Goldsmith weighs in on Mariners’ second base situation

Feb 2, 2025, 10:06 AM | Updated: 10:18 am

Seattle Sports

The Seattle Mariners’ infield is starting to take shape after the re-signing of Jorge Polanco.

Drayer: Jorge Polanco is answer for Seattle Mariners’ infield — with question marks

The M’s 2024 second baseman is coming back to play third base in 2025, filling one of two glaring holes in Seattle’s infield. Now the question looms as to who will be playing second base this season.

There appears to be two in-house options for the M’s currently in Dylan Moore and Ryan Bliss. There’s also still the possibility that well-regarded prospect Cole Young can push himself onto the big league roster, whether that’s on opening day or later in the season.

During a conversation with Seattle Sports’ Wyman and Bob on Friday, Mariners play-by-play voice Aaron Goldsmith shared his thoughts on Seattle’s second base situation. He focused on the potential battle between Moore and Bliss.

“Second base does seem like it’s Dylan Moore right now,” Goldsmith said. “I’ll be really curious how they handle Ryan Bliss in this whole situation. We saw last year when he came up – and he was with the Mariners in the grand scheme of things for a fairly short period of time – but being a young player, you want to get him regular at-bats. And that was a large part of the reason why he was ultimately sent back to Tacoma, because he just was not getting regular at-bats in the big leagues. And I would imagine that philosophy would hold true in 2025.”

Moore is the more experienced of the two and is one of just two players (also J.P. Crawford) who have been on the M’s big league roster since 2019. Moore has mostly been used in a utility role and as a platoon bat against left-handers during his six seasons in Seattle, but was awarded the job at second base in 2021 following a strong showing in the shortened 2020 campaign.

However, he couldn’t replicate his success and hit just .181 with a 74 wRC+ over 126 games in 2021. His OPS of .610 was 245 points lower than the season prior.

Moore, who won the American League Gold Glove as a utility player last season, has shown flashes of what he did in 2020 – when he hit .255 with a 140 wRC+ in 38 games – at different points. Last season when J.P. Crawford missed nearly a month with an oblique injury, Moore hit .250 with 11 extra-base hits and a 144 wRC+ in 24 games. But he hit just .189 with a 96 wRC+ in 98 games after.

“I like Dylan Moore. I like him on the team. I think he serves an obviously huge role on this team,” Wyman and Bob co-host Bob Stelton said. “Having said that, I don’t think he’s an everyday player, and I think when we saw him in the lineup as often as we did, you kind of saw diminishing returns with him.

“Do you believe that they look at him as an option as an everyday second baseman? Because I’ve been viewing it as more of a platoon.”

Goldsmith still sees Moore as the best option right now, but he could see a different line of thinking.

“Now you could spin it another way and say we want to see what Ryan Bliss has to offer. We know what Dylan Moore is. We want to see what Ryan Bliss is,” Goldsmith said.

Bliss was one of three players acquired when the Mariners traded closer Paul Sewald to the Arizona Diamondbacks at the 2023 trade deadline. He made his big league debut last season and hit .233 with a 101 wRC+ in 33 games.

The high point of Bliss’ season came when he had back-to-back three-hit games against Miami in June, but he went just 8-for-56 (.143 average) in his remaining 31 games.

“He was dynamite,” Goldsmith said. “But like any young player, you can blink your eyes and find yourself underwater for a week, a week and a half, because it’s really hard making the adjustment. So all that remains up in the air, at least from what I know right now.”

Hear the full conversation at this link or in the audio player near the top of this story. Tune in to Wyman and Bob weekdays from 2-6 p.m. or find the podcast on the Seattle Sports app.