The concerning Mariners stat that jumps out to ESPN’s Passan

The Seattle Mariners have gotten off to an uneven start for the 2025 season, going 2-3 through their first five games.

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It’s always tough early in the season to get a gauge on what will be long-term trends for teams, but there is some thought you might be able to read into the Mariners’ early results more because of how similar the roster looks to the end of last season.

ESPN MLB insider Jeff Passan isn’t fully in agreement with that line of thinking, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t see potential reasons for concern with the M’s, as he said Tuesday morning on Seattle Sports’ Brock and Salk.

“I definitely look at the (early-season) numbers just to see if there are any any trends worth following,” Passan said, “and the one number for the Mariners that stood out to me is 50. That’s 50 strikeouts in 149 at-bats.”

That’s not exactly a new concern.

Mariners hitters were on pace for much of last year to break the MLB record for most strikeouts in a season, and while they were able to curb their strikeout rate later in the campaign to avoid making ignominious history, they still had eight more strikeouts than any other MLB team at season’s end.

Passan said there’s usually a correlation between strikeouts and team standing, and so far that’s the case as the teams with the five highest strikeout rates so far this season are all under .500 (the Mariners are fifth at 28.4%). In fact, the M’s are the only one of those teams with more than one win.

Passan has good reason to point to the Mariners’ strikeout rate as worrisome.

“If this team is going to win, it just cannot strikeout as much as it does like. That’s a really simple thing, but I fear that because of the construction of this team, that’s going to be hard,” he said. “Guys tend not to cut their strikeout rates demonstrably year over year. That tends to be something that stays pretty static.”

Why are the Mariners striking out more than preferable early on despite changes with their offensive coaching positions?

“Uh, baseball’s hard,” Passan quipped. “Like, you can take the approach that you want and you can prioritize (cutting down) strikeouts, but if you have swing and miss in your game, you’re not going to wishcast it away. You’re not going to say, hey, today I think I’m not going to strikeout.

“It changes everything about your game when you start prioritizing things that you are not physically capable of doing. With a guy like Cal Raleigh, it’s an OK tradeoff because the power is there. It’s just you can’t have guys who don’t have slug and do have high strikeouts.”

ESPN’s Jeff Passan joins Seattle Sports’ Brock and Salk at 8:30 a.m. each Tuesday during the baseball season. Listen to this week’s conversation in the podcast at this link or in the player near the top of this post.

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