They gotta snap out of this funk, man
The whole season can’t be like this. It won’t be like this. Probably. Right?
The 2015 Mariners went 76-86 and it was the worst season of my life.
The M’s have played worse in seasons I’ve watched them a lot and even so in seasons they, like the 2015 version, were supposed to be very good.
There was something about that year though, man. It just never clicked. It never came close to clicking.
You take the 2014 Seattle Mariners, one of my favorite clubs of all time, and add Nelson Cruz at the peak of his power and you get…a dud?
All the ups and downs of an entire era and it builds to, not the pinnacle that was expected before the season, but it all crashing down?
It was heartbreaking.
When news broke Jack Zduriencik was fired, I remember I was in a small menswear shop in downtown Indianapolis. It wasn’t even September.
I was there with my two brothers, one of whom I’d even started an M’s podcast with just for that should-be special season. And I was looking for a white shirt for my grandfather’s funeral.
Bad times.
Tough times.
This is the part of the piece where I go to look up a specific series when I really started to worry, a sweep on the road against the Dodgers. Had to have at least been May, maybe later. Would’ve had to have been a real bad record, too.
Turns out it was the third series of the year.
Okay so I was a little crazy. I wish I’d been more wrong, though.
• • •
We’re still not there where it warrants a real high level of RPMs on the panic tachometer.
There doesn’t appear to be anything obviously and structurally unsound.
If Josh Naylor went right in the tank at the beginning of a five-year deal, that would be a problem, obviously. So we can’t have that. We probably won’t. He just seems the type to be hurt the most by T-Mobile’s harshest early-season months and benefit, as extremely, when the weather swings.
But look what it took last year, him hitting like nobody ever has in this ballpark, for the M’s to win 90 games.
It takes a lot of talent to win a lot of games.
The Mariners won’t be good if their best players aren’t good because when their best players are good they’re real good. They’re some of the best in the game.
This whole thing hinges on the club having the best position players at two of the sport’s most important spots. If they don’t have that, or something close, the whole picture changes. It blurs and fades.
There’s no reason to think they don’t or won’t have that reality. Julio and Cal will get going—Julio’s already starting to—and when they do, the club will get going, too.
What you’re seeing now, obviously, is what it looks like when they’re sputtering. When they’re sputtering, it puts more pressure on not only the remaining pieces but how all the pieces fit together—and who’s doing the assembling.
• • •
Dustin Ackley and Rickie Weeks in left. Seth Smith and Justin Ruggiano in right.
Those were the big platoons for the 2015 M’s.
They weren’t expected to be, like, super important positions for that team but maybe that’s the issue there/here and we also probably should’ve known better with the parties involved.
I don’t remember nor care to look up what the Twitter discourse looked like back then but I don’t think any of those guys were hitting well enough for someone to say “Hey, come on Lloyd! Let Dustin Ackley and/or Seth Smith face more lefties!” Maybe they were, I don’t know.
What we’re seeing now with the Mariners, specifically with fans justifiably upset with Dan Wilson for not pushing the right buttons with his hitters, is that there are simply too many buttons he needs to even have the option to press.
You know why Luke Raley and Dominic Canzone don’t face lefties? It’s because they’re usually bad against lefties. Because the Mariners expect them, not incorrectly, to continue to be bad against lefties.
What’s the issue with Rob Refsnyder? Well, they got him specifically to hit left-handed pitching but when that specifically looks like starting at designated hitter once or twice a week or coming in cold to pinch-hit against the other team’s best lefty reliever, it can be a little touch and go. More go, really.
The Mariners run platoons because smushing two incomplete players together is a lot cheaper than acquiring and employing one, single more-complete player.
Then it’s on four whole separate players to perform as you expect them to and for your manager to craft their roles just-so night-in and night-out, one early pinch-hit opportunity and recency bias test at a time.
That manager? We can speak very honestly and literally there, without creative liberties.
There, the Mariners installed a franchise hero with no managerial experience as full-time skipper in the middle of a season—no open search or interview process to speak of.
Under him, they took the division in his first year, first time in 25 years. An even 90 wins did it. They beat the Tigers in five, in 15. They took the Blue Jays to seven in the ALCS when they should’ve never let it get there in the first place.
But when they did, when it looked like their best players had done enough to take them to the place they’ve never been, Dan Wilson wilted. And it cost them their season.
It sucks but it’s what happened. We outside know it.
This clubhouse doesn’t know it? It’s hard to imagine. It’s there, it is what it is.
That side of the game isn’t his thing. The combination of old-school feel and modern technical acumen, it wasn’t there then and it doesn’t look like it’s there now. It’s not his thing but it’s a big part of the whole “manager” thing.
It’s not the whole “manager” thing, though.
The other part, as we’ve touched on hereabouts before, is as caretaker of the vibes.
The vibes are not great. Far from it. Like how 2015 Rickie Weeks was far from a great baseball player.
In my post from the last time the Mariners were five games under .500, just before the four Astros wins that constitute half of the team’s victories three weeks into the season, I said we may eventually see if Dan has the ability to pull back on the rudder to the level of his predecessor—to not let what should be a competitive team fully go in the tank.
We are still not quite there yet, serious alarms firing and “TERRAIN! PULL UP! PULL UP!” blaring over the intercom from Rick Rizzs, like those messages at Sea-Tac or on the ferry.
There are some warning lights flashing, though. The 2026 Mariners are not at cruising altitude, obviously. They’re closer to circling back and getting something looked at than they are to cruising altitude.
Their best players gotta play better, yes, but if this team is going to at least be the sum of its parts, they need leadership from somewhere to flip the purple RESET bar (bar?) on the SNES and get the racetrack Nintendo logo fading up with the Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball bat crack behind it.
There are almost a handful of players who could help with that, but if your manager isn’t going to be the best in-game tactician, and he isn’t the best in-game tactician, then he should be good elsewhere—and this is elsewhere.
It’s not clicking. It doesn’t look right, good players are playing bad and the team is losing games in the worst ways. In sloppy ways.
If this group of guys is going to going to seize upon the promise this offseason and all the years building to it presented, it isn’t going to just happen to them. It won’t transpire by accident or without intent
They gotta snap out of it. Someone has to snap them out of it.
Who’s gonna do it?