Happy February, fellow baseball sickos! The Winter Fungo is going to be a bit choppy today due to the various effects of snowfall in the Pacific Northwest. There was no school here yesterday, despite relatively little snow in the morning that led to quickly melting and clear roadways. This morning the road outside my home is a sheet of ice, and yet school marches on! This implies the possibility of a vibes-based approach as to whether certain core functions of the systems that mark our daily lives will be allowed to operate on schedule, which is certainly a disconcerting thought. In other news, the Seattle Mariners!
The Week In Mariner
There are obviously many reasons why obsessively observing, thinking, talking, and writing about the Seattle Mariners is a deeply unhealthy activity. One I’ve found is that my mind is starting to see all future possibilities for this franchise well before they happen. I think it’s possible Jerry Dipoto quotes (more on those later) are a sort of Arrakis Spice, turning me into the world’s absolute worst and most useless Kwisatz Haderach.
Anyway, I joked for a while this offseason that the only moves the Mariners should make are bringing back their own free agents, almost all of whom were very bad in 2024. Lo and behold:
Let’s start with a positive and very sincere statement: Bringing back Jorge Polanco in 2025 makes the Seattle Mariners better, which is always something I’m a big fan of. It may seem hard to fathom, given just how bad he was both offensively and defensively last season, but the Mariners’ social accounts were approaching the threshold of hyping Ben Williamson for 2025, and that is a dark place to be. With Polanco the team adds a legitimate major league baseball player to an infield that really, really needed it.
Now, for the schadenfreude crowd - and if you read this newsletter that’s probably you - there’s a bounty of delights on offer here. Polanco was, again, not good in 2024. His offensive profile was always built on the ability to hit flyballs without striking out very much. His 2024 flyball rate was the lowest since 2019, and his strikeout rate increased significantly for the fourth straight year, beating his previous career high by 3.5%. Add in (predictable) injury struggles and (predictable) defensive struggles and you have a second baseman that produced 0.3 fWAR in 2024, which was 29th out of 29 among MLB second baseman (min. 400 PA).
The Mariners answer to ensure this doesn’t happen again is a move to third base, and I do grant he probably won’t be the worst second baseman in baseball in that scenario. Per Adam Jude of The Seattle Times, the team’s commentary was something about how not turning double plays will keep his hamstrings from liquifying.
When I started this newsletter I promised to never discuss players in terms of their contract status or “value” and as such will not spill words on how much Jorge Polanco is being paid in 2025. I would, however, encourage you to go find out on your own if you don’t already know. It’s pretty funny. Here is a fair and rational write up from Michael Rosen of Fangraphs, for starters.
Anyway, in sum: The Mariners acquired arguably the worst second basemen in baseball in 2024. Doing so inarguably made their 2025 roster better than had they not done that. What an amazing offseason. Goms and go biz.The signing of Polanco meant the Mariners had to interact with the media so, as is their modus operandi these days, they scheduled a Zoom call and let President of Baseball Operations Jerry Dipoto off the leash a bit. Ryan Divish of the Seattle Times cheerfully jotted down a helpful summary. Here’s probably the meatiest bit:
“I think the positive trend that developed over the season’s final six weeks, the way we saw our team come together, especially notable was the uptick we saw in our offense and the group generally played well together,” he said. “And one of our points going into this offseason, and I know I made it sitting in the dugout in the final series, was that we didn’t anticipate a great deal of movement around the team. As we are now about a week away from heading to spring training, I’d say that probably played out to be spot on, much to, I think, the dismay of a few. But we have a good team.”
For my purposes the interesting part of this isn’t Jerry’s patented slurry of history revisionism, gaslighting, and half-truth. He’s been doing this exact thing since the day he got to Seattle which, again, was 10 years ago. What’s interesting is how the tenor of the room has changed.
For many, many years the above quote would have elicited a unison of head nods from fans and media, punctuated with phrases like “it just makes sense”, “He needs time. He inherited a mess!”, and “The future is bright!”. No longer. The tolerance threshold for obvious lying is at an end, it seems.
An example: A few hours after this newsletter goes out (1:00 PM PDT, listen here) I will be on 93.3 KJR FM with my friends Chris Crawford and Ian Furness to talk about these quotes. There’s no set schedule with our show during the offseason. We operate solely on a “supply meets market demand” basis. Rationally, there shouldn’t be much demand to hear us on-air right now. The Mariners signed a third baseman to fill a roster hole, and held a press conference to announce it. And yet, given the poisonous relationship they have cultivated with their own fans the mere sound of the team’s President of Baseball Operations’ voice sufficiently whips up enough outrage that I was told we have to come on air because “that is just the nature of things right now”.
I cannot stress enough how different this feels compared to the majority of the Dipoto Era, despite he and the team changing essentially nothing about the way they talk and operate. There is no one left in this market who likes or believes what they are selling. That the team’s response to this appears to be one of deep, deep resentment rather than anything resembling self-reflection and transparency seeking reparations is, well, not a good sign for how things are run behind the scenes.On a less annoying note, I wanted to invite you all to play along with our Mariners’ Offseason Bingo with us. At the beginning of winter BlueSky user and quality person “Ol’ Washboard Eagle” created the template:
After yesterday’s press conference we are SO CLOSE to bingo:
Incredibly, we are still waiting on the center square to be filled. Trader Jerry has never been more washed. Anyway, I do encourage you to follow along with us. Spring Training starts next week (!), and we’re running out of time for Bingo.
Historical Massive Mariner Dinger of the Week
The Place: Safeco Field
The Time: June 7th, 2017
The Pitcher: Brandon Kintzler
The Distance: 426 Feet
Three things I love and miss, in ascending order:
3) Jay Buhner’s giggling and stream-of-consciousness delivery style. The man’s blood seemingly produces a self-perpetuating mild buzz that keeps him delivering only finest “oh he got it he got it he got it” around.
2) The absurd, easy power of Mike Zunino. The man’s offensive game fell into alignment maybe one or two weeks a season but when fully optimized there are few Mariners in history who hit the ball as far with seemingly so little effort. He wasn’t always good, but Mike Zunino was always strong.
1) Dave Sims. It’s incredible how much time can pass when you’re focusing on other things, but Dave was here for 18 seasons of Mariners baseball. To put it one way iPods were still A Thing when Sims came to Seattle. He got the entire Mariners experience over his time here, and provided some of the best calls to some of the biggest moments in franchise history. I’m gonna miss him a whole lot, and I sure hope he has a great time closer to home calling games in New York.