BROCK AND SALK

Salk: Are the M’s better? 5 things you have to buy into to say yes

Feb 4, 2025, 11:06 AM | Updated: 11:36 am

With pitchers and catchers just one week from reporting to spring training in Peoria, Ariz., and the Seattle Mariners front office having their offseason wrap-up/season preview conversations with local media, it is clear that the vast majority of the 2025 roster is already with the team.

As president of baseball operations Jerry Dipoto said Monday, “We feel like this is a good team, and if this is our team going into spring training or opening day, we’re pretty excited by it.”

Not exactly the news most fans were hoping to hear.

Dipoto Speaks: What we learned about Seattle Mariners’ offseason

The Mariners will likely return in 2025 looking a whole lot like the way they finished 2024. Justin Turner and Josh Rojas will be gone, Jorge Polanco will be at a different position and Donovan Solano will be a lone new face among the 13 position players. But other than that, as coach Norman Dale once (almost) said: their team was already on the field.

It’s a brutal reality for fans who understandably had visions of upgraded lineups in their heads. Even the most jaded of fans expected something to change, even if it fell short of their desired payroll. But this will be as close to a run-it-back scenario as I can remember.

In order to believe that this team will improve on last year’s disappointing 85-win total, you need to buy into some combination of five things.

What the Seattle Mariners are banking on

1. A dominant rotation

This is the primary foundation for any successful Mariners team. Everything is built around the starting pitching and they will need to stay healthy for another season. Can they handle some bumps and bruises? Sure. Emerson Hancock is a major league-quality starter who will likely begin his season in Tacoma. Logan Evans and Brandyn Garcia looked sharp in Double-A and could be ready to contribute. Any of the three could step in for a few weeks at a time.

But that’s about it. Even one major injury to a starting pitcher could have disastrous consequences for this team. While I believe they could have traded a starter and won with an upgraded offense, the idea of this current offense improving enough to overcome a major downgrade in the rotation is near impossible to imagine.

They have been remarkably healthy the last three seasons. A pessimist would assume that luck is due to turn. An optimist would say they have cracked a code and their system works. Regardless, they need this rotation to be the centerpiece of their success.

2. Bounceback seasons

As we all know, even if the Mariners’ starting rotation is exactly as good as it was last season, it wouldn’t be enough on its own. Last year’s offense was so anemic that it kept the team from postseason action for the second straight year. To improve by the six or so games they’d need to make the playoffs, they need more offense. And without much addition to the firepower on the roster, they are relying on players who under-performed to bounce back.

Here we might find some good news.

Baseball Reference expects Julio Rodríguez, J.P. Crawford, Mitch Garver, Randy Arozarena, and Jorge Polanco to have better numbers this season than last. The site also projects a minor step back for Luke Raley, a larger one for Victor Robles, and for Cal Raleigh’s production to stay roughly the same. In fact, the combined OPS projections for those nine players averages out to about a 27-point improvement. While that may not sound like much, consider that raising the 2024 team’s OPS by 27 points would have taken them from 22nd to 13th in baseball.

3. Dan and Edgar

In addition to some expected (pro)gression to the mean, the Mariners believe they have finally found the right strategy for hitting at home. According to Dipoto, the quiet offseason was “reflective of a team that didn’t have a whole lot of holes to fill. And you know we feel great about our farm system, we feel great about the stability in our team, and we feel like our offense doesn’t get enough credit for the things that they do well.”

That comment could not be made about the team that played more than two-thirds of the 2024 season with such offensive ineptitude that Jerry himself fired the manager and two different hitting coaches. To say it, you have to believe that the offensive changes under new manager Dan Wilson and then-interim hitting coach (and now director of hitting strategy) Edgar Martinez were real, significant and sustainable.

According to Wilson, the Mariners will continue to use the big part of the park, change their approach with two strikes, and put the game in motion to pressurize opponents. They did those things in the final six weeks of 2024 and it led to improved results. Now, they are betting on that small sample size being the reality in 2025.

4. Flexibility

In order to fill out a roster that saw more players leave than return, the Mariners will likely offer opportunities to young players to make the big league roster. Tyler Locklear, Ryan Bliss and Cole Young are the most likely to have a shot, but others will compete. Those players won’t have much of a track record to rely on, but that might be for the best. After all, we’ve seen plenty of disappointing arrivals from experienced players who came here and struggled.

As I wrote a few weeks ago, “At least young players can be optioned to the minors, don’t require a long period of waiting for them to get back to their career norms, and their lack of cost leaves opportunities for acquisition later.” Essentially, you don’t need to wait for young players to live up to their salaries – you can rotate through until you find a hot hand to stick with. That should alleviate the endless frustration of watching under-performing veterans eat inning after inning.

5. Dry powder

The final benefit of a near-silent offseason is that it preserves the ability to have a more active season. If indeed the Mariners had some $15 million to spend this winter and only spent around $10 million, they should have some ability to take on salary throughout this season. Assuming they planned to have some extra cash on hand for midseason and trade deadline pickups anyway, that number could be even higher.

If indeed the market opens up once some of the other teams that believe they are in contention quickly realize they are not, the M’s would be in prime position to add major league talent, both because of their unspent budget and top-rated farm system.

Summing it up

Convinced? Yeah, I didn’t think so. What if we add that the Mariners made their prime acquisitions before the 2024 trade deadline when they brought in Randy Arozarena and discovered Victor Robles? Both players are expected to start regularly in Seattle’s rebuilt outfield and have had some time to adjust to the challenges of hitting in T-Mobile Park.

Still no? Yeah, me neither.

Look, the Mariners’ baseball operations department is making a bet that they already had it right before the offseason. They are wagering heavily on the belief that their new philosophy and coaching style combined with some natural regression to the mean will improve the offense enough to complement the gamble they have already made on the health and continued dominance of their starting rotation. That’s a lot more betting than I’d be comfortable with if I was in their shoes!

If it doesn’t work, I suspect we’ll find out sooner rather than later, and the consequences for it should be obvious, significant and final. If it does, I imagine there will be some victory laps taken, and well deserved.

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