Welcome back to another Tuesday with our close personal friends, those princes of Peoria, the masters of mediocrity, third-place in the west but first-place in our hearts, the Seattle Mariners. It was a fairly quiet week for the team, in theme with a fairly quiet offseason and a fairly quiet Spring Training. This is because new manager Dan Wilson knows that a good baseball team is neither seen nor heard. You can always tell a Minnesota Man.
Meanwhile, the lack of real news means we can fill the space with that most American of resources: bloviating! Read on for ganders at Jorge Polanco (he’s alive. Quit saying he’s dead), Ben Williamson (Jorge Polanco Life Insurance), Dan Wilson Vs. The Machine, and so much more!
The Week in Mariner
Third base is one of the true real storylines this spring. The Mariners notably re-signed veteran infielder Jorge Polanco late in the offseason, despite him hitting .213/.296/.355 last year and, uh, not being a third baseman. The baseball season is almost unreasonably long, and the things that are happening in Peoria will be forgotten by May, but it doesn’t feel as though things are off to a great start. Polanco only just made it into a lineup on Monday, and only at DH. Ryan Divish of the Seattle Times wrote up the situation:
“Polanco is still working his way back from offseason surgery to repair damage to his patellar tendon in that troublesome left knee. He still hasn’t been cleared to play defense in the games.”
Polanco did indicate the knee is “feeling really good” but, at the risk of leaning into my cynical and pessimistic archetype, that sounds like something any player coming off injury will say going into a new season. Polanco has struggled with injuries his entire career, is now over 30, and is switching to a brand new position when he was quite notably not a good defender at his previous position. As I said many things will happen over the course of the 2025 season that could render all this hand-wringing moot, but for now the idea of Jorge Polanco being ready to be the Mariners third-baseman by Opening Day feels unlikely.
This is of particular concern because, even though he is not a third baseman and did not hit at all in 2024, Jorge Polanco is almost certainly the best chance the Mariners have of getting something like league average production out of third base this year. Consider the depth behind him:
Austin Shenton - Sure
Leo Rivas - Ok
Ryan Bliss - But
Rowdy Tellez - BIG BEEF BOI OK I’M IN (but also this is a bad idea)
Nick Dunn - Quit making up names
This is not good depth! This is not encouraging! Time and again, year-after-year the Mariners go through seasons with massive, gaping holes in their roster. If Jorge Polanco’s health limits his playing time third base is looking like the latest void of suck that drags this team towards its moral and physical resting state (80 wins, 82 losses).
Some people have offered another solution at third base, and I will now use my next bullet point to discuss that.Ben Williamson? No! Stop it! Quit trying to make Ben Williamson happen! One of the worst things that comes out of the Mariners fielding rosters with obvious, glaring deficiencies is invariably a player utterly unprepared and/or qualified is tabbed, seemingly at random, to come in and save the day. A 2023 second-round draft pick, Williamson’s calling card is his defense, which I’m sure is very good. Here is a highlight of him diving to his left. It’s a good play. He also ran a 24% K-rate while slugging .374 in Double A last year, and is older than Julio Rodriguez. He has hit four (4) home runs as a professional baseball player.
Third base is still a position you need offense from, especially if you are the Mariners and annually forfeit the DH position out of an act of combined moral purity and frugality, and Williamson is simply not going to hit enough to justify a position in the big leagues, at least not in 2025 (although I think it’s unlikely he does so ever). If you thought the Evan White Experience was cool but wish he was a worse athlete with less offensive upside, this is the prospect for you*
*This is where I’ll remind you I in no way consider myself a prospect expert. The ones I know like Williamson fine, and they are certainly smarter than I am. The only issue in this case is that I’m right.As the season gets closer I find myself increasingly fascinated by the Dan Wilson Experiment. The Jerry Dipoto/Scott Servais duo remained in place for nearly nine seasons. Over that time, while their personal relationship reportedly changed and grew more distant, the collaborative nature of their work never seemed to visibly falter. Lineups, coaching staffs, bullpen rotations, philosophies, et al were handled with a top-down efficiency and button-down approach that seemingly kept disagreement to a minimum, at least outwardly.
With Wilson, the closed circle and shared buy-in to whatever overarching principles the baseball ops department has adopted is gone, for better or worse. Adam Jude’s recent notes flat out state that Wilson will bunt more than Servaid did previously. He then goes on to offer this little beauty of a quote:
“Wilson spent time this offseason working closely with the baseball operations department to better understand modern analytics and find symmetry and align those with his priorities as a manager.”
That is, at least how I read it, a very diplomatic way of saying Dan Wilson and modern analytics have not yet made formal introductions to each other, which I find extremely interesting given how all-in the Mariners are on these types of things.
We will obviously never know for sure which parties flexed muscle in order to have Dan the Man be the replacement for Scott Servais, but it would be very surprising to me if it was Jerry Dipoto. Not only does Wilson have precious little aptitude and experience with Jerry’s numbers-centric philosophy, he upsets the balance of power by being an extremely-beloved local icon deeply attached to the greatest moments in franchise history. If the season were to go south I have a not-small level of skepticism that Dipoto would be allowed to fire Local Legends Dan Wilson and Edgar Martinez, and if the manager and front office come into disagreement I think Wilson and Co. have an outlet above Dipoto to which they can turn.
Is this all a long-winded way of saying Jerry Dipoto - the man who famously rage quit his previous job because a former catcher and entrenched franchise icon refused to play nice with his numbers - has found himself at least somewhat beholden to a former catcher and entrenched franchise icon who may not play nice with numbers? Well not entirely, no. But it is my favorite part of all this. As we have always said, Dan Wilson is an agent of chaos, and his presence in the 2025 dugout is easily one of the most interesting things about this upcoming season.
Historical Massive Mariner Dinger of the Week
The Time: October 17th, 2000
The Place: Old Yankee Stadium
The Pitcher: Orlando Hernandez
The Distance: 419 feet
There is another time, one so very similar to our own, where this home run breaks the will of the opposition. The Mariners’ lineup of A-Rod, Edgar, Buhner, Olerud, etc. overwhelms New York’s bullpen, and the Seattle Mariners play in a baseball game where winning sends them to the World Series. Instead, in this most crucial of circumstances, Mariner pitchers used were the following:
John Halama
Brett Tomko
Jose Paniagua
Arthur Rhodes
Jose Mesa
I want that ever-so-slight variant of this reality so badly. I want Guillen’s emphatic bat flip canonized as a key moment in the Mariners’ first World Series. I want this home run to matter. I want just one more good starting pitcher on this roster. I want Arthur Rhodes’ pitch to David Justice just two more inches inside. Above all, I want this team in this position again, where every single pitch contains the hopes and dreams of generations. I want it to matter like this, just one more time.