Mariners’ Jerry Dipoto explains the trouble with this MLB trade deadline

Jul 17, 2024, 10:03 AM | Updated: 2:34 pm

Editor, Seattle Sports

The Seattle Mariners are expected to be heavily involved during this MLB trade deadline period. The league isn’t making it easy on them or any of the other teams looking to improve their rosters before July 30, however.

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“We’ve been in touch with just about everybody in the league and have an idea of where teams stand,” Mariners president of baseball operations Jerry Dipoto told Seattle Sports’ Brock and Salk on Wednesday. “And with just very few exceptions right now, almost everybody is in a hold, because what you see when you pick up the paper and look at the standings or flip on a site and and check out where teams stand, almost everybody in baseball is within three games of a playoff spot, it seems.”

Dipoto’s point is well taken. There really are only a few teams completely out of the postseason race right now – just the Miami Marlins (16 games back of a wild card) and Colorado Rockies (16 1/2 back) in the National League, and Los Angeles Angels (12 1/2 back), Oakland Athletics (17 1/2 back) and Chicago White Sox (27 1/2) in the American League.

So while the Mariners have a clear need before the deadline passes, which Dipoto spoke about at length during the nearly half-hour conversation, he explained why they’re running into some trouble on the trade market.

“We don’t make enough contact. That’s plain and simple. It’s our biggest hickey. It’s the area where we need to make the most improvement,” Dipoto said. “It’s hard to imagine us going into the postseason and doing damage without improving in that area, and that’s the simple truth of it. That’s going to come in some part from the guys that are on our club, and obviously as we come down here these next couple of weeks with the trade deadline, if we can improve in those areas, we’d like to. I don’t know if that’s realistic based on, right now, the congestion in the playoff race and who’s going to be available or not available. But we understand that it’s a weakness on our team.”

Standings holding up trade market

Dipoto indicated that the amount of parity seen in the league, which now allows three wild cards into the postseason along with the three division winners in each league, is making for a tougher market than he’s usually seen in his career in MLB front offices.

“I would like to find a way to create better flow and more contact within our offense,” he said. “And again, I don’t know if we’re going to be able to access that on the trade market, but we’re going to try. We’re open to that. As we’ve always been, we are open to doing something that has the potential to be dynamic. Again, I don’t know if that’s going to be available as we push into the deadline. Right now, it’s not. And this is as late as we’ve ever gone into a trade deadline where I can honestly say it’s not.”

Dipoto admitted that the play of the Mariners (52-46), who led the AL West by 10 games on June 18 but now sit just a game ahead of second-place Houston (50-46) in the division, has only added to the complications on the market.

“If you’re in that position (within striking distance of a playoff spot), it makes it much more difficult to make a decision. Hopefully some of that shakes out. Some of this is our own fault, you know, for playing the way we have over the course of the last month. We let the American League shrink up again, where there was more separation than there was in the National. But now we’re looking at a league where, not unlike the other major sports, there are a lot of teams that have a chance at the halfway mark, and that’s going to make the trade deadline a little more complicated than it usually is.”

Listen to the full Brock and Salk conversation with Jerry Dipoto in the podcast at this link or in the player near the top of this post. Catch Brock and Salk from 6-10 a.m. weekdays on Seattle Sports.