The Mariners are pulling the ball in the air less
and other notes on the offense from a peek under the hood
The worst thing Kyle Seager ever did was try to be a more balanced hitter. Towards the tail end of his career—which we didn’t know we were in until it was over—Seager made an earnest attempt to drive the ball to all fields. He said as much and you could see it with every weak flare to left-center.
I hated it. Didn’t make any sense. Sell out for power like prime Brian Dozier, I thought. Seags just didn’t have that kind of raw strength to drive it to all fields and made it where he did in his career by looking that fact in the face and mitigating reality as best he could—yanking the ball down the line.
Like I knew or know anything.
Well, turns out, pulling fly balls in the air is good. Or, I should say, once the ball is in play it’s good if it’s pulled in the air.
Let’s get to reality, or a closer approximation of it—on the idea above and wherever else this train of thought leads us.
The offense is better…while doing a supposedly good thing less
The title of this section would be the title of this post if it weren’t already the title of the post. The Mariners are pulling the ball in the air less than they have in years.
Why is that noteworthy? Well, the primer at the top of the Statcast Batted Ball Profile Leaderboard on Baseball Savant lays it out well. The primer’s there because the default view for the table has rows sorted by Pull AIR%.
It’s an important stat. Here’s why, per the site:
The newly introduced AIR% is simply any batted ball that is not a grounder: line drives, fly balls and popups.
From 2022-24, while only 17.5% of batted balls were “pulled airballs,” that subset was responsible for 66% of all home runs. Pulled airballs in that time produced a .547 average, 1.227 slugging percentage and .733 wOBA, making them an extremely valuable outcome. Airballs that were not pulled, by comparison, had a .319 average, .527 slugging percentage and .353 wOBA, considerably less valuable.
From 2022 through 2024, no organization pulled the ball in the air as much as your Seattle Mariners. Literally first. The gap between the M’s and second place (the Dodgers!) was about the same as the gap between them and the seventh-ranked Rangers.
Over those seasons, the Mariners were:
21st in runs in 2024
12th in runs in 2023
18th in runs in 2022
This year, the Mariners pull the ball in the air the 14th-most in the Majors. They’re 12th in runs.
This blog is in its third season and if it wasn’t clear already, we’ll state it, if not again, at least as clearly as we can: with this type of analytics work, you will never see me say “Here,because of this, it means that.” At least not in any way that could be inferred to be some intellectual leap.
I’m not that smart.
You’ll get “This is happening. And that’s happening, too. Interesting.” And also the occasional “Huh. He did that—so he’s capable of doing that.”
But that’s it.
The Mariners are pulling the ball in the air less than they have in years. They’re scoring enough runs to win games.
Those are two things that are happening. What does it mean? Nothing I, at least, can say confidently.
But there is something important to note here, which I alluded to above.
Batted balls in the air are the most valuable type of ball in play. That’s the biggest conclusion that we know.
Does that mean then that all batters should primarily focus on pulling balls in the air? Well, no. Heck, we don’t even know that trying to specifically hit balls in the air to the pull-side even leads to more pulled balls in the air.
It could lead to less contact and more strikeouts. It might not, but you could see it. We’ll come back to this.
The big thing is—contact quality doesn’t matter a ton if you’re not making contact.
They’re getting on base and walking like crazy
In writing these posts, I’m going to learn things right along with you. Sometimes real basic stuff we should already have a better feel for.
But the Mariners are getting on base more than they have recently. They’re currently seventh in baseball and second in the American League at on-base percentage. The average Seattle Mariner gets on base at a .329 clip.
The weird thing? They haven’t been as bad on the OBP front in recent years as one might think. There is, as one might say, the reality of the offense and then the perception of the offense.
Over the last three years, Mariners teams ranked seventh, seventh and (no kidding) seventh in OBP in the American League. There’s progress here, but contextually, not as much as one would expect.
In a specific sense, the average Seattle Mariner is getting on base in 2025 at a clip (.329) that they haven’t since…crap, the eras of the game really mess with this because it’s been so long, but since about 2016 when the club ran a .326 OBP.
That’s largely coming on the back of the best walk rate in baseball. Entering play on Friday, they’re walking in 11.4 percent of their plate appearances—tops in the game.
That mark would represent the second-best team walk rate in franchise history, trailing only the 2000 squad. The top of this leaderboard has a lot of teams from times when offense league-wide was up significantly, but the 2022 squad is sitting there at seventh so this type of performance isn’t unheard of in the current era of Mariners baseball.
That 2022 squad finished second in baseball in walk rate. They also went to the playoffs—so they have that going for them, which is good.
The approach is…fine
When a team is taking their walks better than anyone else, the natural assumption is to think they’re swinging at the pitches they should and not swinging at pitches they shouldn’t. Especially the latter—that’s like a foundational part of drawing your walks, not swinging at balls.
How good are the Mariners, as a team, at not swinging at balls? Fine. About average. Little below even.
The 2025 Mariners swing at 31.6 percent pitches outside the zone, which ranks 17th in baseball—where lower is better.
Their overall swing rate is also around league average, ranking 13th. They’re more aggressive, contextually, in the zone—with a ninth-ranked swing percentage there.
The thing is, answering the question of “Do they swing at the pitches they should?” is more complex than finding the difference between Z-swing% and O-swing%.
As I talked about in an old post on Mitch Garver, a Baseball Prospectus stat from Robert Orr called SEAGER tries to do this.
There’s a different synopsis in that piece but here’s another:
Plate discipline is more than just drawing walks
What you swing at—hittable pitches—is more important than what you don’t—balls outside the zone—when the goal is improving quality of contact
Balancing both is the best thing a hitter can do: that’s what SEAGER is
The Mariners are 21st in baseball in SEAGER. (BP subscribers can check here.)
How much does that matter? We’ll see, I guess.
They’re really bad at making contact
As we all know, strikeouts have plagued the Mariners the most in recent years.
Here’s their strikeout rate going back the last few years:
2024: Second-worst
2023: Second-worst
2022: 14th-worst
2021: Fourth-worst
Hey there, the Mariners go to the playoffs when they strike out less.
Well, in 2025, they’re strikeout out….seventh-worst in baseball.
Obviously, that could be worse. Almost anything could always be worse. You know what is worse though? Their ability to make contact.
The 2025 Mariners are:
Second-worst in overall contact rate
Second-worst in making contact on pitches in the zone
16th at making contact on pitches outside the zone
Maybe it’s the last one that’s saving their ass? I’ve mentioned it before but O-Contact% can be sneaky-important.
It shows that, even when you got fooled and are swinging at something you probably shouldn’t, you still have good enough bat-to-ball skills to make contact.
Where this can really manifest itself is spoiling pitches and living to fight another day—either, ideally, laying off the ball in the future to draw a walk or getting a better pitch to hit and hitting it hard.
And the Mariners are hitting it hard.
The Mariners barrel the ball with the best of them
What is a barrel? Well, they’re the best. They’re what you’re going for.
MLB has a whole page on ‘em. Here’s the gist, and their graphic.
To be Barreled, a batted ball requires an exit velocity of at least 98 mph. At that speed, balls struck with a launch angle between 26-30 degrees always garner Barreled classification. For every mph over 98, the range of launch angles expands.
The 2025 Mariners are, per Baseball Savant:
Fifth at barrels per plate appearance
Third at barrels per batted ball
Fifth at hard-hit percentage
Eighth in average exit velocity
Sixth in EV50 (an average of the 50 percent of hardest-hit balls)
The first bullet is the one that jumps out to me. It isn’t just that they’re barreling it up when they make contact, it’s that in any given plate appearance, the Mariners are one of the best in baseball at producing the ideal ball in play.
Last year they were 12th in barrels per PA. In 2023, though, they were third. In 2022, they were 15th.
It’s early, and the clip they’re moving at is probably not sustainable, but their 7.4 percent barrel/PA rate would’ve led the league last year.
Actually—and it could be the game changing, it could be the ball, it could be just the small sample, it could be anything—only one team in the Statcast era has finished a season with a barrel/PA rate higher than mark the Mariners sit at now.
That was the 2023 Atlanta Braves, owners of a team wRC+ of 125. Crazy stuff.
What’s this junk drawer of information mean? What’s the signal in the noise?
I have no idea. I already said that. I’m not that smart.
The 2025 Mariners are a top ten team in runs per game and third in wRC+. That rocks.
Do the contact stats worry me a bit? Absolutely. Should they? Who knows.
Lasting message here, if I were to take a swing: there’s more than one way to build an offense. And also, if you can’t stack your lineup with nine versions of Juan Soto or Mike Trout or Aaron Judge, you probably want guys who are capable of doing different things.
That sounds right.
Anyway, the sun is out in Seattle and the Mariners are in first place.
I’ve got a ballgame to bike to in a short bit.
Go M’s.