At some point, they have to get going—right?

The Mariners fail to find momentum…and other notes from recent affairs.

The trade deadline is three days and change away. The 2025 Seattle Mariners have 55 more regular season games to play.

This team has too much talent, is too overdue, is surrounded by so much mediocrity that they have to find their stride and, at some point, elevate their play to a level that’d leave us fans not experiencing multiple violent mood swings every week as we sweat a playoff spot all the way through September…

right?

The phrase “so Mariners” is popular for a reason. But it’s often not the things you think would be “so Mariners” that actually are so Mariners. For example, it would’ve been so Mariners to get walked off by a Mike Trout three-run bomb in game one on Thursday. That’s too Mariners.

But losing the Logan Gilbert-Kyle Hendricks matchup to split the series and fall into a tie in the standings with the Rangers? Behind a Trout tactical nuke to give him 1,000 career RBI? And general umpery?

That’s so Mariners.

Because there’s a bunch of stuff to hit and if I try to hit all of them, I’ll have to be pointed on each, we’re gonna do it that way.

If you like it, holler.

Weird, weird spot the club is in right now.

The division race tightens—the playoff race loosens?

It’s not hard to squint and see the Rangers winning the division. They, now tied with the Mariners, are four back of the just-mopped Astros.

The Mariners not sweeping Quad-A Houston at home looks worse after the Athletics went into the barn formerly known as Enron Field and took all four.

At some point, they will start getting healthier. But that is a bad, bad series loss.

Meanwhile—hey, did you know the Texas Rangers have the second-best run differential in the American League, trailing only the Yankees? Yeah, that’s fun.

They’ve done that with the 25th-ranked offense by team wRC+, which tells you how good their pitching has been.

The division race is starting to have shades of 2023, when it was a three-team race to the end before the Mariners faded and Cal Raleigh ripped higher-ups for not adding like other teams added. The Rangers proceeded to win it all.

Taking a look around the American League, the teams that are for-sure not net selling but not far-and-away division favorites are the:

• Yankees

• Red Sox

• Astros

• Mariners

• Rangers

With the West and three Wild Cards, that’s four spots for five teams. Of course, someone from the Rays/Guardians/Royals/Twins tier could get absurdly hot like last year’s Tigers, but it’s tougher to see.

FanGraphs has the Rangers’ playoff odds at 50.4 percent. Next best in the AL, the Rays at 16.2.

So the Mariners probably only have to beat one of the four non-them teams above.

You know what would be a great way to not do that? Aiming to beat just one or two of those teams.

The Josh Naylor trade is good

Last year around this time, reflecting on the Randy Arozarena acquisition, I referenced a 2014 piece by Ken Arneson titled 10 Things I Believe About Baseball Without Evidence.

Fun concept, bright guy. This year, I’ll pick a different one of those ten things. That is—diversity is good for batting lineups.

A lineup that is diverse (some hit fastballs, some like it inside, or low, some slug, others make contact, etc.) makes a pitcher have to change his approach from at-bat to at-bat. That forces the pitcher to have to make a variety of quality pitches in order to win. It’s harder for a pitcher to win if he has to have multiple pitches working well.

Josh Naylor isn’t your typical thicc boi first baseman. He produces, yes, but it isn’t the traditional thumping approach.

Over the last three calendar years, he’s 11th among first basemen in wRC+(min. 1,000 PAs). However, in terms of hard-hit rate—the percentage of balls in play over 95mph—he’s 25th out of 35.

He does put the ball in play, though.

His strikeout rate is the sixth-lowest among that group of first basemen. His batting average (I know, I know) is ninth-best at .271. He’s batting a sharp .292 this year, 16th-best in baseball.

You don’t necessarily want nine guys like this, depending so much on that skill-set, but it’s good to mix in.

That said, it isn’t like the Mariners are getting a top ten first baseman. His 123 wRC+ is solidly in the second tier and, while clearly ahead, not that far above the ~110 range where it’s an untenable issue for a should-be contending team.

That’s Justin-Smoak’s-best-year-as-a-Mariner territory.

Naylor is not there, though. Well above.

And despite a build that is less than ideal, he turned 28 just two months ago.

He’s only under contract for this year but should not immediately go in the tank.

He’s not enough

If Josh Naylor is the Mariners’ biggest acquisition, it will be another inadequate trade deadline.

There’s a narrow path where the Mariners get one of the best relievers on the market and the third base version of Josh Naylor so technically Naylor is tied for the biggest acquisition…but that’s the only scenario where he’s the best hitter acquired and it’s a successful transactional period.

Folks have been talking about whether it’s more important the Mariners get another bat or high-leverage reliever and it does make for a fun debate prompt—but the Mariners need both. One way or another, they gotta get both.

Doing one or the other probably gets them in the Postseason. Probably.

You do both (or more) and stand to position yourself on a tier where you’re the division favorite and one of two or three pennant favorites.

You can do enough to avoid a disaster, tread water in baseball’s middle class and save some jobs.

Or you can make moves and proactively push this entire organization to a level it hasn’t been at in a long time, if ever.

The opportunity is there.

Boy, this Luke Raley/Dominic Canzone call is gonna be dicey

Here’s the real post-Naylor roster crunch. Demoting Miles Mastrobuoni to Tacoma was a simple effort in procrastination.

With Naylor stepping in as the full-time first baseman—and a lefty-hitting one, at that—it’s now not part of Luke Raley’s role on the roster. At least not a very big one at all.

So he’s primarily a lefty-hitting corner outfielder, exactly like Dominic Canzone. And it’s in an outfield with Julio Rodríguez and Randy Arozarena locked into two spots.

It helps Raley that he has some versatility, being the better athlete, and the Mariners probably like him in center better in a pinch.

It does not help him that Dom Canzone has hit to a 136 wRC+ on the year and 143 since his stint in Tacoma.

Still, every one of the in-season projections favors Luke Raley as a hitter the rest of the year.

And boyyyy, though the front office would love Canzone to be a Haniger-type diamond in the rough, a guy to hang their hat on, it has to be tempting to sell sky-high on Canzone.

If the Mariners were a great team, they could keep both—because great teams are good enough to stack talent and have roster spots just to mess around with. But they’re not, so they can’t afford redundancy.

That puts one of these guys in play.

Raley’s older, almost 31 to Canzone’s almost 28, but he only has one more year of service time—not a free agent until 2030 or arb eligible until 2027.

Raley has a better track record, but Canzone’s playing better now.

The last time the Mariners bet big on Canzone, trading for him in 2023, they wound up benching him for most of the last homestand as they battled unsuccessfully for a playoff spot.

You wouldn’t blame them at all for betting on him again, now under better conditions. But given what he and a hefty dose of recency bias would add to a trade package for a position where the Mariners don’t have depth, it complicates things.

That’s why Jerry and Justin and so on have those jobs, though. We’re not supposed to know who’s going to be better—that’s what they (we) pay them for. That’s the whole gig.

If you’re going to part with one of them, I wouldn’t want to choose wrong.

That could be the season. Or more.

The one thing Ichiro’s Hall of Fame legacy is missing

I feel bad not having an Ichiro-centric piece today. Part of it is that I’m spending some time with my wife’s family, part of it is that the angle I had drafted in my mind wasn’t the most positive. And today should be joyous.

Get with the program, 2025 club. And me—though I’ve now pushed it to the end.

Anyway, fancying myself at least an amateur writer, I enjoy how the Hall of Fame plaques—only unveiled as the inductee begins their speech—condense these legends’ careers down into a couple sentences.

Here’s Ichiro’s, the part beneath the depiction, his teams and so on.

WITH EXTRAORDINARY WORK ETHIC AND UNPARALLELED BAT CONTROL, BROUGHT RECORD-SETTING HIT TOTALS TO MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL AS ITS FIRST JAPANESE-BORN POSITION PLAYER. ELECTRIFIED 2001 MARINERS TO RECORD 116-WIN CAMPAIGN, EARNING A.L. ROOKIE OF THE YEAR AND MOST VALUABLE PLAYER HONORS. THE ONLY PLAYER WITH 10 STRAIGHT 200-HIT CAMPAIGNS, 2001-2010, SET ALL-TIME SINGLE-SEASON HITS RECORD WITH 262 IN 2004. AN ALL-STAR AND GOLD GLOVE OUTEIELDER THROUGHOUT HIS FIRST DECADE IN THE MAJORS, LED A.L. IN HITS SEVEN TIMES. WON TWO A.L. BATTING TITLES AFTER CAPTURING SEVEN CONSECUTIVE IN JAPAN. TOTALED 3,089 ML HITS AND 509 STOLEN BASES.

What’s missing?

October.

No moments, nary a memory save for fruitlessly climbing the wall at Yankee Stadium in the 2001 ALCS.

It isn’t his fault. Of course not.

Heck, Ichi hit .421/.488/.474 in his lone Postseason in a Mariners uniform.

At least he got one.

Félix and Seags, among many others, would’ve loved to have one. And it still wouldn’t have been enough. Not for them and certainly not for Ichiro.

As of this morning, Cal Raleigh is the bettors’ favorite to be American League Most Valuable Player. It’d be the Mariners’ first since Ichiro.

These types of seasons, these types of players—they deserve October shine. They need primetime playoff moments. Ideally several of them.

There are like three or four guys with bigger Mariners playoff moments than Adam Frazier. One might be Cal, with the series-opening shot in Toronto three years ago.

It’s past time for another. Not just for him, but for Julio and the rest of this group.

A lot of it depends on those core players. Most of it, even. The Mariners need better than what they got this weekend from some of their starting pitching and parts of the offense.

But the clubhouse needs more from the organization than they’ve received the last couple offseasons and trade deadlines.

They don’t want to look back two months from now—hell, make it three—wishing they’d done more.