Go get that last piece—for once

You can’t put a price on ambition.

Scott Servais loves days like yesterday. He’s an old-school leader of men. He likes setting a culture and is a student in the art of doing so. For doing that, no day is bigger than yesterday.

As he does every year before the spring’s first-full squad workout, he stood in front of the dozens of players there in camp, he introduced the staff they’d be working with over the coming weeks and months—and he delivered a message intended to define and shape the character of the clubhouse.

I planned to use this as a lede before I read Ryan Divish’s piece on day one of camp, and he hits this part of spring training better than I ever could. For example, here’s Skip in his own words on the season’s opening keynote.

“I look forward to it,” he said. “It’s fun, it’s exciting, but it also gives me an opportunity to reflect back on the different things that we’ve focused on, where we were at as an organization in the previous years and how we’ve grown. That part of it usually sinks in about 11 o’clock the night before. It’s like, ‘Wow, we’ve come a long way here,’ and we really have. But we’ve got a long ways to go yet.”

The question now is—how far will they go?

For as much as people joke about “Win it all.” scribbled on a whiteboard for a social video, I think it’s safe to say the proposition came up yesterday in that oversized clubhouse.

Those are the stakes. That’s the goal. It’s why we do any of this.

To hold a trophy, to have a parade, to hang a banner.

Can the Mariners look at themselves as an organization and say they did everything in their power to accomplish that goal? Nah. Of course not.

We know that, we’ve been over it.

But what’s a bit surreal about all of it is that the very last time the Seattle Mariners as a group were all together, when they all shared a clubhouse, it ended with multiple members of their core saying “Come on. Help us out. Invest in this club. Our rivals invested in theirs. Please. Want this as much as we do.”

Two things happened immediately after that: one, the rivals they were alluding to won the World Series and two, the powers that be in the organization effectively responded with “lol no” and a level of austerity resulting in multiple players being moved in salary dump trades.

Literally the last time we saw them, the players who wear Seattle Mariners uniforms were pissed at the organization’s lack of ambition and investment. And the organization went the other way!

Again, been over it. Sorry. I digress.

And after all of that, after this offseason from hell, they are one big red bow of a big move away from a dream winter. They could have Mariners fans more excited than they’ve literally ever been headed into a new season.

They didn’t have a prayer on Shohei Ohtani, they took no serious run at Juan Soto and, unless a blockbuster trade comes down, they will not add one truly elite player.

But if you’re Jerry Dipoto, after all this, you could walk into John Stanton’s Peoria office when he’s in the building, down at the other end of the second floor, and say

Hey, we did everything you wanted. We got cheaper. We got better. We got our fans excited after a tough start to the offseason. You give me and my crew a league-average Opening Day payroll and we can give you a division favorite and title contender.

If you’re Stanton, how is that…not…everything you’ve ever wanted?

If the Mariners, who presently stand at 18th in FanGraphs’ Opening Day payroll projections, wanted to to climb all the way up to 14th, they’d have another $25 million to spend. Still fourth in their five-team division. Still below the ~10 to 12ish range we’d minimally expect every year during a contention window.

Just, about average. Give this Mariners team a middle-of-the-road payroll and you could have something special.

The important thing to remember, in all this talk about whether or not a player constitutes an upgrade, whether or not a mishmash of cast-offs could maybe outperform a player on the market, is where the Mariners are on the win curve.

An extra two wins there, another win and a half here, it doesn’t mean much if you’re a .500 team. It means the world if you’re floating right around 90 wins.

Shit, with a few more wins, the 2023 Mariners win the American League West, line up one of the best rotations in baseball for the Postseason—starting with home-field advantage in the ALDS—and who knows where things go from there.

The 2021 Mariners also missed the playoffs by a game.

Hell, if you look at the drought-busting 2022 club and ask if they did everything they could to do some damage in the Postseason, they absolutely did not. I remember being criticized quite a bit when I gave their trade deadline a C-grade.

Luís Castillo rules and so did the Wild Card series against the Blue Jays. Getting swept out of ALDS on the back of an 18-inning shutout did not.

The 2022 team deserved better. So did the 2021 club and 2023 club. So do the 2024 Mariners.

Make the big move.

I like Matt Chapman and think he’s worth the risk. Some prefer adding Cody Bellinger, and I have no objection to that. Sure, whatever. You could still do the Blake Snell signing/impact trade for outfielder combo. Hell, do it with Jordan Montgomery if that’s more feasible.

This team needs more talent—it needs more wins wherever they can get them, and it needs them now.

You can adjust later to weaknesses, yes, but if something like the third base platoon does end up being a weakness—which would not be unpredictable in the slightest—you probably lost a fair amount of ballgames finding that out.

When you’re gunning for greatness, every single one of these games counts. It’s just a matter of whether or not this organization actually desires to reach the game’s highest level.

If it does, the cost to do so has never been lower. Again, just give Dipoto and his regime an average amount of resources.

As I wrote last year, they’ve already done the hard part in amassing a largely homegrown core—one fronted by one of the ten best players in the sport at an age when guys are usually still on prospect lists.

Any big finishing move will have its share of risks, of course it will. Nothing is guaranteed and this isn’t supposed to be easy. If it were, the Mariners would’ve won a pennant by now.

But they haven’t—and they should act like it.

Add that one more piece and go make the run we deserve to see from this era of Mariners baseball.