Brock and Salk: Is the Mariners’ recent offensive outburst real?

Apr 14, 2025, 9:30 AM

Seattle Sports

After an underwhelming first 13 games offensively, the Seattle Mariners’ lineup delivered its most productive series of the season over the weekend.

Seattle Mariners Observations: What stands out after sweep of Rangers

The M’s racked up a season-best 17 runs in the series, and it helped them sweep a Texas Rangers squad that came into T-Mobile Park in first place in the AL West.

Is the version of the Mariners offense that was on display against the Rangers the real one? Seattle Sports’ Brock and Salk delved into that question Monday morning.

“If it is, obviously this team’s gonna win a bunch of games,” co-host Mike Salk said. “They’re now scoring 3.8 runs per game. That’s doable, especially after playing all 16 games in lousy hitting parks. That’s something.”

Familiar formula

Seattle collected 11 hits on its way to nine runs in Saturday’s win over Texas, but the club had just six hits in each of the remaining two victories while scoring a combined eight runs. However, the games Friday and Sunday featured a combined four home runs.

Catcher Cal Raleigh was a big part of it all, slugging a home run in each game while using his new torpedo bat.

“Maybe this torpedo bat is just a little bit of a placebo effect, maybe it’s a real deal that it provides a little more impetus in his sweet spot,” co-host Brock Huard said. “But when he gets going, he can carry this team. When Julio (Rodríguez) gets going, he can carry this team.”

With five home runs over the series, the M’s brought their total to 19 on the season, which ranks sixth in baseball. Raleigh’s five home runs on the season are just one off the MLB led.

The Mariners also continued to show their patience at the plate with four walks in each of the first two games. The M’s currently hold the fourth-highest walk rate in the league at 10.8%, which includes an AL-best 13 from J.P Crawford. The ability to work walks a high rate has helped the team produce the league’s 16th-best on-base percentage at .308 despite being 25th with a .210 batting average.

“If that formula sounds at all familiar, it should,” Salk said. “It’s called controlling the zone. I mean, that’s what control the zone was always supposed to mean, and at the moment, they’re doing it. They’re controlling the zone. They’re taking their walks.”

There has still been some swing and miss for the M’s early. Their 23.4% strikeout rate is the 12th-highest in baseball, but that’s a 5.5% improvement from where they were a season ago.

“Those haven’t gone away. They’re going to continue to strikeout some,” Salk said. “But you dropped it by just enough, and in some of the big spots that’s really all you need to do to take apart both Houston and Texas at home over the course of six games.”

Salk ultimately isn’t buying too much into what Seattle’s offense did over the weekend.

“They got a lot of guys that are inconsistent, and when they hit well like they did this weekend, you look unbeatable,” Salk said. “And when you don’t hit well, you look very beatable. It’s pretty much that simple. The lineup is not as bad as it looked over the first couple weeks of the season. It’s probably not quite as good as it looked over the weekend, because everything kind of works in extremes. But it was really nice to see that they had that in them.”

Listen to Brock and Salk weekdays from 6-10 a.m. or find the podcast on the Seattle Sports app.