3 things John Smoltz said about AL West-leading Mariners

May 28, 2025, 1:19 PM

Editor, Seattle Sports

With the Seattle Mariners continuing to roll, Brock and Salk caught up Wednesday with one of the most recognizable broadcasters in the game: Hall of Fame pitcher and FOX analyst John Smoltz.

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The former Cy Young Award winner and eight-time All-Star with the Atlanta Braves shared his thoughts on catcher Cal Raleigh’s huge season thus far, the Mariners’ pitching development, and Seattle standing atop the AL West.

Here are some transcriptions of a few things Smoltz had to say about the M’s.

Smoltz on the Mariners in first place

“Everybody knows in baseball that if the Seattle Mariners find a way to score runs, they’re going to be in the playoffs and they’re going to be a dangerous team. Now, they don’t have a lot of sexy (batting) averages, but they have found ways to score, hit timely home runs.

“And even though they’ve got some injuries in their pitching staff, this division, everybody’s kind of been waiting to see if if the Seattle Mariners can score consistently, because then they become a very dangerous team.

“You’ve got some teams in that division that are a little bit down. You never count out Houston. Texas just can’t score – they’ve turned into, like, it’s just amazing, (but) if they score at all, they’re dangerous. So it really comes down to Seattle finding ways to score runs.”

Cal Raleigh’s big year

“You know, when they signed him (to a contract extension before the season), there was a high expectation and it’s delivered. Again, the game has changed. We’re looking for guys who can hit the ball out of the ballpark because that’s the quickest way to put a run on the board, and for the Seattle Mariners, they’re benefiting big time. … There’s not a lot of sexy averages, but when you get timely home runs and you get on base, score when you need to, that’s the recipe for success.

“You’re facing such really dynamic arms. The storyline for the Mariners for so long was too many strikeouts, not enough runs. So if they can continue to keep doing that in a league and a division that is wide open, they’re going to have tremendous success, and he’s a huge part of that.

“That position over the course of time does have a bigger impact than any other position on the field. … The best tandem catching team usually has a premier jump over everybody else because that that position is just so difficult to get production out of that spot.”

Seattle’s strength in pitching development

“They’re definitely an outlier. Nobody has the resources or wants to put in the resources to develop (pitchers), they just want to find them on trees. They just want what comes out of a computer, what spits out of the analytics – that’s what they want. They don’t want to spend the time and the resources to develop because these kinds of people who are making these decisions, they’re not really baseball people.

“So I give Seattle credit, I give Tampa Bay a lot of credit. But the Rays – and they know it – they develop pitchers and resurface pitchers, but then they all get hurt. So Seattle has done a really good job developing pitchers, and really, until this year, hasn’t had much of the misfortune of a lot of guys missing starts.”

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