6/24/25: 2025 Mariners PATCH NOTES

We're in the source code of the Seattle Mariners, and it smells

and

Jun 24, 2025

It’s Tuesday. My friends, I am sorry about that. There’s really nothing you or I could have done about it, but here we are nonetheless.

It’s going to be a slightly different week at Light Bat Corp. LLC. After enduring a school year protracted by February power outages it’s finally Summer Break. That means my family and I will be out of town until Friday. It also means there will be just one written newsletter this week. However, we’ve got a nice podcast all set to go, as the Seattle Times’ Ryan Divish joins us from Montana. Look for that tomorrow.

For now, the grind continues, and that means we must needs discuss the continuing adventures of that wild bunch of rascals, our outmatched-but-lovable rogues, the Seattle Mariners.

The Week in Mariner

While the Mariners’ results continue to teeter between below-and-above average, their roster is starting to round into the form they and fans envisioned back in February. Logan Gilbert is back. Luke Raley is back. Donovan Solano and Mitch Garver remembered they play baseball for a living. And so on.

It’s easy to forget - I do so every year - that a baseball team is not a fixed thing. After the year is over we will set six months, 162 games, and tens-of-thousands of pitches into the industrial-strength compactor, smash it all down into a thin, easily filed singularity, and stick it into our memory. But that habit of two-dimensionalizing history sells short the truth: A baseball season is a six-month-long work in-progress; one filled with hot-and-cold streaks, injuries, callups, demotions, trades, injuries, breakouts, and collapses.

All these things are constantly smashing into each other simultaneously like some big sports Hadron Collider, fusing the various elements of the team into something simultaneously the sum of its raw material and yet something new and different as well. A baseball team is never a completed work, because it is never in stasis.

With that in mind this past week’s roster changes feel like the next version of this season’s team. We have left the initial beta testing phase of the 2025 Seattle Mariners, and are approaching full product launch AKA “The Playoff Push”. See below for a summation of recent gameplay alterations.

2025 Mariners v. 0.98.21.a NOTES

-Partially de-nerfed the rotation, although still well below 2023-2024 levels which were determined to be extremely OP due to an infinite good health loop.

-Turned on the hit tool for Solano. The Solano hit tool was accidentally left off at the start of the season due to oversight. Solano should operate as designed (“somewhat useful bench player”) moving forward.

-Fixed miscategorization of Ben Williamson as “Major League 3B,” now correctly listed as “Organizational Depth”

-Experimenting with environmental sliders to account for lower-than-expected offensive output.

Wind setting: “TWISTER (1996)

Temperature setting: “Satan’s Crockpot”

-Fixed bug where player fails to recognize/accelerates into walls

-Dylan Moore determined to be past the usability cycle. Sunsetting Dylan Moore began 6/1 and will be complete by the end of the season. Dylan Moore owners will still be able to play offline but he will not be available for purchase or have any further online support.

-Continuing to investigate code line errors that are sapping the power of the Julio Rodriguez character. Also the character is glitching during at-bats, seemingly swinging at every pitch.

-Identified bone spur as cause of Bryce Miller performance issue, not immediately taking any action, thoughts and prayers

-J.P. Crawford +14 Aura roll may be OP. Pitchers are terrified of him, despite a -3 Power and -6 Speed. Needs further testing to determine if nerf is needed

-Granted Bryan Woo “injury immunity”. Please note immunity only works if you resist staring directly at him

-Cole Young was being confused for Bryce Miller’s younger brother. Removed mustache to avoid confusion.

-Remembered Mitch Garver. Imagine his surprise

-Imbued Dom Canzone with the Cloak of False Hope. Cloak lasts approximately 3-4 weeks.

-Rowdy Tellez was determined to be a purely cosmetic skin pack, and served no functional purpose. Removed from the game immediately.

Three Up

How does it feel, Mariner fans, to once again root for a team with the absolute baddest man in the league on it? Cal Raleigh is indisputably Him, as my kids say, and he is Him in a way no Mariner has been since the Alex Rodriguez and Ken Griffey Jr. days.

Including last night’s ninth-inning exclamation mark dinger, Raleigh has hit six more home runs since the last time we checked in on him. He has thwocked a robust 32 on the year thus far, a total that leads all of baseball by four. Here’s a list of the best catcher seasons this decade by fWAR:

*ENHANCE*

It’s been three months! Three months and already one of the best catcher seasons of the decade! Cal is making an absolute mockery of the sport, the record books, and my sanity. You can wait a lifetime (and I have) to experience something like this in baseball so, earnestly, hold this tight to your heart and let yourself breathe it in.

It is highly likely it will be decades before you get it again, if ever get it at all. 2025 Cal Raleigh is a generational, career-defining, history-spanning experience that you will remember the rest of your life, even if he falls back to earth starting today.

Donovan Solano, 3/28-6/7: .167/.205/.192

Donovan Solano, 6/8-6/22: .519/.552/.889

Solano had nine hits over the weekend at Wrigley Field, which was as many as he had in the Mariner’s first 48 games this season. I wrote a few weeks ago about wanting to see ol’ Donny Barrels go out for One Last Job. I think I got my wish. His incendiary past two weeks has his season wRC+ all the way up to the “approaching-respectability” level of 92.

Is he good now? No. He’s never really been much good as an everyday player. Should he keep the team from adding a 1B? Absolutely not, even though there is absolutely now a chance he will. Does he look like the perfectly useful bench bat/25th man on the roster he has made a career out of? Yessir.

I’m just extremely happy for Solano, who by all accounts is a good guy widely respected among his peers. Even if this was all he gets, he got it. One last ride.
The immutable laws of fairness demands I offer you, the reader, the following. Know these words pain me greatly. I do not like them. I do not feel them to be true in my heart. And yet, to deny them is to deny the observable realities all around us and frankly there is simply already far, far too much of that going around. So, ok, are you ready? Here goes:

Dom Canzone has looked ~~fine~~ pretty good since being recalled from AAA Tacoma a few weeks ago.

Three Down

Dylan Moore NO! The longest-tenured Mariner has carved a long, fruitful MLB career out of being fine-to-above-average at most things baseball-related, but after an amazing April he has seen his numbers absolutely crater. June has been the worst stretch of his career, with a “hitting” triple slash of .043/.120/.043 and a 60% (!!!) K-rate.

Cold streaks happen but, uh, that’s about as cold as they come! Given that Moore’s defense appears to be on the decline and he’s in the last year of his contract he’s going to have to get his offense back in order if he wants to be here (or anywhere else in the league) next season.

I like Dylan Moore, so none of this gives me any joy, but it may just be getting close to That Time. If so, it’s been a hell of a run.
The Mariners brought in Rowdy Tellez on a minor-league invite because they seemingly forgot over the winter that first base was a position and they needed people to play it for the upcoming 2025 season. Many people observed correctly that Tellez did exactly what he has always done in his career: He thwocked a few dingers. He also did absolutely nothing else, which is also keeping in line with his career trends.

Slugging .434 while posting -0.4 fWAR is a neat party trick, but sadly not helpful in the task of winning baseball games. Rowdy was DFA’d over the weekend. When discussing baseball players I think it’s fair to say if that’s “meeting expectations” then something is out of kilter with what you’re expecting.
I have stated in the past that Mariner fans need to quit focusing so much on the relative offensive struggles of Julio Rodriguez, given that the other parts of his game still make the complete package one hell of a player. That is still true, but the offensive struggles would sure be a lot easier to swallow if they were a little less, uh, struggly.

Julio is pretty obviously still a work-in-progress offensively. Whatever his gameplan is at the plate is sacrificing both power and walks for contact. As with all things this can work to a point, but when you’re running the lowest BA, OBP, and SLG of your career it seems fair to say the current process is not an ideal one for his skillset.

I don’t think there’s a simple fix for this. MLB pitchers are smart, skilled, and talk. After his stellar rookie season the league adjusted and, outside of August 2023, Julio has really struggled to adjust back.

It’s not the end of the world. He’s a 4-5 win outfielder even hitting like prime Dustin Ackley (I am sorry for putting that comp into your head.) He absolutely obliterated a home run in Minnesota yesterday, so you know the power is there. Just, boy oh boy am I ready for the patented Julio Rodriguez red-hot month. Please. Anytime now.

Historical Massive Mariner Dinger of the Week

The Time: September 24th, 1995

The Place: The Howling, Concrete Hellpit of Seattle AKA The Kingdome

The Pitcher: Dennis Eckersley

The Distance: 382 feet