It’s so funny the things you remember. The things that become core bits, whether they be with other people or just in your own head. And if they’re from other people, they may not know it. You may not even know them.

When I worked at the M’s, I had a coworker who relayed they had a friend who was a huge Mariners fan who’d post fired-up recaps to their Instagram story. If I’m remembering this right.

And if I’d seen one or two, that was the most I’d seen. I don’t remember and likely never knew this other individual’s name.

He’d end his little hits, I think only after wins, with

The boys are hot.

I always think of that when the boys are hot. And the boys are most certainly hot.

It was so perfect the way tonight ended, the 20-year-old phenom sliding to a game-ending catch.

We went tonight, because you gotta go when it’s 80 degrees on a Tuesday in early June. When that ball was popped up behind third and tailing towards the crowd, it was obvious Colt would catch it—probably in dramatic fashion.

Not that he’d catch it if it landed in fair territory but that it would be coming down in fair territory and that it’d land in his glove. Probably after a dive or a slide. Or both?

That’s how things have been going for your Seattle Mariners. And so they did.

I want to show you two different GIFs.

I was going to make this into a bit of a game and have you guess which one was a single with a man on first and which one was a three-run home run on an absolute tank but you’d be able to tell by the angle of the ball off the bat.

But the point remains the same: you could not tell by the enthusiasm of the bat flip.

Jhonny Pereda, bottom four, single to center to put runners on first and second with nobody out:

Jhonny Pereda, bottom five, a three-run homer to put the M’s up 7-2.

Okay, you know what, as I watch the footage and cut the gifs, the point was wrong. You can tell.

But this is a club that’s having fun and letting you know they’re having fun.

After the Pereda shot, I was thinking back-to-back with Colt coming up next. He’d already laced a double to right.

But no, he bunted for a hit. He stood on first with a smirk I think you could sense from the 300 level. He passed the mic to J.P., who proceeded to line a ball to the warning track, caught by Carson Benge on the run before he banged up against the wall in right.

The Mariners went from 2015 vibes less than a fortnight ago to now downright playing with their food.

It was in the upper 70s at the ballpark tonight. The sun didn’t set until after 9 p.m.

Julio hit a majestic bomb up into the cotton candy sky and down into the Mets’ bullpen and it barely mattered at all.

The Mariners’ odds to make the playoffs and win the division are higher than they’ve ever been.

They’re 2.5 games up and, like me with a new belt I just got, looking to stretch this thing out.

Summer is here and the 2026 Seattle Mariners are finding their stride.

The boys are hot.

Go M’s.

People used to say you get more conservative as you age. People say that less now with the state of right-of-center politics and policy but it’s still a bit of an adage.

And while I keep going the opposite direction with each passing year, there’s one spot where I feel more conservative. Spiritually boomer, even.

I love the narratives in baseball. I love the numbers too but I gotta have both. Because it’d be bad if the stories—the people, the scenarios, the arcs, the characters and their character—don’t nudge the numbers instead of the other way around.

I want to take you back to one of my most formative online back-and-forths.

On an older but not the oldest version of Lookout Landing, then helmed by Jeff Sullivan and Matthew Carruth, I got into a bit of an argument in the comments with the latter—a dude much smarter than me on baseball matters. Probably most matters.

It was a tough time to be a Mariners fan. It was a weird time to be a Mariners fan.

Anyway, and I’m not going to look up when exactly this was or the exact results of what happened, but there was a time when Ichiro was benched. “Benched” might be a little strong.

It was late in his first Mariners tenure and he was scuffling and taken out of the lineup for a day even though he didn’t want to be taken out of the lineup.

The next day he got a bunch of hits. Pretty sure it was at least three.

I don’t know why I wandered into the comments—because I never commented at first—to semi-innocuously say something like “It looks like Ichiro responded to the benching….” and so on.

I don’t recall the exact response but Matthew didn’t agree because that’s not how baseball works, in addition to it just being a weird time to talk about Ichiro at all.

The way baseball’s online communities were coming to understand how baseball worked revolved completely around what was predictive.

You can’t say this caused that unless this consistently happened enough to be able to count on it happening in the future. If something was results-based, it was nigh-immoral.

I am almost certainly mischaracterizing that.

But I vividly remember being like “Okay but what if Ichiro said the benching motivated him and that’s why he got those hits?”

Still, no dice.

Because how would Ichiro know better than anyone else? He doesn’t know.

And that’s probably a smarter way to look at baseball if you’re going to be looking at it. Because you can’t go around advocating for the tactical benching of star players in slumps or you’re going to sound like a loon whose Twitter avi is a car selfie with sunglasses from 2003.

While I can say with certainty I’m not growing more politically conservative as I age, I am loony enough to think sometimes guys respond to adversity. And sometimes guys don’t.

And it’s enjoyable to notice it, to believe.

This is just a sunny Saturday afternoon riff but I feel like even a few years into whatever this project is, it’s good to still occasionally express the core values that shape the rest.

I was thinking about that last night as J.P. Crawford had as good of a game in a Mariners uniform as anyone has had all year.

Something’s different with him and this whole club since Colt Emerson came up. It isn’t necessarily that he’s directly sparked everyone or anything close to it, but when you flip from Leo Rivas (bless his heart) to genuinely competing at one spot—with a guy the org views as a cornerstone—things become a lot more real for almost everyone.

Simply, you don’t want to be scuffling whenever Brendan Donovan is back to health.

That surely isn’t what J.P. Crawford was thinking about as he stood and stared at the rail gun bolt headed toward the No Fly Zone, his second homer of the night. Nor when his diving stop kept the Snakes off the board in the 10th.

But I still want to believe that stuff is a factor. Because how can it not be? Those are the conditions and the context.

Crawford is staring at the next phase of his Major League career as he authors the conclusion to this one. He can still pick it a little and he can definitely lean on one.

I was also thinking during the game last night, so perversely, about the range of money Randy Arozarena was playing for—like the total money gap in his next contract between a bad to good to great walk year here in 2026.

Is it nine figures? I think it’s nine figures.

And basically all this year, even before, I thought Randy made sense as a guy to have a great contract year. Why? Well, look at those old Postseason and WBC performances. He rises to meet the moment. Or something.

But that isn’t what I was thinking about as I stood next to my wife at the game last night.

“Man, they’re going to intentionally walk someone to get to Randy? The disrespect,” I said out loud.

Five pitches later, on a 2-2 slider way down, away and out of the zone, Randy hung in there when he needed to hang in there. He went down and got it. Barrel to ball.

Looping liner to the gap in right-center.

Fire the W.

That’s the good stuff.

Go M’s.

The Mariners beat the division-leading Athletics soundly, doing so by holding a good offense to only two runs in the windy bandbox down in West Sacramento. It was one of the most satisfying wins of the season.

And everyone is pissed.

That puts a nice bow on the absurdity around this piggybacking strategy of throwing both Luis Castillo and Bryce Miller on the same day, a storyline made in a lab to invoke hasty reactions on Twitter.

The strategy itself isn’t absurd, though.

Why?

If it helps the team win, that matters more than anything else.

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Does it matter that players are pissed off? Sure. It doesn’t not matter.

But it doesn’t matter more than the ball club winning games. And every player in that clubhouse, in the organization, needs to understand nothing is more important than that.

Quickly catching folks up, though—Luis Castillo and Bryce Miller clearly do not love this setup.

The most visible display of frustration came from Castillo after an extended and animated conversation with Dan Wilson following Rock’s fourth frame of shutout ball. Miller would have the fifth.

Castillo postgame, again via Kramer:

“I was kind of asking, ‘Maybe one more inning?’” Castillo said through an interpreter. “He told me that Bryce was ready. But as a competitor, you kind of want to go out there and just continue. But at the same time, you've got to respect his position.”[…]

“It's a plan that for at least my seasons here in the Major Leagues, I've never seen this piggyback,” Castillo said. “But it's something that you'll eventually get used to. All I've got to do is continue working and just doing the plan that they set up for us.”

Having finished the game, Miller had the on-field walk-off interview with Brad Adams and said he wasn’t overly comfortable with the setup.

He continued postgame:

“I found out yesterday or two days ago, so I just didn't really know how I was going to navigate it,” Miller said. “Obviously, I think I've got [76] starts over the last four years, plus a couple years in the Minor Leagues. Like, I haven't done this in a while -- really, since college -- pitching out of the bullpen. So I didn't really know how to navigate it. But I just did the best I could.”

That item off the top, that’s the only part I don’t particularly like—guys should know, if it is locked in, if they’re starting the game or coming out of the bullpen a couple days in advance.

You know what I do like though?

17 IP, 9 H, 4 R, 4 ER 2 BB, 21 SO

That’s the line on this pair through the first two starts of this piggybacking strategy.

The Mariners’ #5 starter just pitched a complete game two-run 10-strikeout game agains the AL West’s first place team and people are mad.

In part, I get it.

For one, it’s a relatively new concept—though I say relatively because the baseball world’s been talking about these piggyback starts for years. Orgs use them a lot in the minors.

For another, the first taste of it stunk. It was awful, and I’m going to use the following anecdote only to tee up up the broader point.

Here’s a selection of quotes from Ryan Divish on the most recent episode of Inside Pitch on Jason Puckett’s PuckSports, where the pair was discussing Wilson sticking with Castillo for the ninth inning in a one-run game last week against the White Sox.

“Dan was trying to be rigid to the philosophy of trying to get work for his two guys to keep them stretched out, when the bigger philosophy is, hey, win the game first.” […]

“It's not like Jerry's telling him [on piggybacking], ‘Oh, you have to do that.’ They've all decided this is the best way to do it. The problem is that even if Dan understands why they have to do it and even if he understands the premise of it, he got away from what the overall aspect would be. And I'm sure that's what Jerry Dipoto would tell him.”[…]

“Let’s say that Bryce Miller went out and was struggling to throw strikes and was giving up hits, but he’d only given up two runs or whatever.

He’s at 50 pitches after three innings, but it’s been a complete struggle. Let’s say he’s walked four or whatever. You don’t leave him in just to get to 70, do you, knowing that he’s not pitching well? No, you’ve got to rested a guy that can go five so you pull him and go there.

The overall goal of the piggyback shouldn’t be to just keep these guys stretched out. It’s a mechanical thing that you use, but it isn’t like, ‘oh my god, we have to stay to this and results overall be damned.’

That’s the problem. That’s where the misstep was.”

With this setup and other similar decisions—like J.P. Crawford moving to third should he re-learn to throw—the Mariners are asking a lot of their players.

They’re doing what great teams tend to do: putting winning above all else.

It has to come before egos, before “comfort,” above pride and payment—everything.

That is not something The Baseball Club of Seattle LLP tends to do.

There are so many examples of this but among them is hiring a franchise Hall of Famer with zero managerial experience as the full-time skipper for a championship contending team without interviewing a single candidate.

And now, as the Mariners are asking a lot of Wilson—to balance the analytical approach the modern game requires with situational feel and acumen—it’s laying bare the skipper’s shortcomings and, with that, the organization’s folly in asking its employees to put winning above all else but not living up to the idea themselves.

It’s sort of a fun circular “time is a flat circle” kind of thing. Except for the mental anguish it causes Mariners fans on a nightly basis.

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But anyway, you can’t argue with results.

The results are what count in the standings, not whether or not your highest-paid player with a six-plus ERA throws around his stuff in the dugout because he doesn’t get the ‘W’ next to his name in the paper.

Bless Luis’s heart, he’s done so much for this organization and in this game. But it is a results business and, right now, this piggyback setup is getting results.

How long does it stay? No idea. Definitely not through like August and September.

But it may be here for a bit if these guys keep pitching like they have in their limited stints.

The focus then, and in many other ways, shifts to Dan Wilson. Skip is clearly not a masterful in-game tactician. That’s settled in the short term.

So if he’s going to be manager, and he is going to be manager for the foreseeable future, he has to crush the other side of the job—he has to be an elite caretaker of the vibes.

He has to get everyone to buy in, to understand the club only has one goal: to win and win big.

Nothing comes before that.

The challenge: his very presence runs counter to the narrative.

Godspeed, Daniel.

Go M’s.

The entire point is to win baseball games. That’s everything. That’s the goal. That’s why anyone does any of this.

So it’s a little odd when, after all the the machinations that go into picking up the smallest slivers of fractions of wins, teams don’t bring that same mentality to the grind of the regular season.

Teams will, quite often, be worse on purpose.

The Seattle Mariners, with supposed championship aspirations, started Leo Rivas at third base every day for a month. Bless his heart but he’s hitting .133/.259/.173 for a 39 wRC+, good for 253rd out of 258 players with at least 100 plate appearances inn 2026.

That had to end and it does today the Mariners calling up Colt Emerson, their best prospect.

Is he rushed? Is this a bit of a desperate move for the Mariners? Do I care at all about either of those things? No I do not.

Why call Colt up now? Because Brendan Donovan is hurt and Emerson is better than Leo Rivas.

Why not call up someone like Brock Rodden and let Colt develop some more in Tacoma? Because Colt Emerson is better than Brock Rodden.

The entire point is to win baseball games and Colt Emerson helps the Mariners win baseball games. They wouldn’t be paying him $9 million this year if he didn’t.

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On the topic of “rushing” prospects, I’m going to pull up a blurb that I used last year, one from Jeff Sullivan during his USS Mariner days. The domain unfortunately expired but I’ll link to the URL anyway in case it comes back.

As for the confidence issue, if you have a player whose development might be stunted by experiencing a period of low confidence, that’s bound to come up eventually, whether he’s rushed or whether he’s taken care of cautiously. If these players exist, at some point they’ll slump, and when they slump, they’ll have bigger problems. You can’t leave a player in the minors for so long that he’s just immediately ready for the majors, no problem. There will be challenges, unavoidably.

I think our understanding of “rushed” is probably mistaken. I think the minor leagues, certainly, are important. You can never be fully prepared for the majors without having seen the majors, but you can be more prepared, and the more prepared you are, the smoother the adjustment. But I think adjustments can be made in the majors, and if not the minors remain an open option, and while I’m not closed off to the idea that moving a guy quickly can destroy his career, I’d really like to see some compelling evidence. Some careers are just destined to end up destroyed. I think, probably, there are guys who would be rushed, guys who shouldn’t be, but I don’t think those guys get rushed by their organizations. I think the players who get rushed, according to our definition, are the players who have been judged by their teams to be ready to meet the challenge.

Colt Emerson has a good chance to end up being the franchise cornerstone many inside and outside the building envision. He could also be a bust. Or he could be somewhere in the middle.

It will not be determined by the timing of this promotion.

When Mike Trout was first called up by the Angels, filling in for an injured Peter Bourjos, he hit .163/.213/.279 and was sent back to Double-A after only a couple weeks. He came up again a few weeks after that and finished the season with a not-awful 87 wRC+ over 40 games—buuuut hitting .146/.180/.188 with 17 strikeouts and only two walks across his final 50 PAs of 2011.

He posted 20.2 fWAR over the next two seasons.

This stuff happens—or even sometimes doesn’t—and when it does, it doesn’t ruin a player’s career. Alex Rodríguez was awful across his first two stints in the Majors and, with some help, he turned out fine.

There’s the part where, had they not called ARod up to help the ‘94 and ‘95 teams, he would’ve been on the 2001 club—but with Emerson’s contract situation resolved, starting the service time clock isn’t an issue.

Colt Emerson’s going to be in Seattle for a long time. His time at shortstop, however, isn’t starting yet.

From MLB.com’s Daniel Kramer:

Like I said, teams will be worse on purpose. It happens.

Colt Emerson is a better defensive shortstop than J.P. Crawford. The longest-tenured Mariner ranks last in the Majors by Outs Above Average at the shortstop position.

An average defensive shortstop, a term that’d likely undersell Emerson, would be an enormous upgrade over Crawford. With Cole Young’s significant improvement manning the keystone, a Colt/Cole double play combination would turn a team weakness into a strength.

But that isn’t happening. For…reasons.

Were it up to me, I’d slide J.P. over to third, a position that despite his relatively weak arm, is better-suited to his step-and-a-dive skillset.

It is not up to me.

On the back of all this, you have the continued unavailability of Brendan Donovan, the Mariners’ biggest offseason acquisition.

It’s a good anecdote on why so many of the Mariners’ additions go bust or something close to it. When you add non-star players, there are more non-star outcomes in play.

Donovan’s cleared the 3.0 fWAR threshold only once in his career and when you get a sub-50th percentile outcome on a player like that, he ends up not being the type of player you want as the signature acquisition before the most-anticipated season in franchise history.

Throw in a couple positions where you’re counting on platoons and that’s a big chunk of the lineup where you’re sure not to have stars and open up the possibility for performances far, far short of that.

With Emerson up, it’s one more spot in the lineup where the Mariners could have a star.

It probably won’t happen immediately. There will be struggles because there always are.

But the Mariners are better today than they were yesterday.

It’s good to get better. It’s good to try to win.

Go M’s.

The Seattle Mariners are nothing if not themselves.

To be honest, we should’ve seen the Braves series win coming—but that’s how they get you.

It would be very Mariners for them to rip off a great road trip to get back on track, walk straight into the glass door that is a home sweep on a tentpole weekend and follow that up by getting socked in the earhole by the best team in baseball.

But it’d be even more Mariners to have your Opening Day starter repeatedly receive said shots to the earhole before the club, stumbling around the ring drooling and swinging wildly, lands some haymakers of their own en route to perhaps the best win of the young season.

Sure series win? Oh no, no, no. They were competitive on Tuesday night but immediately after nice bullpen usage by Dan Wilson on Monday, José Ferrer getting Matt Olson late, he goes the other way. How Mariners.

So do the M’s roll over on Wednesday, falter and hand in a perfectly symmetrical 1-5 homestand after a 5-1 roadie? Nah. This is how they pull you along, teasing you like the worst situationship.

I can’t believe the kids made up a word for that.

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Anywho, the 2026 Seattle Mariners are not going wire to wire. Not even close.

In my post after the game one win against the Yankees in the second series of the year, I wrote that I hoped 2-2 they were prior to the victory would be the last time this year’s club saw .500. That was, perchance, tempting fate a bit too much.

They saw .500 the next day and twice since, still having not climbed above the water’s surface since their fifth game.

And that water has been pretty choppy for the Mariners. They started down Bryce Miller and Carlos Vargas and have since seen injuries to Brendan Donovan, Matt Brash, Victor Robles and Gabe Speier.

You could say they’ve been unlucky but injuries are the thing folks always overlook in the offseason, when projecting mid-90s win counts (🙋‍♂️) based on a lineup that always looks like this vs. righties and that vs. lefties and so on.

Guys are going to get hurt and when they do the guy who plays instead of them are very important. You traditionally don’t have someone second in line who would start on some teams—but some clubs do because it isn’t against the rules or anything.

The Mariners started Leo Rivas for a month, bless his heart.

Brendan Donovan again won’t play more than 130 games in a season and when he is back, he’s good—but functionally about the same player as Cole Young. Good hitter for second, but probably not the bat or glove for third.

And then you have this situation where you were planning on your top positional prospect—best since Julio—being ready to fill in pretty quickly but no, he’s got a bad case of the swing and miss.

But when he does look ready and able to help the team, do you move Brendan Donovan to a utility role? Really? Or does he get reps in left, kicking Randy Arozarena into a partial DH platoon in a contract year?

Of course you also have the franchise’s longest-tenured player in J.P. Crawford manning the position Colt Emerson actually plays, and doing so quite poorly.

Don’t even get me started on the rotation.

It’s funny because even the good stuff is grimy; perhaps the best story so far is perpetual #6 swing starter Emerson Hancock turning into one of the best arms in the American League.

And as a result, Luis Castillo is going to pitch out of the bullpen? Really? Remember when Félix did that for like a day? Bizarre vibes.

That isn’t to say all this stuff is bad, though some of it is, but it does all make for a team that’s going to have to grind their way to a quality season.

Oh I almost forgot, they’re like the worst defensive team in baseball or close.

So yeah, if they do end up having the season they want to have or something close to it, it’s not going to be pretty. It’s going to be grimy.

What do I mean by that? Think of golf.

You really lose the handle off the tee on a reasonable par four and launch driver off the planet but some tall firs on the right not only keep it from entering orbit but elbow it towards the fairway.

You got a line. Actually only need the 5-iron. Horrid contact. Thinned like crazy. But it’s going to run. It runs all the way to the right fringe. You get it inside the hula hoop from 25 feet and your buddy says it’s good without thinking much.

It’s par. A grimy-ass par.

Give or take a little, that’s how the Mariners do it. In the successful years and not.

Last year they were riding Jorge Polanco, third baseman, in the early going as the rest of the bats thawed out. Then he was DH, but he could only hit from one side. Naylor rocked. Only kind of grimy because they could’ve got him in the offseason. And Geno being kinda meh fit the bill.

That club, one I’d say was still more talented than this one, needed to win an ungodly amount of games in a very short stretch to have the season they had.

The season was their best ever but that club, like this one, was grimy.

Leo Rivas started Game 7 of the American League Championship Series.

You’d like them to step past that because they need to go further to have a successful season, but just because they haven’t looked better yet doesn’t mean they won’t.

When they do look better, though, it still won’t be pretty. We’re going in circles now.

That’s Mariners Baseball.

It is Friday and a beautiful day in Seattle, Washington.

From the meadowy knoll at Discovery Park,

(Luke Raley literally just hit a grand slam as I type this)

Cheers and Go M’s.

Let me tell you about the 2010 Seattle Mariners.

It was a team we were led to believe, after the acquisition of Cliff Lee, had legitimate title aspirations. Why we trailed right along like ducklings after their mother despite an Opening Day lineup that looked like this one, I don’t know.

Optimism and the mania of spring in Seattle has that effect, I guess. Same for trading for the best player available all winter, as the M’s did for Lee.

The optimism was dampened a bit when the lefty ace went down with an abdominal strain halfway through spring training, suffered by colliding with Chris Snyder of the Diamondbacks while backing up a play at the plate.

How Mariners.

Lee didn’t actually go down there and then, after the first-inning collision, I’ll add. His outing wasn’t cut short until he was ejected in the third for throwing a pitch at Snyder’s head.

I’m honestly just learning that part, which, good times. Cliff Lee, what a character.

When the diagnosis came down he’d be out for most of the first month, the talk across town was how the Mariners just needed to get through April at .500 or close, just until Lee got back.

In an April 28th game at Kauffman Stadium, started by Ryan Rowland-Smith and opposed by the Royals’ Gil Meche, a Rob Johnson sac fly in the 8th brought home Milton Bradley and gave the M’s a 6-5 lead. David Aardsma closed it out.

The win got them to 11-11. Their next game, the last of April, would be Cliff Lee’s first start in a Mariners uniform.

They did it.

Lee dominated, Eric Byrnes missed the bunt on a suicide squeeze and the rest—Byrnes riding out of the building on an adult trike and Cliff traded to the Rangers in the middle of a miserable season for us and dominant one for him—is history.

So whenever the Mariners go .500 or close in April, I think of that team.

There are no lessons there—just that it’s funny how much standards have changed, how much more talented this team is than that one.

The 2026 Mariners, despite the sluggish start, have everything laid out in front of them and, perhaps, enough talent to accomplish it.

The 2010 were so bad. They very quickly (8-19 in May) had fans thinking about next year and the presumed arrival of homegrown second baseman with an all-fields lefty swing.

How’s that for a transition, finally, out of an overly extended lede?

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Let me say right now that when I compare Cole Young to the players I’m about to compare him to, I do it out of love.

These aren’t the guys I was watching when I first fell in love with the Mariners, just the guys I was watching a decade deep into an absolute grind of a marriage.

They’re the highlights, I swear.

On highlights, here’s one that used to be staple for me. Even as I pull it up on YouTube now, the red progress bar is almost to the end, right at the curtain call.

For awkward and unathletic dudes like me, second basemen have serious appeal because that’s where we played when we were little. If they let us out of the corner outfield positions.

The guys in the show are not that but they’re sometimes have that aura—or possibly the lack thereof?

Almost all these guys—same as it is with Cole Young now—are former shortstops. Hell, when Brad Miller played shortstop, you could see on every throw he was a future former shortstop.

And they let him replace Brendan Ryan at the position!

They didn’t let Nick Franklin do that. I guess they needed to see a few more weeks, which was the gap between Franklin and Miller’s 2013 call-ups, of what was a 44 wRC+ from Ryan.

Different times, man. They’re a lot different, but the cool thing about baseball is how easy it is to look across time.

When Colt Emerson banged one halfway up the light tower in Tacoma last year, @MILBMariners of course sharing the video, I thought immediately of Brad Miller doing the same his entire professional career ago.

The 2013 season was when my now-wife and I first moved back to Seattle from our shared time in Missoula. We actually drove from there to San Francisco for Opening Day in Oakland, before we moved.

After we did, settling into a one-bedroom in Ballard, we hosted her family in that spot later in the summer—her parents and her brother and his girlfriend all crammed in because her dad’s Twins were playing the M’s and that’s just when you visit your family sometimes. When your ball club is in their town.

We snuck in some good seats early behind the road dugout early and saw Nick Franklin hit two home runs in a 6-4 M’s win.

Franklin was just 22 that year, same age Cole Young is now.

Nick Franklin washed out of the Majors by 27. He was completely out of baseball at 28.

Cole Young is not Nick Franklin.

Probably.

• • •

There are 19 minor leaguers on MLB Pipeline’s Top 100 Prospects list who are younger than Cole Young.

It’s so important to understand that it’s not just about what Young is doing, but the age he’s doing it at.

Jerry Dipoto had this great line to Adam Jude in a piece for the Seattle Times:

“To get to the level he did at the age he did … those players generally stay around a long time,” Dipoto said recently. “Those are guys that you look up and they had 10-, 12-, 15-year careers and did really special things. And I think we’re going to look up and that’s what it’s going to be for Cole.”

Of course, when I say “doing it” as I did above, we’re talking primarily about the last month—even if he did have good stretches and help the team win some games last year.

For posterity, the line early is .286/.357/.420 for a 126 wRC+ and 0.9 fWAR. Just look at that triple-slash, it screams quality second baseman.

Right now, you’re going to see a lot of mentions of Cole Young’s bWAR (or Baseball Reference’s WAR, not FanGraphs’). And the reason why is that it’s higher—because before every game the talented and hardworking folks in Mariners Baseball Information prepare what are called the “game notes,” a packet flush with stats and usually the most favorable ones.

Those go on TV and the radio and in newspapers. That’s just how it works.

I’m not going to use bWAR primarily because I’m a fWAR guy and I’ve always been an fWAR guy but also because bWAR uses Defensive Runs Saved for defense and DRS is outlier-level crazy about Cole Young right now. I’ll wait for MLB’s Statcast-powered Outs Above Average to catch up, even if bWAR and DRS now have Young as the fourth-best position player in the game.

Alright, you know what, for Ss and Gs and because Baseball Reference doesn’t have an easily accessible way to link directly to this one leaderboard, here’s the list.

Still, the point remains, bWAR isn’t a statistic I tend to care too much about— particularly when a guy’s figure is noteworthy because of a month’s worth of DRS data.

But there are other noteworthy stats I do care about. Let’s hit ‘em and call it a post, huh?

Shannon Drayer reported early in spring that being able to hit the fastball was a big point of emphasis from the Mariners to Young after his rookie year, a campaign in which he struggled mightily against the heater.

An update:

• Young vs. four-seam fastballs in 2025: .189/.291/.256 for a 71 wRC+

• Young vs. four-seam fastballs so far in 2026: .270/.372/.432 for a 141 wRC+

Last year, Young had four total extra-base hits against the pitch. He’s already matched that mark in 2026.

The other big split to keep an eye on, the one you watch with every young player in today’s über-optimized game, is simple platoons.

• Young vs. lefties in 2025: .220/.313/.322 for a 89 wRC+

• Young vs. lefties so far in 2026: .324/.351/.588 for a 161 wRC+

I do not think Cole Young will finish the year with a wRC+ over 160 vs. southpaws. But progress is progress, even if it is early.

Finally, while there are any number of reasons for the kid’s hot start to make you grin, from the possibility of him undoing the unfulfilled promise of Ackley and Miller and Franklin or maybe just because you think he’s handsome, there’s a reason it is so particularly salient.

Here’s how he’s hit based on the situation:

• Low leverage: .278/.328/.278 for a 81 wRC+

• Medium leverage: .195/.306/.317 for a 85 wRC+

• High leverage: .529/.579/1.118 for a 367 wRC+

When the game is on the line, 2026 Cole Young has 123 points of wRC+ on 2002 Barry Bonds.

Basically, here, if you took Barry Bonds during his very best offensive season and added regular 2026 Cole Young, you would get 2026 High Leverage Cole Young.

Insane stuff.

Or, less dorky, you get polished and competitive at-bats when you need them most. You get, on Wednesday, multiple key knocks after battling relentlessly with two strikes.

In re-watching the broadcast a bit for this post, some commentary from Angie Mentink stood out: she said that, in those spots, you’re not just looking to go up there and have a good at-bat—you go up there and do what has to be done.

With runners on second and third with one out in the ninth and a 2-2 count, team down a run, he had to put the ball in play. Is it subotimal to get fooled on a splitter way off the plate away? Sure.

But he did what had to be done.

Process is great and Young’s is supposedly much improved—but it’s a results business. And he is getting results.

Cole Young won the Mariners a ballgame and gave us another memorable moment in the adolescence of what could be a long career for a beloved homegrown player.

Regardless of what the future holds—though right now it does look as bright as Young’s GQ smile—this is such a fun time to root for a dude.

This is what it’s all about, the whole story.

And right now it’s just beginning to get good.

It is Friday, it’s a beautiful day out in our fine city and your Seattle Mariners did not lose their most recent game. Series? Yes. Game? No.

That was almost real bad. When Nick Kurtz took a slider down but over the heart of the plate up and out like a prime Tiger Woods stinger, you start thinking about the whole year. You start catastrophizing when you probably shouldn’t.

Because that’s baseball. And it’s baseball, too, when the heart of the order follows a back-breaking double play with, not a blast, but three straight singles to walk off the game and the homestand.

There’s a week left in April and the Mariners have won two of their eight series.

That’d sound like a disaster were you to tell someone in mid-March but, sitting here now, it could be worse. It could be better—a lot better—like not already being five-and-a-half games behind the #1 seed in the American League. They’re three back of the #2 seed, too.

It’s downright bizarre to talk about Postseason seeding in April but for a team with as grand of aspirations as the Mariners, this is the stuff that matters. Not now, no. But later it will—or could.

The Mariners are 15 percent of the way through their season and, unfortunately, this part does count just the same as the final 15 percent.

Right now though, the Mariners can do some work in starting to position themselves better for the bigger small stretches ahead.

Their next six series are:

• at St. Louis

• at Minnesota

• vs. Kansas City

• vs. Atlanta

• at Chicago White Sox

• at Houston

Even after the second leg of the Vedder Cup, it’s White Sox again, Royals again and then the Diamondbacks to finish out the month.

Some of these teams are playing better than their preseason projections, with Atlanta in particular looking good early but, counting them with the Pads, that’s two sure-fire playoff teams in a month’s worth of games.

Time to make some hay.

To this point, it hasn’t mattered a whole lot who the Mariners are playing but hopefully this stretch enables them to find positive vibes and the consistent play that should come with it.

Their best hitters, in Cal and Julio, are looking more like themselves—the former in particular.

And I can tell you right now, if the starting rotation pitches the way it has thus far, the M’s will be back-to-back AL West champs. Now are they that good? Ehhh, we’ll see.

But if they’re close, if they’re a true top five rotation in the sport, the bats will do enough to at least take a division that’s looking about as meh as expected.

Injuries can always change things, though a certain number should be expected. And maybe we should’ve been more mindful of the health status of the team’s biggest offseason acquisition.

A story by MLB.com’s Daniel Kramer shared an update on Brendan Donovan:

It also appears there will be some legitimate long-term monitoring of this issue.

Donovan again cited the sports hernia surgery that he underwent last October as the likeliest cause for what’s going on, and added that this new snag was independent of the discomfort he experienced on the other groin in Anaheim three weekends ago.

And therein lies a bigger-picture scope, as Donovan -- who only played 130-plus games once in his four years in St. Louis -- suggested that treatment could last throughout the season. He isn’t expected to be activated on the Mariners’ upcoming road trip, as he’ll remain in Seattle to rehab.

In my initial post on the trade that brought in Donovan, I mentioned the surgery and how we’ve seen Mariners players undergo it in semi-recent years—Robinson Canó before 2016 and Mitch Haniger before 2020.

I mentioned then that Canó had his best season in a Mariners uniform in 2016. I did not mention that Mitch Haniger did not play at all in 2020.

From a pre-2021 piece in the Times by Ryan Divish:

He had surgery to repair a tear to the sports hernia by Dr. William C. Meyers, a specialist in sports hernias, of the Vincera Institute in Philadelphia. But it became clear that the surgery didn’t fix the issues in his lower back and sciatic pain.

“You recover from that surgery fast, you feel relief,” he said. “Three days into my rehab, I couldn’t do a wall sit. I was like, ‘My leg is (expletive) killing me. You need to MRI my back.’”

A full MRI of his back revealed a herniated disc that looked “like a piece of sashimi.” He underwent an immediate microdiscectomy.

The COVID-shortened season likely played a factor in him missing it completely with rehab, but it’s something to be aware of with regards to Donovan, a player who’s already battled injuries quite a bit earlier in his career.

Because without him and with Leo Rivas starting every day, the Mariners don’t have enough talent—not for what they and we want them to do.

Will Colt Emerson—once wrist pain and an unsightly strikeout rate subside—be enough to help them out should Donovan continue to need time down? We’ll see.

It’s a lot to ask of a 20 year old, but when you build the entire operation around drafting and developing, them’s the breaks.

Plus, that’s what the money is for.

Get after it in St. Louis, boys.

Go M’s.

The 2015 Mariners went 76-86 and it was the worst season of my life.

The M’s have played worse in seasons I’ve watched them a lot and even so in seasons they, like the 2015 version, were supposed to be very good.

There was something about that year though, man. It just never clicked. It never came close to clicking.

You take the 2014 Seattle Mariners, one of my favorite clubs of all time, and add Nelson Cruz at the peak of his power and you get…a dud?

All the ups and downs of an entire era and it builds to, not the pinnacle that was expected before the season, but it all crashing down?

It was heartbreaking.

When news broke Jack Zduriencik was fired, I remember I was in a small menswear shop in downtown Indianapolis. It wasn’t even September.

I was there with my two brothers, one of whom I’d even started an M’s podcast with just for that should-be special season. And I was looking for a white shirt for my grandfather’s funeral.

Bad times.

Tough times.

This is the part of the piece where I go to look up a specific series when I really started to worry, a sweep on the road against the Dodgers. Had to have at least been May, maybe later. Would’ve had to have been a real bad record, too.

Turns out it was the third series of the year.

Okay so I was a little crazy. I wish I’d been more wrong, though.

• • •

We’re still not there where it warrants a real high level of RPMs on the panic tachometer.

There doesn’t appear to be anything obviously and structurally unsound.

If Josh Naylor went right in the tank at the beginning of a five-year deal, that would be a problem, obviously. So we can’t have that. We probably won’t. He just seems the type to be hurt the most by T-Mobile’s harshest early-season months and benefit, as extremely, when the weather swings.

But look what it took last year, him hitting like nobody ever has in this ballpark, for the M’s to win 90 games.

It takes a lot of talent to win a lot of games.

The Mariners won’t be good if their best players aren’t good because when their best players are good they’re real good. They’re some of the best in the game.

This whole thing hinges on the club having the best position players at two of the sport’s most important spots. If they don’t have that, or something close, the whole picture changes. It blurs and fades.

There’s no reason to think they don’t or won’t have that reality. Julio and Cal will get going—Julio’s already starting to—and when they do, the club will get going, too.

What you’re seeing now, obviously, is what it looks like when they’re sputtering. When they’re sputtering, it puts more pressure on not only the remaining pieces but how all the pieces fit together—and who’s doing the assembling.

• • •

Dustin Ackley and Rickie Weeks in left. Seth Smith and Justin Ruggiano in right.

Those were the big platoons for the 2015 M’s.

They weren’t expected to be, like, super important positions for that team but maybe that’s the issue there/here and we also probably should’ve known better with the parties involved.

I don’t remember nor care to look up what the Twitter discourse looked like back then but I don’t think any of those guys were hitting well enough for someone to say “Hey, come on Lloyd! Let Dustin Ackley and/or Seth Smith face more lefties!” Maybe they were, I don’t know.

What we’re seeing now with the Mariners, specifically with fans justifiably upset with Dan Wilson for not pushing the right buttons with his hitters, is that there are simply too many buttons he needs to even have the option to press.

You know why Luke Raley and Dominic Canzone don’t face lefties? It’s because they’re usually bad against lefties. Because the Mariners expect them, not incorrectly, to continue to be bad against lefties.

What’s the issue with Rob Refsnyder? Well, they got him specifically to hit left-handed pitching but when that specifically looks like starting at designated hitter once or twice a week or coming in cold to pinch-hit against the other team’s best lefty reliever, it can be a little touch and go. More go, really.

The Mariners run platoons because smushing two incomplete players together is a lot cheaper than acquiring and employing one, single more-complete player.

Then it’s on four whole separate players to perform as you expect them to and for your manager to craft their roles just-so night-in and night-out, one early pinch-hit opportunity and recency bias test at a time.

That manager? We can speak very honestly and literally there, without creative liberties.

There, the Mariners installed a franchise hero with no managerial experience as full-time skipper in the middle of a season—no open search or interview process to speak of.

Under him, they took the division in his first year, first time in 25 years. An even 90 wins did it. They beat the Tigers in five, in 15. They took the Blue Jays to seven in the ALCS when they should’ve never let it get there in the first place.

But when they did, when it looked like their best players had done enough to take them to the place they’ve never been, Dan Wilson wilted. And it cost them their season.

It sucks but it’s what happened. We outside know it.

This clubhouse doesn’t know it? It’s hard to imagine. It’s there, it is what it is.

That side of the game isn’t his thing. The combination of old-school feel and modern technical acumen, it wasn’t there then and it doesn’t look like it’s there now. It’s not his thing but it’s a big part of the whole “manager” thing.

It’s not the whole “manager” thing, though.

The other part, as we’ve touched on hereabouts before, is as caretaker of the vibes.

The vibes are not great. Far from it. Like how 2015 Rickie Weeks was far from a great baseball player.

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In my post from the last time the Mariners were five games under .500, just before the four Astros wins that constitute half of the team’s victories three weeks into the season, I said we may eventually see if Dan has the ability to pull back on the rudder to the level of his predecessor—to not let what should be a competitive team fully go in the tank.

We are still not quite there yet, serious alarms firing and “TERRAIN! PULL UP! PULL UP!” blaring over the intercom from Rick Rizzs, like those messages at Sea-Tac or on the ferry.

There are some warning lights flashing, though. The 2026 Mariners are not at cruising altitude, obviously. They’re closer to circling back and getting something looked at than they are to cruising altitude.

Their best players gotta play better, yes, but if this team is going to at least be the sum of its parts, they need leadership from somewhere to flip the purple RESET bar (bar?) on the SNES and get the racetrack Nintendo logo fading up with the Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball bat crack behind it.

There are almost a handful of players who could help with that, but if your manager isn’t going to be the best in-game tactician, and he isn’t the best in-game tactician, then he should be good elsewhere—and this is elsewhere.

It’s not clicking. It doesn’t look right, good players are playing bad and the team is losing games in the worst ways. In sloppy ways.

If this group of guys is going to going to seize upon the promise this offseason and all the years building to it presented, it isn’t going to just happen to them. It won’t transpire by accident or without intent

They gotta snap out of it. Someone has to snap them out of it.

Who’s gonna do it?

J.P. Crawford has six career grand slams and that feels like an undercount.

They’re all in a Mariners uniform. Officially.

The first one actually came in the Seattle Steelheads fit, though of course not this year’s model. Tom Murphy was on third and Jake Bauers was on second and Dylan Moore was on first.

It was 2021 and a Saturday evening like last night, but in front of a scattered 14,772 fans as baseball was only phasing more dense crowds back in after the more full-fledged quarantine.

Under 15,000 for that, over 43,00 for the walk-off knock last night—and if not everyone knew some kind of RBI was coming, it was at least 35,000 who did.

That’s around the population of Wenatchee or Mount Vernon or University Place that completely knew for sure J.P. was going to come through, but not counting people actually in those exotic locales.

That’s who John Paul Crawford is, that’s what he does.

Since his breakthrough season of 2021, here’s his overall wRC+ by year and his high-leverage wRC+ by year.

Aaaaand here’s how he ranks among the big-time regulars who tend to come up in these spots—guys who, since 2021, have at least 250 plate appearances therein.

Going back up to the chart before this one, specifically to 2024, that’s why a lot of folks tend not to care too much about high-leverage splits.

They’re not meaningfully predictive, not when you take everyone into account. Just because a guy comes through in the clutch one year or one game or somewhere in between, it doesn’t mean he’s going to keep on doing that.

J.P. Crawford had a 191 wRC+ in high-leverage spots in 2023 and a 78 wRC+ in 2024 and a 210 wRC+ last year.

Is it more likely he’ll be great in big spots in 2026? Or is he bound to snap back in some kind of every-other-year cycle? Shouldn’t he still be above his overall line?

We have no idea!

Well, we probably do. But we couldn’t prove it. All we know is what we’ve seen, though what we’ve seen is an awful lot.

And in an effort to prove what’s a real signal, we don’t adequately enjoy the noise.

J.P. Crawford revels in the noise, the chants.

J.P.

J.P.

J.P.

Go M’s.

There are not many experiences in sports that can touch sitting along the near-baseline, any deck, when one of your dudes hits an absolute tracer to the pull-side.

I’m talking the ones where you know it’s gone immediately and can enjoy the ball’s full arc across your field of vision, one side to the other. Even on absolute bolts, like Randy’s, you still have enough time to momentarily ponder where it’s going to end up.

Like it’s gone, but how gone?

Into the upper tank, Yordán in left didn’t even move—that’s how gone.

On the subject of Cuban sluggers, those left field bleachers were a spot once frequented by the elder Vladimir Guerrero. One night, now a couple decades ago, he did it twice.

It’s a little better when it’s one of the good guys. The Mariners—and Mariners fans—have been looking for that hit all year long. All these long, excruciating two whole weeks.

It’s funny, but it felt that damn good all the same.

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There were about 45,000 fans in the building tonight. And it felt like it.

Maybe everyone else didn’t live like this but, even in a family of seven, I was raised as a kid to keep an eye on blocks of open seats. Open seats better than our own, of course.

Four there, two sections over from the near end of the dugout—keep an eye on those.

It’s just something that doesn’t go away.

In the glory days of the early-aughts, a solid long-lasting chunk of dark green seats was tough to come by. That’s what the building was like tonight.

Full buildings like that, or ones close, I always think—that right there, that’s your KPI. We want—nay, fiend for—a World Championship, but in the heat of the regular season, the Mariners should aim a for packed, lively building every time they take the field and let the rest of the whole operation work backwards from there.

You saw it tonight—or you may have seen your M’s on good, old public airwaves. Those are your airwaves!

It’s good stuff.

There’s something about good Friday nights, about the big moments in the big wins that mark the start of big weekends and big homestands.

They make me think about how spring and summer nights now, even when they’re on the road, one of every three people out in the city is wearing something Mariners.

Friday nights like tonight, when the diaspora of 45K watching in SoDo and even more watching elsewhere makes their way into the best and worst bars, it’s almost everyone.

Baseball is communal like that. And that’s why a homer like that one tonight is so powerful. It’s a jolt to not just the dugout and the clubhouse and the ballpark, but the city.

More of that, please.

Go M’s.

Four series in—no series wins. It’s not what you want.

A stretch like this probably doesn’t matter an enormous amount in the months-long marathon of a baseball season but they’re closer to worrying territory than anyone wants them to be a mere two weeks into the 2026 campaign.

At 4-9, they’re off to their worst start in 15 years to begin perhaps their most hyped season ever. The Mariners are nothing if not themselves.

It’s been a bit, which sucks, because I haven’t gotten you a post and it also means there’s a bunch of random stuff I now have to write about.

Let’s hit a big chunk of it by touching on items of various levels of concern.

Stuff I’m not super worried about and potentially even cool with

The rotation

The only team that’s gotten better production from their pitching through the first two weeks of 2026 is the Yankees. The Mariners saw up close what that staff looks like. Do not care for it.

This Mariners’ group—and especially the rotation? Big fan. The starters have been the best in baseball so far.

Between injuries and varying levels of underperformance, the Mariners did not have a great rotation last year. Honestly, they didn’t even really have a good one—just average. By fWAR, they were 14th on the year and 7th in the American League.

If the Mariners can run out a top five rotation and top 10 bullpen, they’ll win a lot of games. They should win a lot of games.

Julio and Cal

Nope. Not gonna do it.

That’s part of this for sure, I cannot and will not worry about the two best players on the Mariners and two of the best players in baseball because if things go sideways with either of these guys, the Mariners are so boned.

There’s also the part where it’s just not going to happen. Dudes have slow starts and Julio always has slow starts, though there’s no guarantee of even that continuing.

Cal, as others have noted, had a start similar to this one just last year. Through 55 plate appearances last season (he’s at 56 PAs this year), his wRC+ was 30 points higher, yes, but he was still rocking an unsightly .184/.286/.347 line.

Almost everyone on the team has to start playing better but as soon as these guys begin playing to their MLB The Show ratings—doesn’t have to be the Finest or Benchmark cards, either, just Live Series—then the entire picture, team-wide, changes quite a bit.

The Automated Ball-Strike system

Gonna be real honest with you—I did not have enough parts for the section on things that are going well or that I’m at least not worried about.

But ABS rocks. I could have and should have done a whole post on why it’s great but I think I can knock it out here in something a little longer than a tweet.

In today’s world, there are no repercussions for people in power. There’s barely even demand for a higher quality of work and better results.

And umps are a good bit like cops. They have little to no interest in being better.

The number of umpires who have ever checked a strike zone plot during or after a game in an effort to improve their craft, you could probably count it on one hand—of a guy who’d lost a couple fingers to a few too many cold pops on the Fourth of July.

To see not only a level of correction but also a form of public reprimand for an authority figure?

As we’ve quickly seen, it’s electric.

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Monitoring the situation

Here’s the stuff that’s in the middle. I’m not worried about it. But I’m not not worried about it.

All the bat speed chatter

If you’re a plugged in Mariners fan, you’ve probably heard something about how Mariners’ bat speeds are down and down big. It’s not nothing and I may dive into the whole thing more analytically but there’s a little bit of sloppy work being done here.

For one, some folks are looking at this year’s average team bat speed and comparing it to last year’s—the entire year’s—average team bat speed. That’s suuuuch sloppy work, even with a new metric. It’s not a completely different group of guys but it’s not the same, either.

Then there’s people comparing early swing speeds to guys’ full-season averages. Yes, the metric does supposedly stabilize quickly but there are guys with a history of starting slow and then speeding up, including at least one of their best players (*cough,* Julio).

The platoons

They make so much sense in theory. Get one guy who’s good facing righties and get another guy who mashes lefties and, boom, you made yourself an All-Star from one fringe regular and one veteran journeyman.

Ah, if only it were that simple.

Someone on Twitter recently compared it to a parlay, such an apt comparison I was surprised I hadn’t thought of it earlier but I also do not gamble.

It doesn’t seem that crazy when you need just this team to win and only that guy to post his averages and the this total to be smidge over what you’d expect it to be. It can and should happen.

But when you need all of them to hit? It gets dicey.

The Mariners, as constructed, need—or would like to have—all of Luke Raley, Dominic Canzone, Rob Refsnyder and Victor Robles be solid Major League contributors in their expected roles.

That’s quite the quad of guys—or at least the trio of Mariners—who have been anything but consistent in their careers.

The Mariners’ roster, as constructed, was built for this group to go four-for-four on effectiveness.

We will see.

ABS challenge strategy

Putting this here is probably overly kind because it looks like the Mariners came out in 2026 with next to no plan whatsoever on what they wanted to do with ball-strike challenges.

In the second series of the year, the contrast between the Yankees’ operation and what the Mariners were doing was staggering. This is a little inside baseball, literally, but it made me think of how the Yankees were one of the first teams to stop listing their front office staff on their website because they had such an ungodly number of Baseball Ops staffers and didn’t want people poaching them.

And that isn’t a slight against the Mariners’ group, which punches above its weight and then some, but these gigantic clubs like the Yankees and Dodgers will throw resources at everything.

But maybe resources aren’t the issue, I don’t know. Regardless of cause, the results are all that matter and the Mariners have been sloppy here.

By Baseball Savant’s ABS leaderboard, which charts out “net overturns more than expected by a team seeing identical pitches,” the Mariners are 22nd overall. When you look specifically at how the hitters are doing—and these numbers do include challenges for and against the Mariners—nobody is seeing fewer net overturns than the M’s.

This can change. Maybe it’s all noise. But right now it looks sloppy and like a lack of preparation.

Hey, timely transition.

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Yeah I’m worried by or annoyed about this stuff

I gotta wrap this up and negativity doesn’t play that well anyway so let’s rip through this.

Dan. Dannnnnnn.

Dan Wilson is managing like a catcher from the ‘90s who’s a franchise hero despite meh on-field performance and has never competitively managed a team in his life.

Crazy how that works.

If you had hoped last year’s Game 7 debacle may have scared him straight and forced him to modernize his in-game management, particularly as it comes to the bullpen, you should probably stop doing that.

There’s a lot going on here, a number of things to point to, but Wilson’s feel just has not been good.

I think first of game two of the season, when he had Gabe Speier hot as Eduard Bazardo walked a pair of batters in front of left-handed hitting Steven Kwan. Same as last October, Wilson was burned by his faith in Bazardo with Kwan singling in the go-ahead run.

So if in-game management isn’t his thing, it has to be something else. Theoretically.

One of the things I always liked about Scott Servais was how (stepback 2019 team aside), he never let his teams go in the tank. There were clubs, solid clubs, who could’ve folded after tough April, May and June stretches but they never did. He brought ‘em back.

Hopefully this early run is just random noise but, if it isn’t, we’re going to see here soon if Dan Wilson has the ability to pull back on the rudder when his clubhouse needs him to.

There’s a reason teams run high payrolls

It’s redundancy. It’s the margin for error. It’s adding another star even though you might not need one because a star is better than a regular and a regular is better than a bench guy.

Imagine if this team was so talented Brendan Donovan didn’t have a guaranteed spot on the field every day—or if Randy Arozarena was largely a platoon player.

The Mariners are gunning for their first World Series championship with a below average Opening Day payroll. They opened the year 17th, down from last year.

Another $40 million or so to put them at least on the level of other American League contenders would mean another star. It’d mean not leaning so heavily on Julio and Cal.

It’d mean a lot.

Money isn’t the solution to every problem, but it can sure paper over a lot of them.

The defense is not great

By Baseball Savant’s Fielding Run Value, the Mariners are the fifth-worst defensive unit in baseball. By Outs Above Average, they’re second-worst. By Defensive Runs Saved, they’re sixth-best—which, wtf.

The optimist would probably say the truth lies somewhere in the middle but the realist who’s watched this team day-in and day-out would surely disagree.

It isn’t as if this is necessarily surprising. We’ve seen it swing games for them with balls going under Leo Rivas’s glove at third, Connor Joe throwing a key double play ball to the backstop, Randy Arozarena letting lazy flies get behind him and so on.

It’s just—whew, it’s a tough way to lose games. It’s awful to watch.

Maybe Colt Emerson helps, eventually, by shoring up third and moving Brendan Donovan to a corner outfield spot and getting Randy, occasionally, out of one. Maybe. Maaaaybe.

Thing is, you wouldn’t expect the Mariners to be a good defensive team and they just aren’t one.

It’s obnoxious.

Let’s start winning some baseball games, huh?

Here’s to a pleasant Friday evening at the ballpark.

Go M’s.

It almost feels too early for these teams to be facing off. Shouldn’t this be the game that’s on Sunday Night Baseball—and not just streaming, either?

Seattle fans want more than metrics because the numbers have told them to Believe Big before—and even after that, old school Sports Illustrated said it was Time to Believe again.

Right now, I’m not asking you to believe anything you can’t plainly see: this was the first of at least six meetings between two teams with legitimate championship aspirations. To say they’re the American League’s two best clubs would not be a stretch.

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In terms of who’s expected to be going at it come October, it’s the Mariners and the Yankees and then everyone else.

The Yankees are probably thinking “Jesus, if we have to come back here in the fall, is it going to be this goddamn cold?!”

And you know what guys, it might be. It probably won’t be—you could wear shorts to the one ALDS a few years ago. But it could be.

How’s it feel when it’s 40 degrees out and Luís Castillo is running 95 miles an hour in on your knuckles? Probably not great?

Guess so.

The pitching duel most underscored the quality of the two clubs. Castillo is the Mariners’ five, even after they subbed in a different four. Ryan Weathers, quite similar, is the Yankees’ four after multiple injuries ahead of him and he touched 99 from the left side.

Both sides have Dudes—in the lineups and the rotations.

The Mariners have Dudes even when they aren’t starting their best Dude.

But there he was, of course he was, in a couple enormous spots.

Guys aren’t going to bat 1.000 in spots like that, even your best guys—as much as their biggest detractors want them to. That just isn’t how out works.

In a game like that, coming off the bench on a night as cold as any, .500 works just fine, though.

For the club as a whole, maybe that’s the last time they see .500 for a while. Or ever.

It’s fun to daydream.

As another Mariners-centric Seattle voice would say—win a game, win a series.

Logan Gilbert vs. Max Fried tonight at the ol’ ball yard.

Go M’s.

Same as ever, I don’t know what all I want this blog to be. But I do know I want it to be, in part, the things I think and see as I follow the ball club. So this is that.

For the third consecutive year, Emerson Hancock was left to understand that he wasn’t a Major League starter but the Mariners needed him to be one for at least a little bit.

Two seasons ago, he filled in for Bryan Woo when the righty went down with an inflamed elbow. Last year, George Kirby’s ailing shoulder thrust Hancock into the back end of the Mariners rotation.

Officially, the anniversary of his 2025 debut would be tomorrow, the 31st—but spiritually, it’s today, Hancock taking the ball for a Monday lid-lifter against the Tigers after the M’s faced the A’s for four on the opening weekend.

He opposed Jackson Jobe in a 6:40 p.m. start, a chilling 47-degree evening much like tonight will be.

Emerson Hancock’s ERA after that start: 81.00.

Eighty-one.

Double, single, home run, single, walk, fly out, single, single, double.

Dan Wilson went out to get him—and, presumably, called him into his office a few hours later for a solemn meeting. One start, one 15-minute start and it was back to Tacoma.

Slightly different vibe last night.

The six no-hit innings were absurd. The nine strikeouts were a career best. His 12 swinging strikes were the third-most he’s ever posted.

It’s real early but the models confirm progress.

I’ll be honest, I’m just wading into this stuff. But I love metrics where nerds I trust, nerds who are waaaaay smarter than me, take important stuff and distill it down into a relatively easy-to-understand model—ideally like wRC+ where 100 is average and you go up or down from there.

In this case, it’s pitching—a big part of it is having good stuff and locating your stuff.

Thus, you have Pitching+, Stuff+ and Location+ from FanGraphs—all modeled off real-world Statcast data.

In short:

Pitching+ is one of three models that, along with Stuff+ and Location+, attempts to look at the process underlying a pitcher’s performance in order to remove some of the noise that can be present when looking at on-field results.

The sample is so small but here:

• Stuff+

  • Last night: 99

  • Career: 90

• Location+

  • Last night: 116

  • Career: 100

• Pitching+

  • Last night: 110

  • Career: 90

I should say, this isn’t the first time in his career he’s ever posted numbers like this—his last start of 2025, a four-inning stint vs. the Rockies, he notched a 116 Stuff+ and 128 Pitching+. This was after he’d transitioned to relief and began some of the work that led to what we saw last night so maybe there’s something there.

He also posted similarly good numbers (114 Pitching+) in a 1.2-inning relief outing vs. the Angels earlier last September.

So we’ll see. It’s one start—one outstanding, dominant start that represents the best he’s ever looked in a Mariners uniform.

We didn’t see the velo gains Hancock posted in spring training but maybe we will when the gametime temperature climbs out of the 40s.

Either way, if the Mariners receive in 2026 a truly transformed Emerson Hancock, that isn't an insignificant development.

What happens when Bryce Miller is healthy and ready to go? Do they send Hancock to the minors? They couldn’t possibly do something with Luis Castillo and his contract could they?

I have no idea.

One, these things tend to sort themselves out, for better and usually (gulp) worse.

But if Hancock is truly a middle-of-the-rotation starter instead of a swingman #6 type or worse, the Seattle Mariners are a more talented team than they were previously.

How they deploy it matters, yes, but the offseason adage holds true here: add talent and figure out the rest later.

Right now, Emerson Hancock looks more talented than he has at any point in his Mariners career.

Good for him.

How do you follow up the best season in franchise history? You do it again.

There’s no other choice, no other option—no outcome that’d satisfy besides the first pennant in franchise history and the second downtown Seattle parade of 2026.

In March, it feels a bit like a burden. That will happen when the prior year’s team put the champagne in champagne problems.

That was the most fun I’ve ever had watching sports. I know that’s not as good as it gets but it’s as good as it’s gotten for me—even with a couple Packers titles.

There’s nothing like baseball. No place like the ballpark.

While there’s nothing like baseball, there’s especially nothing baseball when you’re a Mariners fan and the Mariners are good. Great even.

Will the 2026 M’s be great? Who knows. We’re a long way from knowing that—and even further from when it truly matters.

A couple years ago on Opening Day I titled my post “Enjoy the enjoyment” and that’s what I’d say here had I not already written it there. Er—

Regardless.

With such grand aspirations for this team, the expectations as lofty as they’ve ever been, it’s more important than ever to reside in the present and move at a contemplative pace.

Enjoy the richness of it all.

In Field of Dreams, watching now as I do every Opening Day Eve, Doc Graham has this outstanding monologue on the richness of the game when he’s asked, in his doctor’s office in Chisholm, Minnesota, for his one baseball wish.

Like most and perhaps all the standout lines in the movie, it’s taken directly from W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe—the book the film is based on. As such, we’ll go with the OG version, should there be any differences.

Well, you know I never got to bat in the major leagues. I'd like to have my chance just once, to stare down a big league pitcher, to stare him down and just as he goes into his wind-up, wink, make him think you know something he doesn't. That's what I wish. A chance to squint at the sky so blue that it hurts your eyes just to look at it. To feel the tingle in your arms as you connect with the ball, to run the bases, stretch a double into a triple, and flop face-first into third, wrap your arms around the bag. That's my wish, Ray Kinsella, that's my wish. And is there enough magic out there in the moonlight to make this dream come true?

If you’re reading this, you never got to bat in the major leagues either.

But there’s still your first glimpse of the field when you get in the building on Opening Day. There’s the cold $5 beer and a Value Dog on a nothing Tuesday in May. Imagine the supreme joy of realizing, with the M’s holding a commanding mid-inning lead after Cal and Julio homers, the setting sun reflecting off downtown as it slides towards the Olympic Mountains, you are at the quintessential midsummer Friday ballgame.

And then there’s standing all night at the biggest Mariners game of your life. Multiple times in a week.

We’ll get there, when the games mean everything, but you do have to appreciate the parts when they don’t because those still mean a lot, too—if not World Series odds, in life.

Speaking of those odds, though—they’re pretty good.

I’m not going to specifically call up the details because the words on the page just look pretty tacky but at multiple big sportsbooks, the Mariners had more money on put on them to win the American League than anyone else.

It feels preposterous, in both the long- and the short-view.

The Mariners—our Seattle Mariners?—are broadly expected to go right back to the American League Champion Series and win it. Sure.

These things do happen, though. Teams reach the heights they do because they have good groups of players and when those good groups of players stay together, as they do in baseball more than most sports, they reach those heights again.

The weird one I always think of is the Kansas City Royals. Even the most flash-in-the-pan title team you can think of first lost the World Series in 2014—narrowly beating the Mariners for a playoff spot—before their run to a ring in 2015.

Since 2000, there have been ten teams who reached the World Series after losing the prior year in the ALCS or NLCS.

Houston has three of them, including one in the NL—following the monster Carlos Beltran 2004 playoffs with a pennant in 2005 behind Roger Clemens and Roy Oswalt. A decade later, they had it happen a couple times during their string of seven-straight ALCS appearances.

Still, I think more of a team like the 2016 Cubs—chasing their sustained Wrigleyville reawakening of a 2015 playoff run with going all the way in 2016.

This Mariners team is battle-tested and they have some of the best players in the game at or beginning their primes.

The bettors love them, analysts love them, the computers love them—we love them.

How many Mariners Hall of Famers are on this team? Cal, Julio and proooobably J.P., right? Perhaps Andrés Muñoz? Luis Castillo could be close. Josh Naylor had an idyllic start to what stretches out now, contractually, as a five-year stint in a Mariners uniform.

A title would tip scales for these guys and others.

Of course, they do already have one literal Mariners Hall of Famer—the skipper.

Where we last left off, he cost the Mariners their season. The best season they ever had.

To surrender the lead and the game and the whole damn year without your best reliever on the mound? Throwing the dude the other guys saw for two innings the night prior?

It’s not unforgivable—but there’s only one thing that will forgive it.

The Mariners can get there, they’re better-suited to do so than almost every team in baseball. But, like the one running through the manager’s office, there are fault lines that could either seal back up or crack wide open.

Go back and tell someone in November that Leo Rivas and Cole Young would be the up-the-middle tandem sandwiched between Cal Raleigh and Julio Rodríguez on Opening Day. They’re already down a starter and, by the sounds of it, won’t seen him for close to a month.

I know it’s not what folks are thinking too much about now—or maybe it is with the face value on those Opening Day tickets?—but the Mariners also went competitively backwards on payroll, sinking to 17th to open this year after starting last year 15th.

I know it’s tough to find true glaring holes with this roster but this team, in this era, should’ve had the resources available over the last few seasons to squeeze another bonafide star into this lineup. Or maybe signing an upside starter this winter would open the door to being creative and aggressive with an arm in or around the rotation?

Am I picking nits? Sure. Definitely.

I do so because this is a, perhaps thee, golden age of Mariners Baseball.

This is our moment in the sun—a moment that could and should last for years.

And that’s all the more reason to savor, to hold in your cheek like a fistful your favorite seeds, the small moments and memories that comprise this grander one.

In six months, the Mariners may play in the World Series. And I know where I’ll be before the first game played in Seattle—it’s the same place I’ll be tomorrow.

I’ll be at a go-to seedy dive bar with people I care about. Just as I was before my last game last year, Polanco’s ALDS winner.

I love baseball. I love it so much. Because it’s so much more than just the game, it’s everything around it.

I can’t wait to be at that bar tomorrow, I’ve been thinking about it all week.

Cheers to the 2026 Mariners.

96-77. Back-to-Back American League West Champions. American League Champions.

World Series Champions.

Go M’s.

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The proportional theory of time is one of those things that makes a lot of sense when you hear it for the first time and then you choose to not think too much about it ever again. The passing of time speeding up as you get older is, uh, quite brutal.

Except for right now. And this particular subject, the approach of baseball season.

It’s Friday afternoon. And if your weekend planning bleeds into keeping an eye on next week, you are already logistically planning around M’s games again.

I swear these guys just started playing practice games. Now the last one’s on Monday.

Hell yes.

Let’s riff on a few things.

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Logan Gilbert is your Opening Day starter

I was talking about this with my brother the other day because that’s most of what the “Opening Day starter” label is good for, just conversation fodder. Outside of rare exceptions, you talk about it like it’s something you care about but it really isn’t.

Even so, it wasn’t the way I thought they’d go.

There’s a couple different ways teams can do this when they don’t have the clear and obvious Dude like the Mariners did with Félix for all those years.

You can just go with the guy who was the straight-up best the year before, which is where I assumed the Mariners would go and pick Bryan Woo. He would’ve been their top starter in the Postseason had he been available—and maybe that lack of availability is a factor here.

The other option is to you can treat it more like a title that has to be claimed by clearly exceeding the performance and stature of the guy who most recently possessed the role. And that feels like how the Mariners arrived at Logan Gilbert.

It could also just be that he’s older. And you don’t want to take this honorary role away from the guy closest to free agency.

I don’t know. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. We’re going to see everyone but Bryce Miller in the opening four-game set vs. Cleveland.

Can’t wait.

Yeah, this shortstop situation is a little awkward

And it isn’t going to get less awkward anytime soon.

Barring a rapid recovery combined with aggressive rostering, J.P. Crawford will not be in the lineup on Opening Day. He probably won’t even be in the building.

For those who missed it, Crawford’s got a bum shoulder this spring and while a trip recent to a surgeon didn’t lead to a daunting prognosis, time’s running out—probably already is out—to be ready for the start of the season.

Here’s what Dan Wilson said about Crawford’s recent medical check-in:

“Everything seemed to be pretty congruent with what we talked about here,” manager Dan Wilson said. “It was recommended to have an injection, so he did get that. He’ll be down for a couple of days and then start ramping back up. So we’re excited to hear that. It’s about as good of news as possible.”

He’s played three games at shortstop so far this spring, won’t play another until tomorrow at the earliest and the club heads up to Seattle on Monday night.

Crawford will almost certainly staying in Arizona, playing minor league spring training games, to make up for lost reps.

For a dude entering the last year of his contract and playing the same position as the organization’s best prospect, it isn’t what you want.

Reporting, including in the article linked to above, indicates it will probably be Leo Rivas filling in for Crawford in the likely event he misses time.

That would then slide either Ryan Bliss or Miles Mastrobuoni up the depth chart and onto the active roster.

But if it’s extended time that Crawford misses? Or even if he doesn’t, but it’s something that nags him—as injuries tend to do as guys age? Colt Emerson will be lurking.

It was already going to be a story regardless, and this potentially pushes the pace of the timeline.

But then again, he did experience this exact thing in 2023 and went on to have the best season of his career with 4.9 fWAR.

So who knows?

I’m bullish on Luke Raley

Bounceback candidates don’t come much more obvious than this. Honestly, we’re still a week away from Opening Day and talking about Raley being a potential X-factor for the 2026 M’s already feels a bit played.

But here—

So far in 44 spring training plate appearances, Luke Raley has put six balls in play with exit velocities exceeding 105 mph. It’s the exact same tally of 105+ mph batted balls as he had across 216 plate appearances in 2025.

In speaking with Shannon Drayer recently, Raley shared what most assumed—that the impact of the oblique injury that knocked him out for two months extended beyond his time on the Injured List.

“I’m not going to be one that just like lays it down and quits. But yeah, it was challenging,” he said. “When I came back from the oblique, it just never felt right. Didn’t feel like myself. And especially when you’re hitting, like a millisecond makes a huge difference. So it’s like, was my bat speed a little slower? Like, what was going on? Could I not make the move I wanted to make? I’ve tweaked a hamstring or a quad and you come back from that and it doesn’t affect your swing. It’s the oblique. You can’t do anything. It affects your running. It affects your throwing, your swinging. It doesn’t matter. You use it in everything you do.”

I actually hadn’t seen this quote until researching this post, but something that’s stuck with me on Raley since I saw it was a clip from Chris Long’s Green Light podcast.

Different sport, yeah, but similar talk on the nagging nature of oblique injuries.

@greenlightpodcastSam Darnold reportedly hasn’t thrown a football since Thursday, here’s what Beau had to say about his experience with an oblique injury: @BetMGM #seahawks #samdarnold #seattle #seattleseahawks

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Actually, let’s go back to what Luke Raley said—alluding to bat speed. Here’s a chart with data Luke has almost certainly already seen.

It’s important to note the data for April is pre-oblique strain. So it was down from the high at the end of 2025. But, it was in line with how he started 2024 and instead of ticking up as the season progressed, it went the other direction.

Factor this in with the player Raley has shown to be—solid runner, solid defender, absolute gamer—and you’re looking at a player with a chance to be a significant contributor for a very good club.

Sooooo, Cal Raleigh and the WBC

As I’ve made very clear on this publication, I did not want Team USA to win the World Baseball Classic.

I assumed, as part of that, it would mean rooting against Cal Raleigh—one of my favorite baseball players of all time—in some big spots. Turns out I was wrong, thanks to the brilliant strategery from Mark DeRosa.

Maybe this is a stretch but there’s some poetic justice in it all.

When you sign on with these guys with a limited worldview and some pretty backwards thinking, that’s going to manifest itself in ways that go beyond who he pulls in for pregame speeches.

It isn’t a coincidence that, when you’re arguing with someone on social about some new-age baseball stuff, you go to their profile and it’s a bunch of the most abhorrent political takes you’ll ever see.

Close-minded anti-evidence people are just going to be that way in multiple settings.

And that leads to stuff like benching a guy who hit 60 home runs last year because he’s hitless over three games. Like, you’re gonna let Will Smith face a righty late when you have Cal on your bench? Alright, dude.

So of course Cal hits an absolute piss missile in his first game back in Mariners camp.

@behindthetridentNo baseball hit in 2025 at 110 MPH at 30 degrees was anything other than a home run! #seattle #mariners #mlb #springtraining #peoriaaz @Seattle Mariners @Athletics

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See you on Opening Day, big man.

Go M’s.

I want you to try to remember the most competitive casual sporting event you ever played in. Or try to remember the most casual competitive event.

Maybe it was like an intense rec softball work league with the same teams over and over, including some you didn’t like. Or maybe it was an annual golf scramble put together by your local dive bar. Could be Seattle’s Monday Night Pinball league and one of your buddies plays on the other team your go-to spot hosts.

Before a big game, match or whatever, this guy you know on the other team says “Hey man, I know it’s a little weird, but please just don’t try to like shake my hand or dap me up. We decided as a group we’re not doing it so just, like, please…”

You would ABSOLUTELY go to shake this person’s hand. No question. I’d try so hard to shake their hand. And then after the game when asked I’d tease them about it some more.

Were I just knocked out of a tournament I cared a lot about by the team I thought was obnoxious? I might take it a smidge too far. Happens.

It’s kiiiiind of funny to have written a whole post about why I can’t do it with Team USA and the whole schtick before this whole saga went down.

That felt pretty political and it was intended to be pretty political, noting the unavoidable intersection of baseball nationalism and American militarism.

Randy Arozarena, the showman he is, just lit the fuse on a flare illuminating this whole thing and I can’t blame him for walking away afterwards. Because it is funny for how dumb it all is.

He’s back in camp and has issued his own statement. Once Cal’s back in camp, after whatever transpires over the next few days, I’m sure they’ll get over it. They’re big boys.

Cal’s original responding statement, for those that missed it, came with him wearing a T-shirt, seen above, featuring text from the front of a Claymore mine.

Robert O’Neill, the former Seal Team 6 member who makes his money now going around claiming he killed Osama bin Laden even though he didn’t, only shooting his dead body in the forehead enough for his skull to split open and brain matter to spill out, was wearing a similar shirt when he spoke in the Team USA clubhouse before their game against Canada.

Josh Naylor, being a normal dude who you would want to hang out with and not someone who would, say, describe people he didn’t like as “boys” he would make his “concubine”, kept the bit going during the game itself.

Because how can you not??? Look at these guys! They’re so deadly serious they brought in a troop to talk about how to really be deadly serious all while their manager loses track of what games they’re supposed to win and their pitching coach sounds wholly unprepared for the job at hand.

To borrow a term the redass baseball types enjoy using, it’s just so much eyewash. By being anti-showy, it’s showy in the worst way.

And it’s not what I, at least, want baseball to be. It’s not how I see baseball nor how I think most folks do.

I alluded to it in my last post on this, how the romanticized humble roots from which this game springs to life are now better found outside the country that originally authored ‘em.

Take The Players Tribune for what it is, but liked this bit from Fernando Tatis Jr. and whoever at TPT who ghost-wrote it:

I knew I was blessed to be raised with such a deep love for baseball, and the only way I knew to honor the game was to keep playing better, playing harder, and playing with the type of joy and excitement that’s hard to find anywhere except at those neighborhood ballfields in the D.R.

That type of baseball — our baseball — is unique. It’s not small. It’s not quiet. It’s a whole town shutting down to watch a game. It’s radios blasting Merengue típico between innings. It’s kids playing until the sun is so low that they can’t even see the ball anymore

When I was a kid, I was bad at baseball. Stopped playing in like third or fourth grade. I played a lot of catch before and after that, though. Even now still.

When I think about baseball in my childhood, I don’t think about games but of playing catch with a friend of mine in the park across the street from my house. His name was Al Beseler, he originally lived in the house next door to my grandma’s and he had a glove that was either his dad or his grandfather’s, one from the ‘40s.

He had a hell of an arm, too. I think it carried his high school team to state after our family had moved out to Seattle.

But years before that, we’d be out in that park—La Crosse, Wisconsin’s Weigent Park—playing long toss until it was dark, which in mid-summer was close to nine o’clock.

I’d wake up the next morning with my arm sore as hell, like a fast-pitch beer-league softballer who’d gone six strong.

I always liked that super old mitt Al had. I thought it’d be cool to play catch with and I don’t think I ever did.

I follow this guy on Twitter—or maybe it’s this guy’s business?—Jimmy Lonetti of DJ Glove Repair out of Minneapolis and I saw him post a refurbished glove he was selling that looked a bit like Al’s, or at least reminded me of his.

I reached out, asking if it was still for sale, eventually sending over my address but flaking on the conversation before we talked price and payment.

Still, a week or two later, a package I wasn’t expecting—and in it, the Hawthorne 60-4068 with Stan Musial’s signature branded into the palm.

I happily paid the very reasonable Paypal invoice that showed up in my inbox the same day.

The glove’s still my go-to. It’s in my bike bag right now after a cruise around the north side yesterday.

That is baseball.

It’s good to have love for the game, and that love is made better by sharing it with others—by reveling in it.

Life’s too short, this world is too tough to make more hostile by choice.

I’m sure Fernando Tatís’s San Pedro de Macorís is going to shut down tonight. Julio’s Loma de Cabrera, too.

The whole country, really.

Because what a game. This may mark the greatest collection of talent to play a competitive baseball game…ever?

How can you not enjoy it? How can you not smirk at the wonder of it all?

I hope Julio does go to shake Cal’s hand tonight. Because it’d be fun—and funny.

And then I hope he hits a fastball from Paul Skenes 450 feet to deep left.

Got some good memories in that building.

Something like this perhaps?

Monday morning began with the markets down significantly on the back of the continued global fallout from the United States opening up another unprovoked war in the Middle East. And the Dominican Republic played Israel in a 9am Pacific ballgame.

Dallas native Ryan Prager, a consensus non-prospect in the Texas Rangers system, donned the blue cap with the Star of David and got the start for the country the United Nations Human Rights Commission officially stated committed genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

Facing a lineup as talented and joyous as any ever assembled to play a competitive game of baseball, Prager went 1.2 innings, walking four and giving up five runs.

A Fernando Tatís grand slam was the killshot.

I like rooting for the Dominican Republic in the WBC. It’s honestly not a new thing for me, either.

But that doesn’t mean it has any real validity either, whatever that means in a context like this. I have no legitimate ties to the country whatsoever, if that’s helpful or illustrative in any way.

I like the way they play the game, and I like the players who are playing it.

Dominicans helped write the history of this era of Mariners Baseball

It goes back to Robinson Canó, unimpacted by the events that cut the legs out from under a Hall of Fame legacy. I still love that dude.

When he first signed in Seattle, I consumed every piece of Canó content I could find, highlighted by this two-part program from YES Network where they followed Robbie back to his hometown in the Dominican.

A mini-documentary from Vice Sports and New Balance further highlighted the humble nature of this baseball hotbed. It’s pretty damn good if you want to save it for later on YouTube, but the opening seconds give you a quick look at a place producing more Major Leaguers than anywhere outside the United States.

So much of baseball is tied up in the romanticism of the sport, the grain-rich imagined memories of kids playing in the streets and on sandlot fields. In American lore, it’s Benny “the Jet” Rodriguez on VHS.

In reality, it’s players like Robinson Canó in places like San Pedro de Macorís.

This is a country with a population on the level of the state of Ohio and a GDP between Idaho and New Hampshire—and they’re producing some of this generation’s very best ball players.

Hell, look at recent Mariners history. Like I was saying, that’s where it starts for me.

The 2017 Dominican Republic WBC team had Canó and Jean Segura up the middle, with Nelson Crúz splitting time between the outfield and DH.

Just that year’s roster alone is peppered with guys who were Mariners prior, present or after that WBC—all soliciting varying degrees of positive fan sentiment.

Fernando Rodney was coming out of the ‘pen for them in 2017. Alex Colomé, too. Remember him? The M’s would trade for him a few months after the tournament.

Carlos Santana was, then, another future Mariner on the squad. Adrian Beltre played his last WBC that year.

It’s crazy. I’m sure this is true for a lot of teams but the Mariners’ recent organizational history is steeped in Dominican heritage.

Like the sweet-swinging second baseman that preceded him by a handful of years, Jorge Polanco is also from San Pedro de Macorís.

A mural-sized depiction of his walk-off winner over Detroit, perhaps the signature moment of the organization’s most special season, now resides in the team’s clubhouse.

The ace and signature acquisition of 2022 but now a rock-steady #5, Luis Castillo is from Baní, Dominican Republic—a coastal town of about 150,000.

It was there, early in his minor league career, he saw Pedro Martinez and asked him desperately if he could demonstrate how he threw his signature changeup. Thanks in part to that chance encounter, Castillo now has a $108 million contract to his name.

But, speaking of money, let’s get back to Julio.

It starts with Julio

While people with the IQ of a truck axle chirp on Twitter about Rodríguez’s lengthy contract, Julio this winter used money from it to open a robust sports complex in his hometown of Loma de Cabrera.

“This field is where everything started for me,” Rodríguez told Daniel Kramer of Mariners.com. “Being able to give back to Loma de Cabrera and create a place where kids can feel proud, feel safe and believe in themselves means everything. I want them to know there are no limits to what they can achieve.”

As much as I love what a Dominican Republic win would say, a figurative sports-centric pushback against American belligerence, there’s a more on-field reason to root for Julio and his squad.

It centers on a now-tired question: can you imagine if Julio Rodríguez played as well in the first half of the season as he does in the second?

Through his first four seasons, here’s Julio’s combined second-half line: .297/.351/.552 for a 154 wRC+.

That for a full season plus Aaron Judge getting hit by one of Zohran’s free buses and you’re looking at the American League MVP.

I don’t want to say I’d settle for the WBC MVP but you couldn’t ask for a better way for Julio to start his 2026 and continue to assert himself as one of the best players of his generation.

It’s so funny thinking about how the cliché criticism on him was that he wasn’t clutch. It may even persist in certain circles.

If there’s a single neuron in your brain firing in that direction, or even if not, I encourage you to watch the kid’s 2025 Postseason highlights.

Julio Rodríguez: Big-Game Player.

I’ve probably mentioned this before but playing a lot of sports growing up, my dad said two things the most:

• The team that has the most fun wins

• Play like your hair is on fire

That’s Julio. That’s this Dominican Republic squad.

And that’s only part of why I’m out on the United States

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again and again and again: everything is politics. Literally everything.

Whether you want it to be or not.

Choosing not to be political? Using sports as a chance to escape politics? Hey guess what—those are political actions.

I love this line from Hannah Krieg, a reporter whose site The Burner (and accompanying socials) is doing important work in Seattle.

I think there’s a lot of validity to the idea that those who stand opposite to this fascist regime can’t surrender the idea of American patriotism and the iconography that surrounds it.

To protest America is American. So is fighting for your neighbors and embracing the cultural melting pot that built this country into the superpower it is today.

I just can’t do it right now, though. I can’t. Maybe you can. Maybe you did with the Olympics and that continues here. I don’t fault you. It is what it is, I guess.

But I can’t.

As part of the opening salvo of what’s looking increasingly like another Forever War, the United States fired a Tomahawk missile at a school in Iran, killing 175 people—most of them children.

More than a hundred young souls erased from this plane of existence.

Mothers and fathers sent their little ones off to school the same way many readers of this post have before and those kids never came home, instead smited by an American cruise missile.

Okay—but what does this have to do with baseball?

Folks will say the same across most all of American professional sports: just assume your favorite athletes have the worst politics imaginable and be surprised when they don’t.

Which, sure. I get it.

But after what happened with the Olympic men’s hockey team and with the assumption something similar would or could happen here in baseball should the United States prevail in the WBC, I don’t want to see it.

Maybe it makes me a snowflake.

It certainly makes me into the crying lib (not a lib, though!) a bunch of burner accounts on Twitter already think I am.

But either way, I can’t do it.

I don’t want to see Cal Raleigh at the White House. I don’t want to see him pose for a photo with DJT.

Silly as it is, that could break me—and partially fracture the bond this city has with one of its most beloved stars.

Vamos República Dominicana. Vamos Julio.

God, I love baseball.

I should remember that the first time one of the (three??) lefty relievers is summoned to face a same-handed foe in a big spot and walks him on five pitches.

Nobody’s ever ready for that—if we’re ever ready for that.

I’ve burned this quote before in a spring training post but after a quick search it wasn’t on this blog so I don’t feel bad doing it again. Because it’s Harry Caray and I know he loved baseball, too.

It's the fans that need spring training. You gotta get 'em interested. Wake 'em up and let 'em know that their season is coming, the good times are gonna roll.

There were traces of snow in Seattle earlier this week. First and only snow of the winter, and somewhere in the city it landed on a cherry blossom bud already showing a speck of pink.

It’s supposed to rain for four days straight but today, spring is officially sprung because I’ll be able be able to put a ballgame on in the background of a workday.

I can almost hear Rick and Gary and Shannon and whoever else they have working these early broadcasts. I can almost almost hear Peter Falk from the Princess Bride (and ensuing meme),

“Okay. Alright. Now let’s see—where were we? Ohhhh yes, in the pit of despair.”

It’s weird to think about. When there’s no baseball at all, there’s nothing. When baseball stuff starts happening again, it all comes racing back. There’s some real scar tissue there.

I felt it for the first time, like pressing a lie bump on your tongue against a one of your front teeth, when I heard Dan Wilson say “You can’t get to the World Series with any kind of shortcut…” and recoiled in thought with

“Oh yeah it may not be a shortcut but using Muñoz with five outs to go would’ve been A PRETTY DAMN GOOD ROUTE THERE!”

It’s going to be on folks’ minds. It’s already on folks’ minds.

That’s been a common question circling around camp as I see various media hits—how do you bounce back from that? How do you reset, learn from the experience and push on towards a championship?

Like almost everything, you just gotta take it one day at a time.

Teams do learn from their postseason failures, see up close what it takes to have a truly special season and go about repeating what led them there but correcting whatever halted their climb. Happens quite a bit, actually.

We won’t know if the 2026 Mariners will do that for a very long time. But I do know they play a game almost every single day between now and then.

And it’s going to be a hell of a journey. It always is.

Most fan bases don’t have a team like this right now. They all have hope now but for many that’s all they have.

We have a lot more.

Let the good times roll.

I hope everyone who’s a fan now understands that spring training didn’t always used to be like this. Like, for a bit now the Mariners enter spring training in a spot where we expect them to make the playoffs.

Now here in 2026, we not only expect them to play into October but it would be an absolute disaster if they failed to do so. And the roster matches, for the most part, the team’s ambitions.

You haven’t really lived if you’ve never entered spring training hoping for a Justin Smoak breakout to make your team only respectable. One time, a 36-year-old Mike Sweeney played his way onto a roster that already had a 400-year-old Ken Griffey Jr. on it.

Now the Mariners have a consensus top-15 overall prospect who’s 50/50 at best to make the Opening Day roster in part because the team doesn’t need him quite yet.

Hello, Colt Emerson—the most interesting player in camp.

Taken 22nd overall in the 2023 MLB Draft, Emerson very quickly established himself as not only one of the best players in that class but all of the prospect world.

He now tops out at #4 for Keith Law and The Athletic—this after posting a .285/.383/.458 and 129 wRC+ campaign across three levels, finishing up in Triple-A Tacoma and then the Postseason taxi squad.

And he doesn’t turn 21 until the end of July.

Here’s what we’re watching as he makes his bid for the Opening Day roster.

Can he continue to elevate with authority?

I can’t say for sure I’ve read all or even most of what’s been written on the kid but, to me, Aram Leighton over at Just Baseball has the definitive article on Colt Emerson.

I’ll borrow a couple gifs but you should read the whole piece, which explains a slight swing change led to a big difference in Emerson’s ability to not only sting the baseball but (oohwee) put it in the air.

Through the early part of the season, June 14th to be exact, Emerson had a longer stride and bit of a leg kick.

Here’s some of Leighton’s analysis:

He had a tendency to drift onto his side, causing barrel drag and making it difficult to cover the top of the zone…With the barrel lagging behind his body, it causes the path to often be flatter even when he is barreling balls, sapping his game power.

Starting on June 13th, Emerson ditched the leg kick in favor of a toe tap that has appeared to help him hold his back side more effectively. With his body not crashing forward prior to his swing, it is easier for him to create more barrel depth.

The results don’t lie.

Unsurprisingly, the swing looks about the same now down in Peoria. Both Ryan Divish and Daniel Kramer posted clips from recent BP sessions.

Here’s a swing from Divish’s:

I should’ve said this waaaaaaay earlier in the piece but everything you see at spring training means very little. Practice, games, whatever—it just doesn’t hold a lot of predictability.

That said, if we’re looking for anything we’re looking for skills. Is a player capable of doing something we’d like them to do?

With Emerson, it’s hitting the ball hard in the air. Is he truly the version of himself we saw at the end of 2025?

Spring training cannot do a whole lot to confirm that, but this is what we’re watching—because what we saw at the end of last season looked a lot like a Major Leaguer.

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How (and where) is the defense?

The Mariners’ best prospect is a shortstop. And right now, shortstop is manned by a veteran on the last year of his contract.

This is an awkward situation that’s only going to get more awkward as time goes on.

But let’s start with the Emerson side of this first.

This quote from Jerry Dipoto has been bouncing around socials since it was shared in a piece by Daniel Kramer.

“When we drafted Colt, our expectation was that he would grow into a bigger body and eventually playing himself off of shortstop,” said Jerry Dipoto, Mariners president of baseball operations. “We don't think that's the case at all. He’s refined his body and became an even better shortstop.”

FanGraphs’ Top 100 list—with breakdowns from Eric Longenhagen, Brendan Gawlowski and James Fegan—has an excellent write up on where Emerson’s defense stands now heading into 2026:

Defensively the arrow is up. Fully healthy from the fractured foot that sidelined him during the summer of 2024, Emerson looked much more spry at shortstop in 2025. His range was better, but he’d also progressed on some of the little things, like his footwork around the bag, getting the ball out quicker, and charging more aggressively. His ability to grow in real time is remarkable. More than once, Brendan saw him either misplay something or take an imperfect angle in a game on Tuesday, and then handle the same ball perfectly three days later. It’s this as much as anything driving the defensive projection. We’ve long been skeptical that Emerson would be able to stay at short with his size and speed, and still think there’s a good chance he needs to move to third base at some point, but for now it looks like he can be average or maybe even a tick better there.

Now the awkward part.

You’re not going to like hearing this because it sucks to hear: the advanced metrics say J.P. Crawford is one of the worst defensive shortstops in baseball. At least he was in 2025.

Among 33 shortstops with at least 500 defensive innings at the position, Crawford ranked:

• 32nd in Statcast’s Fielding Run Value

• 25th in Baseball Prospectus’s Deserved Runs Prevented

• 22nd in the the more old school Defensive Runs Saved

Would the Mariners dare to be a bit proactive here, almost certainly improving their run prevention unit by sliding J.P. elsewhere and giving Colt Emerson the starting shortstop job in 2026—starting as soon as Opening Day?

It’s so tough to see given the softer side to roster-building but it’s difficult not to wonder if it’d be best for all parties. Crawford bolsters his versatility before free agency by playing third (where quick hands are more important than range) and, should the kid kick down the door Julio-style, the Mariners get better overall with Emerson at short and Brendan Donovan at his most natural position in the keystone.

It’s relatively unlikely without an injury. It’s extremely unliklely before Opening Day.

But you just never know.

And that’s why it’ll be interesting to see just how good Emerson’s defense looks under the microscope there in Peoria. We’ll see the games but coaches and execs see even more.

And on the games, it’ll be most interesting to see where the M’s choose to deploy Colt.

A lot of times, especially in the early going, there’s a bit of an A-team and a B-team, with the most established veterans considerably more likely to stay home when the team heads elsewhere in the Phoenix Valley for Cactus League play.

Do the Mariners run Emerson out as the ‘starting’ shortstop on the team that doesn’t have Crawford? How does it change as camp progresses? Does he get more time at third? Do we see him at second as much or more than Cole Young?

Would we ever see Crawford play another position as soon as the Cactus League?

I doubt it. But we’ve got a month and a half of fake baseball on tap and we have to talk about something.

We could do a lot worse than another potential franchise cornerstone trying to battle his way on to the Opening Day roster.

Go M’s.

The winter is over. That’s one of my favorite things about Seattle, something my Dad would always say to people when we first moved to the area, that yeah the winters are dark and damp but they start baseball practice in about January or early February

The good weather days start coming with fewer and fewer bad days in-between them and all of a sudden Opening Day is the week after next.

We’re still a long ways from home but the offseason is over. Before we move full bore into spring training storylines, let’s put a quick bow on what should be one of the most pivotal winters in franchise history.

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Let’s set the scene the way we did in our Brendan Donovan post—another week, another projection system that loves your 2026 Seattle Mariners.

It’s PECOTA szn over at Baseball Prospectus and the M’s do not even officially make the Teams PECOTA Likes article because “the Mariners, were very good last year and surprise surprise, they’re also projected to be very good this year.”

How good?

At 93 wins, the Mariners project to be seven wins clear of the Astros in the West, five wins above the AL East’s best (Toronto and New York) and…11 wins worse than the Dodgers.

It says a lot about baseball right now.

Before that, quick recap of the major moves:

• Josh Naylor signed for five years, $92.5 million (full no-trade clause)

• Brendan Donovan acquired from Cardinals for Jurrangelo Cijntje and Tai Peete

• Jose A. Ferrer acquired from Nationals for Harry Ford and Isaac Lyon

• Rob Refsnyder signed for one year, $6.25 million

Because it’s the flavor of the week, what grade would I slap on that?

I’d give the Mariners offseason a B.

Just a regular-old ‘B’.

Why? First off, because it’s my blog and that’s what these words are for. But also because they met expectations. And a ‘B’ is actually pretty good for that.

When the Mariners signed Josh Naylor to kick off not only their offseason but basically all of baseball’s, I wrote the following:

Jerry Dipoto, Justin Hollander and crew are surely already bouncing out of their corner and ready for another round of transacting.

Maybe one year of Tarik Skubal costs less in prospect capital than most expect. Ketel Marte’s out there, too, probably.

Plus, leave it to this front office to conjure something together out of thin air.

They’ve got the time, positioning and prospect armory to do something special. And they should be given every opportunity to do just that.

This should be the golden era of Mariners Baseball. The hardware that’d make it undeniable is closer now than it ever has been.

No Tarik Skubal, no Ketel Marte, nothing you could say was pulled out from the ether.

A trophy and parade are still closer than they’ve ever been—but things sure feel a bit different after the Seahawks marched to a title then through the streets of Seattle.

Obviously, you can’t make someone make a trade. And you can’t trade for players who were never available.

But there are a group of players who are freely available. They’re not always the best value on a dollars per WAR perspective but that’s part of the deal—in pure dollars, they cost more but they don’t cost any players at all.

Yes, Josh Naylor was a free agent before re-signing with the Mariners. But Josh Naylor isn’t an improvement over Josh Naylor and the last time we saw the Seattle Mariners on the field, they sure as hell had Josh Naylor.

In terms of adding to their club, the Mariners took more damage than they dealt in free agency. It’s not unexpected, but it’s a relative bummer nonetheless.

I know it’s a common trope around these parts but it’s a good time to take a look at the ‘ol FanGraphs Payroll Breakdown.

I won’t include the whole list in the screenshot but I do have to include most of it or it wouldn’t have the Mariners.

Yeah dude, 17th. From a contextual standpoint, payroll is actually down from where it was on Opening Day of last year—as the M’s ranked 15th then.

More recently, Baltimore shot past the Mariners with their signing of Chris Bassitt to bolster a rotation that badly needed help. Another noteworthy team: the Detroit Tigers, who have launched themselves into the top ten in payroll, a full $45 million clear of the Mariners.

The M’s should be considerably better than Detroit but imagine how much better than everyone in the American League the Mariners could be if they had resources on the level of the Tigers (???).

Pick a player.

Like, Alex Bregman’s not perfect but imagine what a luxury it’d be to have him locked in at third with Donovan anchored at second but ready to be pushed all over the diamond by whichever one of Colt Emerson or Cole Young wins the broken-pool-cue fight.

Oh no, now Colt Emerson might be taking J.P. Crawford starting job at short because Cole Young is also good? And now there are really quality players sliding over to DH?

Sounds like a great club.

The 2026 Mariners may yet be a great club. They truly are in an incredible position, perhaps a better one than they entered any of their other 49 seasons.

Even so, one thing is clear about the game today: there’s really only one MLB team that’s truly gunning it for a title.

The Mariners will look to be the best of the one that aren’t. And then take the Dodgers in seven.

We’re on to spring training.

Go M’s.