There's a good ball club in there somewhere
A quick temperature check on your 8-9 Seattle Mariners.
“You can see the good Mariners in there but the bad Mariners are stubborn.”
I loved this line (tweet) from Seattle Times transportation reporter David Kroman. It fits almost any era. It is all-encompassing.
I adore it.
You can go as macro or micro with it as your heart desires.
Starting big, you can see the makings of what could be a world-class organization. Beautiful ballpark, city burgeoning with resources, a competent and effective Baseball Ops group—plus, of course, as much young talent as they’ve had in decades.
The bad Mariners are stubborn, though.
If you thought peeking in the door of true contention meant they’d come back with a battering ram, well, no, not quite.
The bad Mariners are stubborn. They’ll try to get by with stopgaps and value plays where they can, even with the roster containing more elite talent than it usually has, a total that has them on the cusp.
And you know this organization—though not this exact ownership group—has spent among the sport’s upper echelon before, so it isn’t impossible.
You can see the good Mariners in there.
I’ll be honest, one of the more annoying parts of the early season is that every game is either an indictment or exoneration based on the result and the events leading to it. This post is not intended to be that.
The reason it’s almost tough to write this post/this week is, honestly, not much has changed since Opening Day or the start of Spring Training or maybe even since last year’s playoffs.
It’s a solid roster with some really strong talent. But there are holes. There are vulnerabilities.
You can see the good Mariners in there but the bad Mariners are stubborn.
And there are more good Mariners.
The Mariners pitching staff is currently tied for first in the league in fWAR at 2.9. Luís Castillo came into 2023 as a Cy Young candidate and if anything has changed, it’s his odds getting stronger.
But the bad Mariners are stubborn.
So damn stubborn.
The most valuable commodity in the game of baseball is outs. And the Mariners lineup finds itself playing with about 20 of them instead of 27 every game. That’s real tough.
I’m not going to dive into the numbers (yet) but Kolten Wong is probably not going to be this bad going forward. Thing is, those plate appearances to date do—quite unfortunately—count.
Baseball Reference has him at -0.9 WAR and FanGraphs has him at -0.5.
He’s been bad on offense. The numbers say he’s been bad on defense. It’s early, but he’s dug such a hole he’s probably about almost halved the value you would expect to see him put up over a full season—probably closer to a one-win player, if that, than the two-plus the Mariners would’ve liked to see.
Dylan Moore lurks, yes, but is Dylan Moore an everyday player on a title-contending team? I don’t know. Hopefully? But just like Wong’s first few weeks, those theoretical early break-in-case-of-emergency righty-on-righty PAs for Moore (career 92 wRC+ in that situation) will count as well.
The good Mariners are in there, though.
This roster has plenty of talent—and the minors gives the front office some bullets to work with, whether it’s augmenting with those players directly or in exchange for external talent.
Like I said above, we’re under 20 games in and not much has changed.
The Mariners are not a bad club and they should be a pretty good one. But they have their deficiencies and do not look like the great club we all want them to be.
Externally, the Astros may step back a tiny bit, the Angels might be solid and the Rangers will be in the mix more than they have in years. Outside the division, the American League as a whole feels as weak as it’s been in a long time.
The opportunity is there to be something more than the Mariners ever have been. But it won’t be handed to them. They won’t just happen into it. It takes commitment.
It takes ambition.
“You can see the good Mariners in there but the bad Mariners are stubborn.”
Love this - thanks Colin!