The things we learned from the 2024 Mariners
And what they might mean going forward.
Hey, happy Monday. Allow me to make it a little bit better by firing way too many words your way about probably my least favorite team I’ve ever followed—your 2024 Seattle Mariners.
In a lost season like this one, what mattered? What are the data points that could or should impact 2025 and beyond?
Before moving on to other items in the weeks and months ahead, I wanted to get this out of the way. “This” is a general riff through the lasting storylines from the season and the things I think they mean heading into 2025.
It isn’t meant to be all-encompassing but here’s what sticks out to me from an otherwise forgettable campaign.
The Mariners will be a cost-conscious, bottom-half budget team until they aren’t
These aren’t your older brother’s Mariners. Or your…dad’s Mariners? I don’t know. What I’m trying to say is that since this ownership group bought out Nintendo—presumably with a hefty cost?—they are not the sometimes-ambitious ball club we saw in the early-aughts and then late-/middle-2010s.
If this group wasn’t going to run a top ten payroll in 2022 and 2023, with a world of opportunity laid out before them, then they never will.
Whether they just don’t have the juice or they’re keeping all the cash for themselves, I don’t know. But while I’ve dreaded them becoming a frugal operation with a ceiling in line with a team like the Brewers, Twins or Guardians, all of a sudden that’s just the reality now.
If the Mariners climb much higher than 15th in Opening Day payroll for 2025, it will be a surprise.
Miller and Woo took about the same jump forward as predecessors Kirby and Gilbert
I say “about the same” because George Kirby and Logan Gilbert because nobody here has the same path. Everyone deals with different timelines, dictated by a mixture of need, readiness and health.
I just mean that, generally, they’ve taken a good job stepping up from flashy rookie seasons to above-average full-time starters.
For a very unsophistaced look, here are the 17 most valuable seasons by Mariners starters in the post-stepback era. Why 17? Because that’s where 2023 Bryan Woo is and that’s how this type of exercise works.
It’s great to see. It’s a meaningful data point heading forward. There are three others that are more like constants:
Health is everything. Everything. The Mariners have been so lucky on this front that it’s probably skill. But one significant injury blows a hole in the entire operation and multiple would sink it. So far, so good?
Can anyone take another jump forward? As constructed, this is, at minimum, a top three rotation in ball. Starting pitchers are the load-bearing walls of the organization and, yet, they don’t have an über-elite top dog. Since 2021, again the post-stepback era, the Mariners barely have a top 50 starting pitcher season by fWAR. George Kirby’s 2023 checks in at 49th with a 4.3 mark.
Luís Castillo will continue to decline. Probably. Maybe not, but that’s generally how this works. The guys who ward it off do so with a blend of health and proactivity. It’s a ‘known’ the Mariners should operate around.
The clubhouse needs a veteran voice
The fellas love them some Justin Turner. The fans do, too.
It’s understandable. He’s seen and done it all. He made adjustments to launch from DFA’d JAG to accomplished veteran. Specifically, he’s built the type of launch angle/plate discipline combo the Mariners (and most teams) crave but few can consistently deploy. He even passed the offensive elixir on to Chris Taylor and made Jerry Dipoto look a little silly as a result.
Biggest point: it is undeniable that Justin Turner’s presence added value beyond his on-field production. His perspective was impactful and needed.
Going ahead though, does it have to be, like, actually 2025 Justin Turner?
They could do worse. I shouldn’t tempt them nor the baseball gods. But a Justin Turner/Luke Raley platoon feels like the exact type of setup that could and has gone sideways.
As I wrote in the Soto piece, while I agree they need what we used to call veteran presents—that presence needs to produce to have weight.
This whole deal doesn’t work without a legit bullpen
The formula has been something like:
(Young+healthy+dominant) starting pitching
+ Occasional pop
+ Ceilingless wunderkind
+ Optimistic platoons
+ Elite bullpen
______________________
~89 wins on the back of
outperforming peripherals
The 2024 Mariners went 27-28 in one-run games and underperformed their Pythagorean record by four wins and BaseRuns by five.
They also had what could fairly be described as the worst bullpen they’ve had since 2020. The injuries got to them—Matt Brash, especially. As much as we enjoyed and reveled in Brash’s dominance the last couple years, we still under-appreciated him.
The nicks and dings Gregory Santos and Yimi García came in with were probably reflected in the comparatively low cost of each acquisition.
There’s any number of stats you could look at and I’ll give you one that’s probably not the best predictive metric but is still reflective of what happened—the 2024 group was the only Mariners bullpen, post-stepback, to notch a negative figure in Win Percentage Added. The second lowest WPA was last year’s 4.6 mark and 2021 was the best at 8.2.
The 2021 Mariners went 33-19 in one-run games. The 2022 club went 34-22.
If this team plans contend by over-performing their talent level, having their output be greater than the sum of their parts, then they’ll need a good bullpen.
Some injury luck rubber-banding would be a good place to start.
There’s probably not a significant contributor from the Paul Sewald trade
I’m not going to dwell on this too much because it feels mean. And it’s not a “victory lap” by any stretch. But it’s a data point that sticks out to me. I didn’t like the Paul Sewald trade at the time—because the 2023 Mariners had everything to play for and these B+ prospects are fun to follow for a bit but rarely work out—and I like it less now.
Josh Rojas was…temporarily useful? The third base setup did not work out but Rojas had his moments and played to the level you’d expect Josh Rojas to perform at. There’s a decent chance he’s DFA’d.
Dominic Canzone might win a Pacific Coast League Home Run Derby someday. Being a through-and-through quad-A guy sounds depressing as hell but that’s where Canzone resides for now. Maybe he has a good year as the strong side of platoon on a team with PAs to burn and has a 2022 Jake Fraley-type year, posting 1-2 wins and a 120ish wRC+.
Ryan Bliss remains interesting. Boy it’d be cool if he were good enough for the everyday second base job. It’d be cool if I had a game room with four pinball machines and a Miller Lite tap, too. You can’t really bank on anything there, which is unfortunate. But maybe a good deal on Dirty Harry and World Cup comes out of nowhere and we make a move.
Either way, was it worth shedding Sewald and the money owed in 2023 and 2024, plus messing with the mojo in a season you came up a game short? Not to my eye.
The American League West is kind of soft?
The AL West took a step back in 2023, with the Astros winning it with 90 wins. The Mariners failed to capitalize. In 2024, it only took 88 wins to win the West, again by the Astros. The Mariners failed to capitalize.
And it doesn’t seem like that trend is in line to change? The Astros should lose Alex Bregman and they should continue to fade. But they’re the best team in the division right now. They probably don’t have a 100-win season in them but they could definitely win 90ish again in 2025.
The Rangers will reportedly decrease payroll in 2025. Which is nice. But they also do theoretically start to see returns on the Jacob DeGrom deal. They still have Corey Seager and Marcus Semien. And the young boppers, Wyatt Langford and Evan Carter, didn’t go anywhere. But, again, you have to squint to see a great team.
The Oakland Athletics, especially the Oakland Athletics when you think they’ll never be good again, give me the heebie-jeebies. They have some real talent. But whether they keep it is anyone’s guess. Plus the whole Sacramento thing? No way they pull a Team of Destiny out of this. Probably. Almost certainly.
The Angels are quite bad but they will have money to burn and Scott Boras would love to get them in on the Juan Soto bidding. But they also could sign Pete Alonso to an instantly-bad deal.
Basically, a true talent 95-win team likely cruises to a division title. Will the Mariners go for that? Probably not. But that’s the context.
Mitch Garver is your expensive backup catcher
Last offseason, the Mariners did not want to pay good money for a backup platoon catcher. It was a normal enough decision. So Tom Murphy signed with the Giants for two years and $8.25 million—with a club option for another $4 million in 2026.
The Mariners will pay Mitch Garver three times that AAV in 2025, if he’s still here. If he’s still here and the Mariners are smart, he’ll fill an approximation of the role Murphy had and would have in Seattle.
It would be nice if the Mariners received from Garver in 2025 what they thought they were getting in 2024. It’d solve a sizable chunk of their problems. And it isn’t outside the realm of possibility, not at all.
The Mariners would be unwise—or, more likely, quite resource-strapped—to bank on that in 2025.
Or, behind another door, he could be sent outbound with $4 million in cash, sure to post a 148 wRC+ for, like, the Athletics.
The offensive approach, apparently, was a negative
There’s a lot going on here. I’ll be honest, it’s a spot where I’m biased towards folks I’ve worked with or seen work.
One of the last pieces I wrote for Lookout Landing before joining the Mariners organization was on how the “Control the Zone” strategy Dipoto expounded upon sounded a lot like Theo Epstein’s Cubs Way.
The Cubs won their first title in a century ten months later. Mike Montgomery, acquired from the Mariners for Daniel Vogelbach, got the final out.
I loved chopping it up with the baseball ops and player dev folks about controlling the strike zone, winning every pitch, all of that stuff.
Gonna hope this doesn’t warrant an email but I remember shortly after I first got to the M’s, La Crosse Loggers legend Andy McKay—then Mariners Director of Player Deverlopment—sent an email to an alias he probably thought was primarily the baseball ops group but was instead the entire front office, marketing and ballpark ops and guest services and so on. He said, if anyone wanted a copy of the player development handbook—literally The Mariners Way in glossy spiral-bound print form—to reach out.
Mentally, I said “Oh hell yeah.” In literal email, I said something different. But I got it and it was awesome. And talking ball and Mariners player dev with McKay was, in part thanks to that book, fun as hell.
Those conversations turned into videos (the one below before I joined; still a model to follow), and it’s nothing that’s earth-shattering, but winning pitches and winning big counts matters.
If you lose a 1-1, you probably lost the at-bat. If you win it, you’ll win it.
You hire and quickly fire Offensive Coordinator Brant Brown. You…don’t hire a new full-time hitting coach but instead give Director of Hitting Strategy Jarret DeHart and Assistant Hitting Coach Tommy Joseph their boss’s prior responsibilities. DeHart later gets fired, Joseph remains and Edgar Martinez comes in.
Which leaves the question…how much is this core organizational strategy—controlling the strike zone, winning every pitch—prioritized in 2025 and beyond?
Ryan Divish and other accounts said Brown would have batters looking for a specific pitch in a specific spot and if it wasn’t there or a batter missed it, things went sideways. Obviously, that’s gotta be overkill.
But how much of this strategy is gone now?
It’s probably not all of it, not if the new approach is straight from Edgar and his career 14.8 percent walk rate and .418 OBP.
Still, it’s curious. Something that makes me wonder. The Mariners were a lot better under Edgar, someone who was called upon as hitting coach before the Dipoto administration—and succeeded.
Is C-ing the Z still all the rage? Is the way they’re going about it something they need to abandon? Or already did?
It’s worth monitoring.
The outfield is set
Unless they get Juan Soto, of course.
Back in reality though, somehow, Victor Robles was a top 25 position player in baseball after the Mariners acquired him. Among outfielders with at least 200 plate appearances over that span, Robles’s 154 wRC+ ranked sixth—behind only Aaron Judge, Yordan Alvarez, Byron Buxton, Juan Soto and Matt Wallner(?).
Don’t say the Mariners never get lucky with these type of guys. You just can’t, you know, rely on a handful of them all at once.
Still, the Mariners will roll with Robles, Julio Rodríguez and, unless they decide to get cute and shed money in a way that almost certainly blows up in their face, Randy Arozarena.
That rocks.
First base, second base (or shortstop and JP moves to second), third base and designated hitter are fun spots to upgrade. Lots of avenues to do it. Do it to it.
That’s surely not all of the meaningful lessons from the season that was. Some may warrant full posts, others not not so much. Like, the Geno trade was a disaster. And they still haven’t figured out second base. But Colt might be the dude there? And then there’s hoping Lazaro can contribute soon.
There’s a lot more.
Maybe we hit them, maybe we don’t.
Continue to enjoy watching the World Series. And then there’s the election.
Fittingly, after that, it’s the most important Mariners offseason in our lifetime.
Go M’s.