Mariners’ Jerry Dipoto on Mike Zunino: ‘We’re going to need him; can’t allow this to steamroll’

Over the past three seasons, “Mike Zunino optioned to Triple-A Tacoma” has been a fairly common phrase read by Mariners fans. They read it in headlines again late last week, as Seattle’s promising catcher was sent back to the Rainiers to work out his swing.

That makes 2017 the third straight season that Zunino has ended up in the minors, which is fairly alarming considering Zunino logged 295 MLB games in between his initial call up to the Mariners in 2013 and his first option back to Triple-A in 2015. Zunino is still just 26 years old, though, and Mariners general manager Jerry Dipoto is determined to give Zunino all the room he needs to find himself again at the plate.

“We like Mike. We believe Mike is a part of what we’re doing here,” Dipoto told “Danny, Dave and Moore” on Wednesday. “He’s really important to us and we understand that we’re going to need him, and what we can’t do is we can’t allow this to steamroll. We have to let him go and find his swing.”

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It certainly was a rough go to begin to season for Zunino, who was hitting .167 with no home runs, six walks and 30 strikeouts over 80 plate appearances before getting sent to Triple-A. It was a continuation of his struggles late last season when he hit .146 with three homers over his final 29 games with Seattle, which immediately followed a 26-game stretch where he hit .280 with nine home runs in his return from Tacoma.

The lack of production on offense seemed to get in the way of Zunino’s usually stellar defense as of late, and that’s when the Mariners decided to let Carlos Ruiz and Tuffy Gosewisch take over the everyday duties at catcher in the big leagues.

“To a certain degree it was starting to affect the defense, and that’s Mike’s calling card, is to catch and throw – and the power,” Dipoto said. “And when you’re starting to get less and less of the first two because the offense is becoming more of a concern, you need to throw the player a life preserver.”

The good news for the Mariners is that Zunino isn’t dealing with the same issues that prompted them to put him in the minors for the first half of the 2016 season, as he has shown improved discipline at the plate over the last year.

“This is very different than what we did last year,” Dipoto said. “Last year we sent him back in the attempt to rebuild an approach, and I think by and large that was generally successful and even this year he’s maintained his walk rate. But along the way he’s had a lot of difficulty making contact. He’s not really chasing pitches, he’s just having a difficult time making contact in the strike zone, and to me the only way you can get beyond that is to just go have success.”

And that’s what a trip back to Tacoma affords Zunino.

“We thought at this time Tacoma was a more likely place to find the success and gain your confidence, and hopefully when we bring him back like we did last summer he comes back and he’s ready to make an impact.”

The very initial results proved that to be the case. After going without a homer for over a month in the majors, he left the yard in his first game in Tacoma on Tuesday.

“He had a much better first game in Tacoma than he had April in Seattle, and that was the goal, to just let him go, take a breath, remember that he is a good player, because it turned into a fairly large-sized struggle over the previous five weeks,” Dipoto said. “As the O-fers mount and as the strikeouts pile up you tend to put more pressure on yourself, and Mike was certainly doing that.”

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