Shannon Drayer: What to know about Mariners picking Jason Kanzler as manager

The Seattle Mariners’ search for a manager is over. It will be Jason Kanzler who they go with, and that’s kind of taking the big swing as he has no experience managing at any level.

Salk: Seattle Mariners taking big risk with Jason Kanzler hire

I’ll remind you that Mariners president of baseball operations Jerry Dipoto in his end of the year press conference said that while managerial experience was preferred for the next manager, it wasn’t required. So in some ways this isn’t a surprise because we have seen this before from Dipoto, although this is a very different candidate that is taking over as the skipper of the Mariners than the previous two, Scott Servais and Dan Wilson.

I’m going to be really interested to see Kanzler work with this club. He is only 36 years old. That’s going to make him just the second youngest manager in the game right now, and he’s not too far separated in age from a number of the players. The core of the team is averaging about 27-28, and Cal Raleigh is 30, so Kanzler is really going to be talking the same language.

A new captain at the helm 🫡

Jason Kanzler is ready to lead the charge as our new manager. Welcome to Seattle!

🔗 https://t.co/HYXzYGEWpZ pic.twitter.com/Oq2bMRDaQa

— Seattle Mariners (@Mariners) November 3, 2026

As for the experience factor, no, he hasn’t managed, but yes, he has seen the game up close at real speed as he was a hitting coach for the Houston Astros for a couple of years, so I feel a little bit better about that. I also am intrigued by his player development background. He spent the last three years as director of player development for the Cubs. That’s an area that a lot of teams are starting to favor when they’re looking at the managers, coaches and whatnot that you’re going to put in the dugout. So we’ll see how he leans on that.

Who is new Mariners manager Jason Kanzler? Jon Morosi’s insight

The people that I’ve talked to have said Kanzler is a quick thinker, he is very smart, he is somebody that is up to date on all of the trends and probably has the potential of setting some trends himself. So he should be able to work with everybody on everything in a game that at this day and age is just progressing at such a rapid speed, so I think that makes it very important.

I think the thing to remember here, and I think that this is something that we learned throughout this search and really was hit home when we heard last week that former Mariners minor league hitting coordinator CJ Gillman was being hired as the major league hitting coach – Dipoto and general manager Justin Hollander are doubling down on things that they think are working in this organization. This isn’t and never was going to be another big retool or rebuild. There were some things that needed to be fixed, things that weren’t happening specifically at the major league level. But they like what they have going on in the farm system as far as processes go, so I think that this is more in line with what they have and what they like rather than somebody that’s just going to come in and steer the big league ship, so to speak.

Are there risks here? For sure. But there’s also I think the potential for a really good match, and it seems that they spent a lot of time trying to figure that out. So it’ll be interesting to get to know Jason Kanzler, and we’ll get our first shot at that at the press conference Wednesday. I also want to hear a little bit about the process of hiring him.

Until then, Kanzler has his work cut out for him with baseball likely shutting it down in under a month with the expected lockout. He doesn’t have a lot of time to hit the road and get to know these guys.

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