Requiem for a Mariners Season: The questions that await

The Seattle Mariners’ season is over, falling short of the playoffs for the second straight year.

The Mariners have been eliminated from postseason contention

After a postseason berth in 2022, not making the postseason last year could be excused if it was the outlier in a long, sustained run. Once is a blip, twice is a trend. It’s a definitive shift in the wrong direction and must be rectified before the potential for a special era falls away into the void.

There is opportunity to be seized in the American League. This year will be the first time since 2016 that no AL team wins 100 games in a season – and it’s possible that no team wins 95 games. No AL rival has the starting pitching quality and depth that the Mariners possess, but we saw this season firsthand the limits of pitching if the offense is subpar. It is a built-in advantage for the M’s, but with the fickle nature of injuries, randomness, and luck over the course of a season, this highly-coveted arsenal of arms must be supplemented with offense before it’s too late.

Windows of opportunity are fleeting in sports. While the entirety of the league might be down, there are teams who are just beginning to blossom into their own eras of contention. The Guardians had the youngest lineup in baseball in 2024, with the Tigers and Orioles not far behind. The Astros should, at some point, theoretically, start to decline. So how do the Mariners capitalize on this opportunity?

I believe there needs to be a thorough evaluation and overhaul of the roster, starting with these key questions before the M’s take the field in 2025.

Who are your core players?

We’re solely looking at the lineup and offensive players here because the starting pitching is a known and proven quantity. Similarly, this organization has proven it can consistently find and churn out quality relievers. So we turn our eye to the offense. Every successful team has its core of key guys, indispensable amid inevitable turnover from year to year.

• Julio Rodríguez
• Cal Raleigh
• J.P. Crawford
• Randy Arozarena
• Victor Robles

Going into this offseason, these are the only five in the lineup who should be looked at as everyday players. Beyond that, thorough discussion and evaluation as to how to upgrade the remaining spots in the lineup is needed. This isn’t to say that no one else outside of these five is valuable to the success of this team. You do need 13 position players after all. Luke Raley, Josh Rojas, and Dylan Moore are all key contributors, and Mitch Garver is your only other catching option. That is a solid group to build around, especially if they are utilized in contributor roles rather than needing to be the main run producers.

How can the Seattle Mariners improve?

It is a vague question and one that should take a two-pronged approach. With that aforementioned core, improvement must come internally. That will require a comprehensive look at how the Mariners want to coach their hitters. It might be tough to convince Edgar Martinez to return for a full season as hitting coach, but hopefully the tenets of his message take root for the players it made a noticeable impact with over the final month of the season. Yet we also saw that a “one size fits all” approach doesn’t work for everyone. Perhaps, the overriding philosophy still works, and it wasn’t being effectively communicated. Whatever it is, the Mariners must find a way to tailor the message to each individual hitter in order to bring out the best version of this core part of the lineup.

The second approach to this question is straightforward: the Mariners need better hitters. Whether they come in free agency or trades (we won’t dive into specific names yet, plenty of time to do that after qualifying offers and other things sort out during the offseason), the M’s must find proven commodities that supplement this lineup. If power doesn’t translate to T-Mobile Park, then either find guys whose prodigious power is ballpark-proof or build this team around clones of Victor Robles. Not literally of course (although that would be awesome and undeniably the most entertaining team in MLB history), but his speed and ability to get on base have made him the most valuable player on the roster during the second half of the season.

There is a third way to improve the roster, and it comes in the form of the final question to this offseason puzzle.

What do you do with the prospects?

Farm system rankings are subjective and fun discussion pieces, and we have heard directly from the Mariners front office that they often value prospects internally in a different manner than external publications, but all of that is a simply a preamble to say that the Mariners are loaded with enviable position players depth. In fact, Bleacher Report just named them as the top farm system in baseball (see, these rankings are important when they support the point you are about to make). The time has now come for the Mariners to do something with this glut of prospect capital.

Trade them or bring them up. Those should be the only two options this offseason. In fact, you can probably do both. However, if it takes trading most of these top prospects for a superstar hitter or proven commodity, then that’s what must be done. There is a backlog of young talent and a glut of middle infielders in the system, but there is an urgency that must exist for the parent club. The Mariners don’t have the luxury of being able to wait multiple seasons for this group to come to fruition, and even then, it’s never a sure thing. This is not a team deep into a rebuild, years away from contention. This is a once in a generation starting rotation, all perfectly aligned for a synchronous harmony over the next 3-4 years.

The other option is to bring up the best of this talented middle infield group. If Cole Young is a better shortstop and/or second base option than any player the Mariners can bring in this offseason, then he needs to be given the opportunity to make the 2025 opening day roster. The Padres and Brewers have received vital contributions from their young, star prospects in Jackson Merrill and Jackson Chourio, respectively (I don’t know, maybe you have to be named Jackson for this to work). It’s easy to envision Young playing a similar role for a playoff-contending Mariners team next season.

Bold actions sometimes fail. Nothing is certain in sports – it’s simultaneously the most endearing and maddening thing about it – but the frustration of this Mariners season should serve as a daily reminder of the action needed to avoid it moving forward.

More on the Seattle Mariners

• Astros overcome terrible start to clinch AL West with win over Mariners
• Bryce Miller’s big leap has been ‘awesome to watch,’ says MLB insider
• Why have Mariners been AL’s best offense this month? Passan weighs in
• Seattle Mariners activate reliever Gregory Santos from injured list
• Seattle Mariners’ Julio Rodríguez named AL Player of the Week

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