What Jerry Dipoto said about Mariners’ need to make more contact
Jul 17, 2024, 2:24 PM | Updated: 3:39 pm
The Seattle Mariners will enter the second half of the MLB season leading the American League West, but there’s been a sour taste during the All-Star break left by their offensive performance.
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Even though Seattle is a game ahead of second-place Houston in the division with a 52-46 record, its offense has the most strikeouts in MLB, is 25th in runs scored, and ranks last with a .219 batting average and 28th in OPS at .667.
Mariners president of baseball operations Jerry Dipoto spoke at length Wednesday about those struggles when he joined Seattle Sports’ Brock and Salk on Wednesday.
Here’s a look at what he had to say.
Seattle Mariners’ Jerry Dipoto talks the offense
• How Dipoto would describe the Mariners’ first half of the season
“In a word, imperfect. If you would have told me that I was going to be sitting here the day after the All-Star Game and we were going to be in first place, and have been in first place for all but I think six days of the season dating back to the last week in April, I probably would have told you (to) sign me up. And I don’t want to be disrespectful to what we’ve been able to accomplish in the first half, but we know that we need to do things differently and improve not just around the edges, but improve meaningfully on the offensive side especially. Get a little bit more consistent than we were coming down the stretch back in the bullpen. Otherwise, it’s not going to be quite as fun on the back end of this as it was for the majority of the first half of the season.”
• On Seattle’s biggest issue
“We don’t make enough contact. That’s plain and simple. It’s our biggest hickey. It’s the area where we need to make the most improvement. It’s hard to imagine us going into the postseason and doing damage without improving in that area, and that’s the simple truth of it. That’s going to come in some part from the guys that are on our club, and obviously as we come down here these next couple of weeks with the trade deadline, if we can improve in those areas, we’d like to. I don’t know if that’s realistic based on, right now, the congestion in the playoff race and who’s going to be available or not available. But we understand that it’s a weakness on our team. And that’s on me. That’s on me for looking at it from the front end of the season and believing that we’d made enough positive addition to offset what was a strikeout problem a year ago. And, you know, frankly it’s only gotten worse this year, and I don’t know why that is. … I’d like to tell you we could snap our fingers and solve our problem with strikeouts. It’s not going to be that easy. Particularly, it’s not going to be something that we’re able to solve in two weeks. Hopefully we’re able to solve it over time, and I believe that we’ll do that. It’s going to happen developmentally, it’s going to happen over time. It’s probably not going to happen in the snap of the finger.
“… We’re striking out way too much, and the solution for us being a better offensive team is putting the ball in play more. And I think our guys know that, and believe me, they work hard at it every day. But it has to get better, there’s no question.”
Related: Mariners’ Dipoto explains the trouble with this trade deadline
• Looking ahead
“On the offensive side, especially over the next two weeks, it’s on us, it’s on our group to try to figure out how to start doing the things that we’re capable of doing. We have good major league players who’ve had excellent careers … Somebody said to me once when I was playing that nobody really cares about how you start, they only care about how you finish. And right now we have 13 position players, I would venture most of them get up in the morning and when they’re looking in the mirror, they recognize that they’re having among the worst performance seasons that they’ve had. And the only way you can resolve that is (recognizing) it’s done, it’s water under the bridge. Wake up today and go help win the game, and then you’re gonna wake up at the end of of September headed into October and you look at your numbers and say, ‘Huh.’ But if you look at your numbers every day, it’s hard to change them in one day. And that’s how you get hung up and in slumps, is by trying to figure out how to solve the numbers problem in a week. You can go torrid hot for a week and it’s not going to resolve something that took 100 games to transpire.”
You can hear the full Brock and Salk conversation with Seattle Mariners president Jerry Dipoto in the podcast at this link or in the player near the top of this post.
More M’s coverage from Seattle Sports
• Three things to know from Seattle Mariners’ 2024 MLB Draft
• Examining what Teoscar Hernández said about hitting in T-Mobile Park
• Alex Rodriguez details the type of hitters Mariners should target
• ARod wants to ‘come back’ to Seattle to thank Mariners fans
• Was the Seattle Mariners’ first half a success? Brock and Salk react
