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.

Jerry Dipoto will tell you what he’s going to do. He’ll tell you a lot of things, actually, with varying degrees of specificity.

There are certain times, though, when he speaks in a certain way, that you know something is about to go down. Saturday at FanFest was one of those times.

Vintage Jer.

Right off the top of his appearance on a live edition of the Hot Stove Show, when asked only about his thoughts as spring training approaches, this was part of his answer.

…there's one more move that we feel like is in us and that we want to make. And we've been grinding hard for the last, you know, handful of days to see if we can bring it through.

In his second question, only on the differences he saw from the end of last year to the beginning of this one, he squeezed this gem in.

I do hope that there's one more player coming along for the ride that might not be in a Mariner uniform just yet.

Ken Rosenthal has a fun story in The Athletic on where Dipoto and Justin Hollander were when the trade was finally consummated but I can tell you with about 97 percent confidence this deal was most of the way home when Dipoto gave that interview on Saturday.

He knew what he had and what he has is a good move for a good team.

IN: 2B/3B/OF Brendan Donovan,

OUT: 3B Ben Williamson (to Tampa Bay); SHP Jurrangelo Cijntje (#7 Mariners prospect per FanGraphs); OF Tai Peete (#12 prospect); Competitive Balance Round B pick (No. 68 overall)

Let’s walk through a few things.

The player

On morning of the day the trade was made, FanGraphs released their first playoff odds for the 2026 season. Nobody in the American League had a better chance of playing October baseball.

Surprise, surprise—they still don’t.

We talked about in the post on free agency and the same is true here: every single win the Mariners can tack on to their already-strong projected total matters so much.

A win in April is the same as a win in September but Mariners fans are well aware the 91st win is worth a lot more than the 87th.

Brendan Donovan may not be a true star, but he adds wins and he adds talent—and the Mariners will never have enough of either.

By now, you probably already have a strong sense for the player so I won’t dive super deep. FanGraphs has a great writeup on the trade, Baseball Prospectus as well.

I always go to Luke Arkins at the Mariners Consigliere for a good statistical primer on moves like this. He notes, among other things, Donovan’s consistency.

2025: .287 AVG, .353 OBP, .422 SLG, 119 wRC+
Career: .282 AVG, .361 OBP, .411 SLG, 119 wRC+

He also goes on to give some perspective on where those numbers rank across baseball over the last four seasons (quite well) and the company around him (same).

I want to do something similar, but with Mariners. Who’s this guy like, from players we’re familiar with?

We’re looking for, in the relatively modern era of Mariners baseball (2010-on), guys who run a solid average for the modern game, get on base like mad but don’t really slug like crazy. Since players change as they move through their careers, we’ll compare Donovan’s career line to single seasons from M’s.

Here’s some names that pop out. We’ll bring Donovan’s career line down here for context.

• Brendan Donovan, Career: .282 AVG, .361 OBP, .411 SLG, 119 wRC+, 9.1% BB%, 13.5% K%, .129 ISO

• Jean Segura, 2017: .300 AVG, .349 OBP, .427 SLG, 111 wRC+, 6.0% BB%, 14.7% K%, .128 ISO

• Ty France, 2021: .291 AVG, .368 OBP, .445 SLG, 129 wRC+, 7.1% BB%, 16.3% K%, .154 ISO

• Kyle Seager, 2013: .260 AVG, .338 OBP, .426 SLG, 116 wRC+, 9.8% BB%, 17.6% K%, .166 ISO

• Seth Smith, 2016: .249 AVG, .342 OBP, .415 SLG, 111 wRC+, 11.0% BB%, 20.3% K%, .167 ISO

• J.P. Crawford, 2023: .266 AVG, .380 OBP, .438 SLG, 136 wRC+, 14.7% BB%, 19.6% K%, .172 ISO

There are no real perfect matches but we can start to paint a picture. Jean Segura’s 2017 campaign is the closest, particularly as you combine a high OBP with a relatively modest ISO. But as you’ll remember, it wasn’t like the Hitting Machine was swinging a pool noodle.

I don’t know about you, but I’d love 2017 Jean Segura on the 2026 Mariners. Now imagine he swung lefty, struck out less and could play second, third and a little corner outfield at a roughly average rate.

That will play.

As such, keeping Donovan on the field will be all the more important.

I hate to bring it up because it also alluded me until I read it in Luke’s piece but Donovan did finish last year on the Injured List, undergoing sports hernia surgery at the beginning of the offseason.

It’s an injury Mitch Haniger dealt with around multiple other ailments and, before him, Robinson Canó during the pre-2016 offseason.

Canó, 33, produced his best season in a Mariners uniform that year. Whether or not that was without a little extra help in recovery, who’s to say?

Overall, Donovan’s the type of vet this team needs. He’s a high-floor player with two seasons of control whose offensive value comes in ways that continue to diversify a Mariners lineup that’s shifted away from being purely all or nothing.

Imagine facing Donovan in a high-leverage spot late with a man on and Julio and Cal lurking.

Tough sledding.

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The cost

It does not matter. Mostly. The Mariners’ window is now and they needed to get better so they did.

Even so, they did well.

I did find it humorous that, as we all anxiously waited to see the cost, Bob Nightengale was the first to have any part of it—describing the Rays stepping in to snag Ben Williams, presumptive M’s Opening Day third baseman, as “a minor role” in the trade.

Even so, Ben Williamson isn’t nothing. I’m glad he’s not the 2026 Opening Day third baseman but you just never know.

This may be a bad comp—and I had someone I respect say as much—but I look at Ben Williamson as an Evan White-type. Well, very roughly.

He’s a defense-first player at a bat-first position and, while he can hit the ball hard, he does not slug at the Major League level. He doesn’t walk, either.

Williamson, like White a half-decade ago, could be unlocked by a smart team capable of turning those high exit velos into actual production. There was a time when that thought kept White in a Mariners uniform instead of being traded to a team like the Rays.

Now, with Donovan in the fold and multiple other young infielders ready for reps, Williamson is on his way to Tampa.

On Tai Peete—who will join Jurrangelo Cijntje as the only first rounders in the Jerry Dipoto era to not debut with the team—I liked the way Ben Clemens put it at FanGraphs:

Peete is the sort of guy who gets moved to rebuilders from contenders: tooled up, inconsistent, and probably in need a lot of playing time to figure out what’s there.

Finally, you have the #68 overall pick in the draft. Notable players taken in this general vicinity: Ryan Sloan, #55; Ben Williamson, #57; Tyler Locklear, #58; Brandon Williamson, #59; Connor Phillips, #64; Isaiah Campbell, #76; Cal Raleigh, #90.

It’s not nothing. The Mariners have done as well as anyone at turning draft picks into Major League value and, when you largely abandon the free agent market, some of that’s going to have to come in the way of trade.

Basically, the big number here is three. None of these three is likely to be an All-Star on their own but it’s three lottery tickets that could hit and burn you.

As long and Donovan is what the Mariners expect him to be, it shouldn’t matter.

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The outlook

I’ve mentioned it throughout this post and the life of this blog—the Mariners need to, above all else, add talent. It matters little where it goes, within reason, and it’s all the better that Donovan is the type who can fit in many places.

If a guy like Arozarena is a little worn down, Donovan can give him a DH day. If the Mariners just want an everyday second baseman because Colt Emerson is officially Ready to Rock on Opening Day, then they’re set.

With that, let’s go to the lineups, or how I’d do them. We’re going to do a little manifestation and pretend Emerson sets Peoria ablaze a la Julio in 2022.

vs. RHP

1. Brendan Donovan - 2B

2. Julio Rodríguez - CF

3. Cal Raleigh - C

4. Josh Naylor - 1B

5. Randy Arozarena - LF

6. Dominic Canzone - DH

7. Luke Raley - RF

8. J.P. Crawford - SS

9. Colt Emerson - 3B

vs. LHP

1. Rob Refsnyder - DH

2. Julio Rodriguez - CF

3. Cal Raleigh - C

4. Randy Arozarena - LF

5. Josh Naylor - 1B

6. Victor Robles - RF

7. Brendan Donovan - 2B

8. J.P. Crawford - SS

9. Colt Emerson - 3B

The bottom of that vs. LHP lineup needs some help. If Ryan Bliss can pick up some of those ABs, pushing Donovan over to third and Emerson occasionally out of the lineup, that’d be useful.

If there was a player out there on the level of prime Dylan Moore, that’d be ideal but I’d be surprised if a meaningful bench upgrade is coming.

Save us, Michael Arroyo?

No matter what, even if this roster still has holes that could use calking, Donovan does that to another in a significant way.

Prior to the trade, the Mariners were counting on three players in 2026 who, at different points in the 2025 season, played their way out of the lineup: Ben Williamson before the trade deadline, Cole Young a little after that and Dominic Canzone in the ALCS.

Now they’re only counting, to some degree, on two of them. Could be one less in the case of Young.

I want to go back to Clemens at FanGraphs one more time.

Here’s a good way to put this trade:

[The 2025 Mariners] handed 684 plate appearances to the combination of Williamson, Dylan Moore, and Donovan Solano last year, and got an 80 wRC+ and meh defense in the aggregate for their trouble. That’s a Donovan-sized hole that would add something like three wins if filled with the genuine article.

There’s no guarantee the Mariners are getting the “genuine article", as we know all too well (hello, Kolton Wong), but if they do—they’re as good as anyone in the American League.

Now, can they be better than everyone in the American League?

We’ll see.

Go M’s.

The Seattle Seahawks are not my favorite football team. They’re quite the opposite.

Though, the first time I did see my favorite team play in person was here in Seattle against the Hawks. It was an NFC Championship—like today.

I paid more than I’d ever paid for a ticket to a game (still a small fraction of the get-in price today) and had, no exaggeration, a bottom-five experience in my entire life.

I’m sure, however, Hawks fans would not mind if today were a little less dramatic than that one, albeit with the same outcome.

For whatever reason, the semifinals in major professional sports often seem the pinnacle of what constitutes the real deal, the actual grind, in the wearying march of fandom.

Even going to the World Series or Super Bowl is incredible—it’s so special. The whole world is focused on you, or at least most of this sports-watching sphere in the case of baseball, and it escapes the orbit of what is normal.

In football, they spend two weeks talking about just the one game. A whole extra week, just for talk, for revelry. So indulgent.

It rules when it’s the team you’ve rooted for your whole life.

I loved how, in the hype video from earlier this week, the Hawks showed Mike Macdonald’s speech in his first team meeting—and, specifically, how he had players craft a mental mural of what the NFC Championship game would look and feel like.

This is the real final, the battle against the rivals you’ve been playing for years—and aiming to rise above. To vanquish.

It’s also what Seattle expects, and reasonably so. This city may not be New York City or Los Angeles but it’s not Kansas City or Cincinnati, either.

We expect our teams to be regularly contending for at least a chance to play for a title. What we saw from the M’s and Hawks this year is what our world-class city deserves.

I often say, or at least used to, “don’t football the baseball.”

You can’t do it. And there’s a history of Mariners fans, myself included, defensively guarding against football-obsessed baseball casuals trying to make someone on the Mariners the quarterback or a series in May be a must-win tone-setter or -changer.

But there is something to the Seahawks better understanding—and, as a result, meeting—the standards the city sets.

Economically, this isn’t the West Coast version of Milwaukee or Minneapolis—two wonderful towns, still, couple of my favorites—but instead the Pacific Northwest version of San Francisco.

Load-bearing parts of the modern world were built right here between the Cascades and the Olympics.

Seattle is what it is because of its people—our talent and our labor. Our investment, too. Both collectively with taxpayer funding for first-class facilities and individually with the ever-rising ticket prices to watch our teams play in them.

Even if you were the biggest homer, someone with ‘12’ in all of your online display names, you weren’t blowing up group chats saying this year’s NFC Championship Game would be played in our fine city.

But here Seattle is—and here the Hawks are.

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I think DVOA is great and if it loved my team with two games from a parade, I’d hold it up like the bible, too. But if you had a dozen people list the top 10 teams of the 21st century I don’t know if the 2025 Seahawks come up five times combined.

Nevertheless, when the other three teams remaining are these uninspiring crop of legendary-QB-in-his-prime-less combatants, the Hawks made sure they were the fourth. And they don’t accept less, not for too long.

Moving on from Pete was, while understandable, not something every team would do—not when they did. And when they did happened to be the exact cycle to land one of the best coaches in the NFL.

Mikey Mac got some defensive coordinators promoted and paid. Hell, the Head Coach of the Miami Dolphins was last seen coordinating a defense that allowed 25 fourth-quarter points to the Packers’ biggest rival in a playoff game.

Speaking of deciding to move on at the exact right time, whew, Sam Darnold.

At the most important and demanding position in professional sports, the Hawks made a move that, while more-than-reasonable now, was positively shat upon at and following its inception.

There’ll be a lot of talk about the 12 Flag Raiser tomorrow and how it’ll probably be Jody Allen. You know me, I dislike owners and the über-wealthy tech industrialists as much as the next comrade—but stuff like this, the decisions above, are why I don’t mind an owner getting a little shine here.

All of this, the results, the final product and the experiences they deliver, they’re on the owner. Are they what produces it? God no.

But they, well, own it. That’s how it works.

Go ahead Jody, wave the flag. Everyone was ready to hate you and many still might but your ball club is favored by a touchdown in the NFCCG.

The last time we heard from Seattle Mariners ownership, it was in a full-page ad in The Seattle Times with a letter signed by John Stanton.

Via @shawn_karmil

/pinch and zoom

The Northwest deserves a World Series. I know we are going to get there. This is the beginning of a special era of Mariners Baseball. There is work to do to take that final step. That work starts now.

There’s still work to be done, work in the winter, to take that final step.

It may have started with Josh Naylor—but there’s more to be done.

Seattle expects there to be American League Championship Series games played just across the street from Lumen in October.

And this year, we want more than just playing in them.

Go M’s.

Editor’s note: Abolish ICE. Demand nothing but the most—drastic, meaningful and material action—from your electeds.

Pramila Jayapal, Adam Smith, Patty Murray, Maria Cantwell, Bob Ferguson, Katie Wilson…

Delete the entire apparatus and throw these white supremacist chuds in jail.

King Félix will have a statue outside of T-Mobile Park. You already know the post, the idyllic “K”-shaped split second captured initially on digital film will one day be frozen in bronze or iron or copper whatever they make these things out of.

The number thirty-four will also hang out in center with HERNÁNDEZ arched above it.

It’ll hang alongside twenty-four and eleven and fifty-one and soon another fifty-one, all of them perching above the patrons in The ‘Pen like stained-glass windows in church on a bright summer morning.

This was no certainty. There’s a time when it was but it hadn’t been in a long time. And now it’s close to a certainty again even if it isn’t all the way there.

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By now, you’ve probably seen the following chart or some version of it. It’s in an in-depth breakdown of all the 2026 candidates from Jay Jaffe at FanGraphs.

With a bit of a shallow ballot, there was reason to be optimistic about Félix’s chances of closing real ground between himself and the Hall—but this is different. This isn’t just good, it almost seals it.

Jayson Stark has a report that’s equally illuminating and bullish on Félix as Jaffe’s. Here’s how the former wrapped his up:

In the last 40 elections, two other pitchers jumped to a vote percentage between 45 and 60 in their second year on the ballot: Don Sutton (in 1995) and Phil Niekro (in 1994). Both got elected by the writers exactly three years later.

So how does a Miguel Cabrera/Joey Votto/Zack Greinke/Félix Hernández Induction Weekend sound in 2029? I’d be happy to show up for that one!

This is all very meta. It is, in effect, analyzing the analysis. Most of the time, you aren’t even talking about performance on the field but instead reaction to performance on the field.

So gauche.

Even so, it’s data that looks good for Félix. It also does not hurt, or perhaps is only humorous, he’s already once been the canary in the Kinsellas’ corn field for marking a new era for starting pitcher recognition.

Stark continued,

Fifty years ago, Bob Gibson would have laughed out loud if you’d told him a starting pitcher could have a won-lost record of 13-12 and win a Cy Young Award … but Hernández actually did just that in 2010. Cy Young voters have pretty much ignored the win column ever since.

So is the King now about to similarly alter the Hall of Fame voting scene? Sure looks like it.

I suppose this is just how time works, the same groups of folks following the same groups of ball players, moving in infinite parallels across generations of the game.

The line of thinking—and sometimes even the people—that helped Félix win that Cy Young in 2010 will be the very same that carries him into the Hall.

MLB.com’s Mike Petriello, who’s been at this a long time, has in recent years honed in on measuring starting pitchers against their peers over rolling seven- and ten-year spans.

It goes back, he said in a 2024 piece, to a quote from Justin Verlander.

“I like the [best player in a] decade thing,” Verlander told Yahoo in 2020. “If you’re the best player or one of the best of your time, you should be in.”

Petriello goes on in the piece to use those seven-year spans, as is common to measure peaks, often by the aforementioned Jay Jaffe. Félix does quite well in those but the following is a list for Verlander.

Here are the best pitchers in baseball over the decade beginning with Félix’s first full season in the Majors—2006 through 2015.

1. Felix Hernández - 50.1 fWAR

2. Justin Verlander - 49.4 fWAR

3. Clayton Kershaw - 47.1 fWAR

4. CC Sabathia - 43.4 fWAR

5. Cliff Lee - 42.5 fWAR

Best Pitcher of the Decade, Félix Hernández

That 2015 bookend is weird, though. It was the first year of the contract extension that was, when signed, the largest deal for a pitcher in Major League history.

It was also the first year he wasn’t himself—that he wasn’t the King.

I joined the M’s in 2016 and posted my fair share of #HappyFélixDay content but the bounceback never came.

When Félix walked off the mound in Game 162 of 2014, there was so much still around the bend—for him and the M’s. At the time, it read to me like a step into the sunlight, the return of competitive baseball to Seattle.

And in a way it was.

But it was also the last time Félix was ever a good pitcher on a good team.

Hell, it was probably the only time.

He was robbed of a second Cy Young weeks later. Then there was 2015 and, soon, the decline was over when it’d only barely started.

It didn’t look like there would be a big 34 hanging out in center field—not without, by the Mariners own rules, at least coming close to Hall of Fame induction. And without that, surely no statue.

Guys wash off the ballot all the time if they’re not near the traditional 65 fWAR threshold.

Hell, Jim Edmonds and his 64.9 fWAR got 2.6 percent of the vote in his first year on the ballot and he was gone immediately. Félix finished 10 fWAR below that.

But hey, as we’ve mentioned, it’s a different time.

What’s funny with Félix and with time is that while it’s a new era for starting pitchers and the Hall of Fame, just as it was in 2010 for him and the Cy Young, Félix is and was a throwback.

He was the last of a dying breed, the generational fireballer that’s among the game’s true aces, with the workload to match, before his prefrontal cortex had even fully developed—because who needs that when you have a mid-90s fastball, El Cambio and the Royal Curve.

Félix Hernández posted his career high in innings at just 24 years of age—notching 249.2 IP in a 6.7 fWAR season.

The only other players to match those totals before their age-25 season, since 1980, are Dwight Gooden and Roger Clemens.

Nobody’s done it since Félix—and nobody probably will ever again.

Félix’s career will stand, in part, as a reason for why it won’t. He gave everything he had for teams that, mostly, didn’t deserve it.

As bad as things got, it was still Sunshine and Lollipops every fifth day. At least until the inevitable 1-0, 2-1 and 3-1 Finals.

King Félix never started a Postseason game, something he’d earned but was denied by a combination of thriftiness and mismanagement.

I’m sure it’s something that still haunts him and likely will forever.

But he deserves this, too—and now a trip to Cooperstown is inevitable.

Whether it comes in the summer of 2028 or 2029 or whenever, it’s happening.

It’ll be a #HappyFélixDay, indeed.

A lack of imagination is one of the biggest problems facing the world today. Or maybe it’s better described as pessimism? Low demands? It’s hard to frame exactly.

“A better world is possible” is what folks often say, preemptively responding to blowback from suggesting dramatic improvement from the status quo.

Yes, we know why things are the way they are. But it doesn’t mean they have to be that way. Or that we can’t talk about the way they are and how they should be much better.

So yeah. This is my blog and we’re going to do the occasional post on how the Mariners could just go spend money to acquire more good players if they wanted to.

Let’s take a look at where they stand as we head into the new year and offseason’s final few furlongs before spring training. Specifically, let’s look at where they’re most wobbly.

Drawing on FanGraphs’ Depth Charts and their associated projections, here are the Mariners’ weakest positions for the 2026 season. No real surprises.

• Second base: 2.5 fWAR

• Third base: 2.2 fWAR

• Left field: 2.1 fWAR

• Right field: 1.8 fWAR

• Designated hitter: 1.6 fWAR

For those being the Mariners’ worst positions, they’re really not that bad—especially at the two spots we assume the club is most likely eying an upgrade. That is, generally, how you end up sitting in the top five in projected WAR for 2026.

That top end of the table is going to shift, though, with all the talent still on the board. Not to mention, these are the wins that are toughest to come by. That’s what the whole old win curve is about.

It can be very expensive to go from 88 to 90 to 92 to 96 to 100 wins. Much more expensive than going from like 78 to 81 to 83.

It’s a price the Mariners, so far, have been reticent to pay. And we all expect that to continue. Because it will continue.

Meanwhile, I want to go back to some projections, specifically projections for the best position players available on the open market. Here are those players, their position(s), their 2026 projected fWAR and their crowdsourced projected AAV for 2026 and beyond.

1. Kyle Tucker, LF/RF, 4.4 fWAR, $35M AAV

2. Bo Bichette, SS/2B/3B, 4.0 fWAR, $27M AAV

3. Alex Bregman, 3B, 4.0 fWAR, $31M AAV

The three best free agents available play literally the Mariners’ three biggest positions of need.

And there is no expectation for the Mariners to pursue, let alone sign, any of these players.

It’s insane! Bananas foster!

I’m not going to make this as fleshed-out as last year’s version of this post but it remains immensely frustrating the Mariners apparently will never run a top ten payroll under this ownership group. If they weren’t and aren’t doing it for this window and these teams, they aren’t doing it ever.

The contextual level that spending has sunk to is, apparently, what to expect until there’s a new crew backing the operation.

For a kid who fell in love with the M’s in the early 2000s when they were among the game’s uppermost echelon and spent like it, too—well, it sucks.

/Jarvis, pull up the chart.

Here, once again, is the Mariners’ Opening Day payroll rank going back to the beginning of the century.

Again, I used Cot’s because it has the legacy data. For 2026, I have what they’re in for now but we can expect—I would think—at least another $10 million or so, taking them from roughly $158 million to a possible $168 million.

Per FanGraphs, Arizona is currently at $168 million and 14th in payroll. Detroit is 15th with $164 million in 2026 outlays.

Should the Mariners indeed start their 2026 with a payroll about where 2025 ended up, that $168 million figure, they’d once again be right in the middle of the pack.

Most likely, they will once again end up below their market size (13th). They will certainly be outside the top 10, they’ll be way below their franchise high-water mark (7th) and even further back of the lowest luxury tax threshold.

The Mariners have $10 to $15 million left to spend because that’s what John Stanton, Chris Larson and company said they could spend. And that’s all there is to it.

It’s a business after all, folks say.

They spend a whole year talking about the 50th anniversary of regular-old businesses? Not so much.

The Mariners are a community institution.

And the community deserves to see more of an investment in the roster after its own investment in the organization.

Remember the price of those playoff tickets? Oohwee.

If the Mariners decided now, finally, to allocate resources on the level of the sport’s true contenders—at least the top 10—they’d have another $40 million to spend.

They could sign any one of the three players noted above, including Kyle Tucker—who’d bolster a corner outfield crop that has an aging Randy Arozarena and unproven Dominic Canzone in the top two spots on the depth chart.

Or they could drop Bregman at third over the possible Ben Williamson/Colt Emerson platoon. They could play Bichette there, too—or at second, gasp, blocking Cole Young.

The Mariners would have to spend at least another $70 million this offseason to rise to their highest-ever payroll rank, 7th, a spot currently occupied by the Houston Astros.

They could sign any two of Tucker and Bregman and Bichette and, should Houston not spend more this offseason (unlikely), still be behind their biggest threat in the division.

The Mariners don’t have to live like this.

We don’t have to be chill with it, either.

Even when they’re as good as they’ve ever been, there’s a path for the Mariners to be even better.

And ownership should take it. Or find someone who can.

Go M’s.

The funniest thing about anytime the Mariners acquire a reliever they’re going to actually keep and use is how abstract and distant it feels in the moment compared to the to near-certain reality of multiple days’ mental health hinging on this guy’s arm in the medium-distant future.

Right now, Jose Ferrer is a young lefty with a hard sinker and secondary stuff that could be better utilized. He’s also the dude the Mariners finally ended up trading Harry Ford for.

But in six months, probably sooner, he’ll be the guy Dan Wilson is using too much. Or too little. Or against the wrong guys. Maybe it’s the right guys.

Maybe it’s literally Game Seven of the ALCS.

OH NOW HE STARTS WALKING PEOPLE—GOD. DAMMIT.

Hey, that’s a long way off.

Let’s talk about the actual guy and the actual trade.

They’re good, the bad and the we’ll see of Jose Ferrer

We’re going to talk about the cost to acquire him here in a second but for now, let’s focus on the guy who will stand as a foundational piece of an offseason where the Mariners look to go from eight outs to zero outs from their first pennant.

There’s a lot of really good analysis out there from folks who are better analysts than me. What I’ll do is blend what I’m seeing with what the other, smarter folks are seeing.

The quick primer: Ferrer is a hard-throwing lefty who tossed 76.1 innings across 72 appearances for the Nationals last year, posting a 4.48 ERA and 1.4 fWAR.

As has been clear for a while now, teams do not care about ERA. It’s not meaningful because it can be misleading and because it can be misleading, it’s not as predictive as other metrics.

To follow, from the Mariners’ release on the move, are the types of things teams do care about.

[In 2025,] Ferrer posted an elite 64.3 ground-ball percentage across his 72 appearances, which ranked in the 99th percentile of all pitchers according to Baseball Savant. Ferrer also ranked in the 95th percentile in lowest walk rate (4.9%), 94th percentile in average fastball velocity (97.7 mph), and 93rd percentile in lowest barrel rate (4.8%) in 2025.

This would be why his FIP the last two years—2.76 in 2024 and 3.03 in 2025—were a good deal better than his ERAs, a 3.38 in 2024 and the aforementioned 4.48 in 2025.

FIP (Fielding Independent Pitching), for those who don’t know, aims to surface “what a player’s ERA would look like over a given period of time if the pitcher were to have experienced league average results on balls in play and league average timing” by focusing on strikeouts, walks and home runs.

Luke Arkins over at Mariners Consigliere notes the likely culprit in the gap between Ferrer’s actual and expected results.

Ferrer’s .276 AVG placed 140th among 153 relievers facing at least 200 hitters, while his .310 wOBA ranked 122nd. Suboptimal results that must improve moving forward. […]

Possible smoking gun: Ferrer’s opponent AVG and OBP are definitely unappealing. But there’s evidence worth considering when discussing a pitcher whose success is contingent on keeping the ball on the ground. His team’s infield defense was suspect in 2025.

The Nationals’ infield contingent accrued a minus-27 Fielding Run Value (FRV) - the worst in baseball. This had to factor into Washington’s .282 AVG on ground balls being the highest allowed by any team. In Ferrer’s case, opponents hit .273 on ground balls he surrendered, which was 24 points above the MLB average.

To me, a pitcher with the third highest ground ball rate in baseball with the worst infield defense behind him is bound to experience damaging results on grounders. Perhaps this is one of many factors influencing the Mariners to acquire Ferrer.

Arkins goes on to highlight the Mariners, also, had bad infield defense in 2025.

That could change, yes, but it’s also not the point I’d like to make.

In baseball and sports and life, your ability to influence an outcome is dependent in large part on how many variables you can control.

For Ferrer, quality of contact is one of those variables he appears to be good at controlling. But you know what’s better, as a pitcher, than inducing weak contact?

That would be preventing contact entirely.

And Ferrer’s relative inability to do that makes me a skosh uneasy about his outlook as an elite high-leverage arm.

In 2025, among relievers who threw at least 50 innings,

• Ferrer’s strikeout rate of 21.9 percent ranked 98th out of 144

• His 11.5 percent swinging strike rate ranked 79th

• His Win Percentage Added (WPA) of 0.78 ranked 75th

WPA is very specifically not supposed to be a predictive stat. But it is, a bit like ERA although better, supposed to be a reflection of the events that transpired.

What happened could have been a little fluky, but it is what happened.

When you’re a pitcher who doesn’t get elite swing-and-miss results, like Ferrer, you open yourself up to more randomness and an increased potential for your results to be worse than the underlying metrics.

It’s a lot easier to block this out in December, long before you’re hanging on this guy’s every pitch, but you’ll definitely feel it whenever he’s got a runner on third with fewer than two outs in an enormous spot.

Of course, at 26 and changing organizations, he’s not a finished product.

On that, to Brendan Gawlowski at FanGraphs. Gawlowski’s a former scout and a friend of mine. He’s also a very smart dude who likes the move for the M’s and sees the potential for upside in changing up a repertoire that sees Ferrer chuck sinkers 71 percent of the time.

The changeup performed very well in 2025, generating big whiff and chase rates, and hitters didn’t do much with it even on contact. He could probably stand to use it more.

The real path forward may be the slider, though. Ferrer’s sits in the low 90s and has tight, two-plane movement, not quite cutterish but in the neighborhood. His command of it isn’t great, generally in the dirt to the glove side, but whether it’s because guys don’t expect the Spanish Inquisition or they’re just not seeing his spin very well, opponents did absolutely nothing with it and whiffed more than half the times they swung. The Mariners have had a lot of success getting fastball-heavy arms to diversify their arsenal — Logan Gilbert and Bryce Miller are two obvious examples — and it would come as no surprise if they have Ferrer lean on the bender a lot more going forward.

Put everything together, and you can imagine why Seattle sees Ferrer as an impact reliever, the kind worth parting with a top prospect for. Sources from around the game like Ferrer as an upside play. […]

The more I look at Ferrer, the more he seems like a reliever with another gear, a guy with closer stuff who is a plenty good fit for Seattle’s bullpen as is.

This will be something to watch once the boys get down to Peoria, both in early reporting on bullpens and then in Cactus League action.

This is getting way longer than it needs to be so let’s get to the other side of it real quick.

Farewell, Harry Ford – that was, well, something

When a move like this goes down, one for a long-established Mariners prospect with a good deal of volatility in value, you often see two sides that look a lot like what we saw in the fallout from Ford’s move:

• Ford was a consensus top 100 prospect and moving him for a reliever is an obvious overpay

• Ford was never—or at least no longer—as good as people thought; the market dictates his worth and this was it

I’m not going to take either one of those sides because, man, I don’t know.

I don’t have the scouting eye to know any better and I don’t have the sources to tell me what the market was saying.

What I will say though: the arc of Harry Ford as a Seattle Mariner ending here is a bummer. And weird.

It goes back to a piece I wrote in June.

If I were to pick the most relevant point out from there, it’d be this: sometimes it’s just as risky to not trade prospects as it is to trade them.

Ford has been a member of the Mariners organization since 2021. He became tradable after the Braves finished beating the Astros in the World Series that year.

The Mariners have run out a playoff team or near-playoff team every one of the four seasons since then and Harry Ford contributed nothing of value to any of those clubs when he otherwise could have.

It was never obvious, not even now, that he should have—but he could’ve. That’s undeniable.

When he’s moved now, here, for this, you can’t help but wonder who the best player was the Mariners could’ve used Ford to acquire in 2022, 2023, 2024 or 2025.

Heck, in 2025, the possibility exists he could’ve chipped in himself had the M’s and Ford committed to developing more positional versatility.

Or maybe, the whole time, the Mariners didn’t think he was all that good and were intent on limiting him to exposure that would reveal as much to rival teams.

I don’t know.

Ford could still, through Ferrer, have an impact on Mariners teams going forward.

But the last Mariners team was one lockdown pivot inning from a quality reliever away from the first pennant in franchise history.

There’s no guarantee this or another roster gets that close.

And Harry Ford is left as a valuable reminder in why it can be dangerous to hug your prospects a little too tightly.

There was a time not that long ago when “meaningful second-half games” was a legitimate stretch goal for the Seattle Mariners and their fans. For multiple seasons in a row, too, it would’ve been something to have even a “big series” in the second half.

And when it happened for the first time in what felt like forever, it was something.

2014, anyone?

It feels so long ago because it is so long ago, now 11 seasons since that one. But it was also literally the just the regime before the group we have now.

That season went well, the following one did not and Jerry Dipoto was hired as GM.

It only took hair over a decade to legitimately reach true contender status but hey, here we are.

And where are we? I enjoyed Dipoto himself getting the chance to encapsulate it during last month’s end-of-season media availability.

We have, I think, universally, one of the best farm systems in baseball, in terms of top end prospects, preparedness of those prospects, guys who are near and ready, we’re excited by that.

And I look at the core of our team, and most of them are in their mid-, late-20s. Most of them are having what should be the best years of their career.

Our starting rotation returns in full. We’ve got core players like Cal, Julio, and JP through the middle and young players that populate other spots on the field.

Productive veterans all over the field that return. And we’re right in the prime of what we should be doing, so it’s exciting. The only thing that makes it different is that this year, we go in being the divisional champions.

Would we all have preferred it not take this long to hang a 2025 A.L. WEST DIVISION CHAMPIONS banner? Yes.

But here’s something that needs to be said about the 2025 Seattle Mariners, something I’ll probably say a lot over the years ahead:

They could’ve won it all.

The 2025 Seattle Mariners were good enough to win the whole damn thing. They really could’ve done it.

They didn’t—but they could’ve.

That’s the mark, the target heading into this winter and the season to follow. And all ensuing seasons until something otherwise makes that not the case.

Their success—or, at least, above averageness—is undeniable.

Obviously, seventh-best isn’t the first-best we’re looking for in a single season. But it’s winning consistently—at least, to the level the Rays do?—over an extended period of time.

The best part of this endeavor, however, is the intent the organization has expressed to push beyond that.

It’s weird the 2025 Marines and the 2021 Mariners won the same number of regular season games. The latter went Fraley, Trammell, Haniger across the outfield on Opening Day, with Evan White and Dylan Moore on the right side of the infield.

Obviously, teams can and do often change after Opening Day. The 2021 club sure did—Cal Raleigh’s debut season, for one—but none with as much intent and ambition as the 2025 iteration.

The 2025 Mariners made perhaps the best mid-season upgrade trade in franchise history. No, they did. That happened. I feel like we can call that off memory.

They did that and then they pushed on. They got The Guy. They went and paid the price in prospects and money for the biggest bat available at the deadline. And it was their guy, the guy they should’ve never traded away.

Do we all wish Geno would’ve hit a little better on his second tour? Sure. Yeah. Whatever.

But you can never take Game Five away. It happened. The things that swing games and seasons and legacies matter. They transpired.

The Mariners pushed on and made the big trade and not only could’ve won it all but were close to doing so.

To put it simply, they tried. For once, they really tried to win a championship. And hey, look what happened.

Now it almost feels like second nature.

Of course they got a deal done with Josh Naylor. They had to—and so they did. What a world.

It’s easy this time of year to dive into projections, to make grandiose plans and chart out the win totals. It’s hard to be present when the team isn’t playing any games.

Still, outside baseball, the end of the year is time to take stock, to find joy in being in the presence of the ones you care about.

It’s a good time to savor the softer side of life, like Josh Naylor positively beaming when shown—to raucous applause and his walk-up song on the organ—on the big board at a Kraken game last week.

This is a guy who, six months ago, didn’t know where he’d be playing in a few weeks, let alone a few years.

And here he is, as beloved as a ball player can be in his new hometown, with $90 million to his name and a potential organizational hall of fame career in front of him.

That’s the good stuff. That’s life.

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This blog can sometimes balance two ideas that might otherwise feel contradictory:

• That the game of baseball is about more than wins and losses, it is the backdrop to life for so many of us

• The Seattle Mariners owe it to their fans to win a championship and should make every effort to do so

I swear they’re not contradictory. Quite the opposite.

Never does sports fandom have more weight, more meaning, than when these two ideas meet.

I want to hug and lift up my wife in joy when the Mariners win a World Series. Or maybe it’s having one of my future kids on my shoulders at the parade, them asking why I’m crying about something good.

And everyone reading this has their own version, or own past experience from this fall’s playoff run that’d serve just as well.

Here, to follow, is one I loved.

It comes from Mariners President of Business Ops Kevin Martinez, one of my favorite people of all time. He shared it in an interview with Seattle Sports that aired the Wednesday before Thanksgiving.

If you’re someplace you can watch it, here it is. Transcript to follow.

Salk asks if Kevin has a favorite game. Here’s what followed.

Yeah, I had a couple, but one is deeply personal.

It was the morning of Game Five. It was my dad’s 96th birthday.

So I’m driving over the I-90 bridge. It’s very early in the morning. I call my father and we have a conversation and now they live in South Florida. My mom is 88, dad’s 96, and they’re the biggest Mariner fans in South Florida.

They’re staying up late, they’re watching all the games down the stretch.

And I said, “so dad, how do you feel about…” and I get my love of baseball from my parents, both of them. And I said, “how do you feel about tonight?”

He goes, “I got a good feeling.”

He goes, “I got a really good feeling about Geno Suárez tonight.”

He goes, “I wouldn’t be surprised if he hits four home runs.”

I said, “dad, let’s settle down.”

That’s getting a little aggressive, four home runs.

So it’s Geno’s first at bat and I share with the person sitting next to me, I shared the story and I said, come on, Geno, do it for dad on 96, you know, his 96th birthday.

Next pitch, Mike, next pitch—it goes into Edgar’s Cantina.

And then of course, Geno hits the granny to win it. So that game, that moment, that conversation with my dad, that will stay with me forever.

To quote Leo in OBAA,

Life, man. LIFE!

Let me hit you with one more quote on the way out.

If you’re reading this, you know what it’s from. Apologies for the corniness.

But that’s what it’s all about.

So often we dream on what might be possible even when it surely isn’t.

Right now, your Seattle Mariners winning the World Series is possible.

Perhaps not as probable as the moment when Dan went to Eduardo but I digress.

The Mariners signed the bat they needed to sign. It sounds like they’ll either get another or a leverage reliever—maybe both.

It all goes to supplement one of the best cores in the sport.

It’s December in Seattle and even though the Hawks are rolling, you’d be challenged to find a local sports fan who isn’t ready for spring training.

This city’s a baseball town. Most are when the hometown nine has a shot at a title.

The Seattle Mariners do. Now and for the forseeable future.

And for that I’m thankful.

Go M’s.