Four insiders dive into what went wrong with Mariners’ offense
Oct 23, 2024, 6:20 PM
(Brandon Sloter/Getty Images)
At the end of the day, the story of the 2024 Seattle Mariners is one of a team with an excellent pitching staff that was mired by a bad offense.
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It takes just one quick look at the season totals to see where the Mariners’ shortcomings were.
Pitching? Phenomenal.
The M’s were tied with the Braves for the lowest team ERA in the majors and first in walks per nine innings. And their starting staff led the league in the same categories, plus opponents’ batting average, WHIP and strikeout-to-walk ratio.
Hitting? Terrible until the final month.
Seattle entered the month of September with the league’s worst batting average and highest strikeout rate, and it was in the bottom 10 in on-base percentage and slugging.
Perhaps no better numbers sum up the Mariners’ 2024 campaign better than these: Seattle was was 70-15 and had the league’s third-best winning percentage in games where it scored at least four runs, but failed to score at least four runs more than all but seven MLB teams (all of which also missed the playoffs).
Seattle Sports’ Mariners insider Shannon Drayer, show hosts Mike Salk and Bob Stelton, and former Mariners reliever Charlie Furbush tried to make sense of what went wrong with Seattle’s offense during a special offseason Mariners roundtable.
“You can have all the pitching you want in the world, but if you don’t score runs, it just ain’t going to happen,” Drayer said. “And that’s what we ultimately saw this year. (We) saw some good stuff at the end of the year. We’ll get into what that might mean going forward, but what do they need to look at? And what got them to where they were in the first half?”
‘Contagious’ struggles
The problems at the plate were widespread early on, especially for the players the Mariners brought in during the offseason.
New acquisitions Mitch Haniger, Mitch Garver, Jorge Polanco and Luis Urías were all hitting .219 or worse by the end of May.
Meanwhile, J.P. Crawford took a big step back and was dealing with an injury, Ty France continued to decline and Julio Rodríguez was going through the worst power slump of his young career.
“Didn’t it feel contagious?” Stelton said. “It felt like as they struggled as everybody struggled, everybody started pressing more. Everybody felt like, ‘OK, I gotta get this out of this.’ It was crazy to see one through nine. … Everybody that they had brought in to fix their problems were failing and flailing up there, and that included Garver, it included Polanco, Urías, everybody.”
Seattle Mariners’ failure to get big hits
One of the aspects that has helped cover up some of the Mariners’ offensive shortcomings in recent seasons has been their ability to come through in clutch situations.
In 2021, they led the league in wRC+ in high-leverage situations and were second with runners in scoring position.
In 2022, they were seventh in wRC+ in high-leverage situations and tied for third with runners in scoring position.
However, they dropped to 11th in wRC+ in high-leverage situations and tied for 10th with runners in scoring position this season. A resurgent month of September helped boost those numbers a bit, too.
“It was apparent every night,” Furbush said. “Too many missed opportunities. Too many times you watch a game and they couldn’t seemingly just put the ball in play. It was so painful to watch some of these losses.”
Furbush added that the stellar pitching should have taken away some of the pressure on the offense in those situations.
“From the outside looking in, I would think that they would have so much more confidence knowing that every game they went in to play their pitching staff was gonna hold it down and they would have a chance to win,” he said. “All we needed was a couple of runs to win, and I think we saw their record if they score four runs. It was asinine how good they were, and four runs is not a lot.”
Was coaching the problem?
The Mariners’ offensive woes led to two hitting coaches being fired this season.
The first domino fell early in the year when the team parted ways with offensive coordinator Brant Brown in late May, then hitting coach Jarret DeHart was let go alongside manager Scott Servais in August.
Stelton isn’t so sure that the hitting coaches were the problem.
“To me, that’s one of the more elusive things. I don’t know the role of a hitting coach. When it comes to a veteran, how much impact do they truly have?” Stelton said. “They’re not teaching you how to hit. You know how to hit. That’s why you’re at this level and that’s why you’re making the money you make. Yeah, you’re going to fine-tune your mechanics and they’re going to pick up on things that you’re doing wrong at the plate, perhaps. But I can’t blame Brant Brown and Jarret DeHart for a complete failure of veterans, proven commodities in your lineup that just face-planted for whatever reason.”
The Mariners did see a notable uptick in offensive production over the final six weeks (especially from Rodríguez) after DeHart was replaced by Hall of Fame designated hitter Edgar Martinez. But Martinez had already been working with the team in a part-time capacity.
“That’s one of the great mysteries. Do I think that Edgar Martinez came in here as a hitting coach in the last six weeks and fixed all of the players? Not really,” Salk said. “I mean, he was here as a hitting coach a couple of years ago, and he didn’t fix all of the players then. Do I think it’s possible that he reached Julio and was able to kind of find a way of communicating with a fellow superstar that finally kind of got through to him? Yeah, I think that’s very much possible and hopefully they’ll be able to continue that if Edgar’s not the full-time hitting coach next year, which seems likely to be the case.”
Watch Part 1 of Seattle Sports’ Mariners offseason roundtable at this link or in the video player near the top of this post. Click here for Part 2.
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