It is what it is

What else can you say about the 2026 Mariners right now?

Summer is officially here in Seattle and you know what that means: the best version of this year’s Mariners are still weeks, if not months, away.

We’re used to this, though. As I wrote recently, the Mariners don’t often travel by the path of least resistance. The only time they really went wire to wire with a great team, the nation suffered its greatest tragedy since World War II.

Probably not related but do we really want to risk it?

Anyway, I saw this tweet the other day that made me think, at least a bit, about the our M’s. It was about the World Cup and, despite my efforts to date, I’ll never find it again.

But it went something like this: Despite what USMNT fans might think, you’re not going to Football Manager your way into developing a talented group of strikers.

It wasn’t “a talented group of strikers,” almost certainly. I think the club has a decent one? Maybe even two? It’s cool Antonio Freeman’s kid is on the team.

Anyway, the point applies all the same, which is: you can toy with a team around the edges, you can talk about how Rob Refsnyder should’ve been DFA’d so the Mariners could keep Jhonny Pereda, you can loath the Piggyback v1.2 and you can be thrilled about the club finally correctly aligning the left side of their infield…

And it still isn’t going to be the difference between the 2026 Mariners as they exist now and the 2026 Mariners as we want and envision them to be.

Every club has its injury troubles, some more than others. Little can be done to influence it.

But what most teams do not have is a roster with talent on the level of these Mariners. It isn’t just that every day a new player goes down with a day-to-day injury, it’s that every day a pretty good player goes down with a day-to-day injury.

Maybe, just maybe, we’re starting to see the end of it. Who knows. I guess we’ll see which way the trend is headed based on whether or not Dominic Canzone plays today or if he’s on the day-to-day-MRI-to-IL track.

Either way, the original point holds—it isn’t just that the Mariners are losing guys, but they’re losing guys they need.

And part of the reason they need them is because the even better players aren’t playing like it.

There’s no substitute for your great players playing great.

As such, it was a sight for sore eyes to see one of those classic Cal Raleigh home runs with the trajectory of a Russell Wilson moonball.

Though the record isn’t a whole lot different than it was this time last year, the club sure looked a whole lot better when Cal was hitting 60 home runs.

The 2026 Mariners don’t need Cal to hit more long balls than almost anyone in American League history but they sure could use a wRC+ that starts with at least a one and a two and then 30 or so bombs to go with it.

Julio’s having the best first half of his career but it’s still a long way from the best version of him as a player. The 2026 M’s don’t need the dreamed-on 10 fWAR version of Julio but they do need more than the three wins he’s pacing toward.

He’ll pick it up, though. He always picks it up.

It’s stuff like this that makes it hard to find words—interesting words, at least—about this ball club.

Like, look at the piggyback, the source of a lot of consternation yesterday as it was revealed the reigning American League Player of the Week, Logan Gilbert, would be taking his turn at the strategy on Saturday—and with the team’s most consistent starter, Emerson Hancock, as as the second half of the duo.

While there are ways the strategy helps the team win now—simply, their six starters are better pitchers than their worst relievers, especially with injuries—but the Mariners aren’t doing this to win games in late June.

They’re doing it to win games in the middle of October.

Can you fault them when last year’s rotation, already down its best arm, put up a 6.59 ERA over 27.1 innings—under four per start!—in the American League Championship Series.

Nah.

So yeah, it is what it is.

The regular season goal they have to hit is the #2 seed and it doesn’t look like the AL is going to put up too much of a fight for it.

This isn’t the best version of the 2026 Mariners. It probably won’t be for a little while.

So what else can you besides ride it out?