him more rest, or he is going to be an empty husk by mid-August. Otherwise, Dumper is the best:

2002 Willie Bloomquist Rating:

Leo Rivas

2025: .341/.471/.366, 19.6 BB%, 15.7 K%, .424 BABIP, 161 wRC+

2024: .233/.333/.274, 11.6 BB%, 27.9 K%, .347 BABIP, 88 wRC+

Career (137 PA): .272/.385/.307, 14.6 BB%, 23.4 K%, .378 BABIP, 115 wRC+

This one is no fun! Leo Rivas is a great story; a longtime minor leaguer with a slick glove and a patient approach, his success thus far in 2025 has been a joy to watch.

/Stephen A. Smith voice

BUT

He’s completely out of his mind right now. There is no better proxy for the 2002 Willie Bloomquist that inspired this post than 2025 Leo Rivas. The BABIP is going to regress. The walks will fall as pitchers collectively realize “Oh. Yeah. It’s Leo Rivas”. This one is easy.

2002 Willie Bloomquist Rating:

Dylan Moore

2025: .295/.345/.551, 8.0 BB%, 20.7 K%, .304 BABIP, 156 wRC+

2024: .201/.320/.367, 12.0 BB%, 27.9 K%, .267 BABIP, 105 wRC+

Career: .211/.318/.393, 10.7 BB%, 29.4 K%, .276 BABIP, 105 wRC+

Well well well! Look at what we have here. Moore has always been a player whose value and skills weren’t fully shown by a casual glance at offensive numbers, but this year he has utilized a lower strikeout rate and home run boost to become a legitimate force at the plate.

I, um, don’t think it’s built to last. At least not like this. Dylan has a long MLB track record at this point - he is the longest tenured current Seattle Mariner! - and it’s much, much more likely that the sudden shifts in offensive profile leading to his breakout are small sample size flukiness than a real change in skill or ability.

All I ask is that when the regression comes and Dylan resumes being a quality MLB utility player you try and appreciate it for being exactly that, and don’t say things about batting average. You sound ridiculous when you talk like that.

2002 Willie Bloomquist Rating:

J.P. Crawford

2025: .288/.408/.390, 16.0 BB%, 17.4 K%, .344 BABIP, 144 wRC+

2024: .202/.304/.321, 11.5 BB%, 22.6 K%, .248 BABIP, 89 wRC+

Career: .247/.341/.369 11.6 BB%, 18.6 K%, .287 BABIP, 111 wRC+

This feels a bit like Jorge Polanco 2.0 in the sense that Crawford is having his best season immediately after his worst. I’ve never been a huge fan of his offensive skillset, and I think it’s likely both the walks and strikeouts will worsen over the course of the season. That said? He can fall quite a ways here and still be a useful player. He just needs to avoid the total offensive collapse of 2024 (and most of 2022).

J.P. has a long track record of having a good approach, and I don’t think that will change. As long as he slugs over .350 or so he’ll be fine, if not exciting.

2002 Willie Bloomquist Rating:

Randy Arozarena

2025: .223/.377/.405, 16.6 BB%, 26.5 K%, .289 BABIP, 138 wRC+

2024: .219/.332/.388, 11.3 BB%, 26.1 K%, .275 BABIP, 114 wRC+

Career: .252/.348/.434, 10.3 BB%, 25.6 K%, .317 BABIP, 125 wRC+

There is basically nothing about Randy’s current performance that tells me he’s not capable of being at least 90% of this for the rest of the way in 2025. Like seemingly every other player on this team I don’t think he’ll keep walking this much. Otherwise he’s performing pretty much exactly how he always does.

He’s a really solid major league hitter, the coolest Mariner by a mile, and one of the very best trades ol’ Jerry Dipoto ever pulled off. I’m thrilled he is a Mariner.

2002 Willie Bloomquist Rating:

That’s it for another week of The Light Bat! Thanks as always for reading. Next week we’ll be back to see if the Mariners’ run of series wins reaches double-digits, breakdown whatever divinely-inspired galaxy-brain nonsense Dan Wilson comes up with, and well, you know the drill by now.

Additionally, we’ll be back with The Blight Bat Podcast. I’m happy to say this week we’ll be bringing in a few well-known and (mostly) beloved friends.

Have a great weekend y’all!