Major renovations? What Morosi thinks of Mariners and trade deadline

After winning 90 games in back-to-back seasons and ending their lenghty playoff drought in 2022, expectations were very high for the Seattle Mariners in 2023.

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Things haven’t gone great for the M’s so far, though, as they enter Friday’s series opener against the Angels at just 30-31 and losers of six of their last eight games. They also find themselves 10 games back in the American League West and 5 games out of the third AL Wild Card spot.

We’re now less than two months away from the Aug. 1 MLB Trade Deadline. Last year, the Mariners went big with a blockbuster trade that brought Luis Castillo to Seattle.

But with the M’s continuing to hover right around .500, what could their approach be at the deadline? MLB Network insider Jon Morosi broke it down with Seattle Sports’ Wyman and Bob on Thursday.

“We are rapidly approaching the point of the season where you’ve got to start making some decisions. And I know Jerry (Dipoto) loves to make aggressive deadline deals, and probably that’s part of his disposition again. But I think that the way they’re performing and the lack of consistency gives me a lot of pause as to what sort of deals he could contemplate,” Morosi said.

A “handful” of players are likely off-limits in a trade, Morosi said, such as Castillo, outfielder Julio Rodriguez, catcher Cal Raleigh and starting pitchers Logan Gilbert and George Kirby. But considering the state of the Mariners, Morosi thinks the team should be “open-minded” when it comes to trades.

“I think that you have to look at it and say rather than going for a ‘hey, we’ve got to get that one last relief piece to make this a World Series team,’ this team isn’t close to that right now,” he said. “And it’s a tough thing to say, but any clear-eyed analysis if you compare where the Texas lineup is right now to Seattle’s, there’s just there’s no comparison right now. There is no comparison. And oh, by the way, Houston’s gotten a lot better the last month, too.”

“This is the kind of deadline where it’s not the final piece kind of a deadline. It is take a step back, we’ve got issues here, and how do we fundamentally change this team? Whether it’s a different kind of right-left balance or a different kind of contact-oriented lineup,” Morosi later added. “But this is not a team that needs an adjustment at the deadline. This is one that might need some really major renovations here. Because that Texas team is going nowhere in terms of leaving their spot atop the division … That element of Texas is the thing that I think is changing this entire calculus. This team, the Mariners, they’ve got to confront the reality that they probably have to make some pretty significant changes to make this a much more competitive roster.”

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