Well, they gotta play better
And other notes from the early going
Four series in—no series wins. It’s not what you want.
A stretch like this probably doesn’t matter an enormous amount in the months-long marathon of a baseball season but they’re closer to worrying territory than anyone wants them to be a mere two weeks into the 2026 campaign.
At 4-9, they’re off to their worst start in 15 years to begin perhaps their most hyped season ever. The Mariners are nothing if not themselves.
It’s been a bit, which sucks, because I haven’t gotten you a post and it also means there’s a bunch of random stuff I now have to write about.
Let’s hit a big chunk of it by touching on items of various levels of concern.
Stuff I’m not super worried about and potentially even cool with
The rotation
The only team that’s gotten better production from their pitching through the first two weeks of 2026 is the Yankees. The Mariners saw up close what that staff looks like. Do not care for it.
This Mariners’ group—and especially the rotation? Big fan. The starters have been the best in baseball so far.
Between injuries and varying levels of underperformance, the Mariners did not have a great rotation last year. Honestly, they didn’t even really have a good one—just average. By fWAR, they were 14th on the year and 7th in the American League.
If the Mariners can run out a top five rotation and top 10 bullpen, they’ll win a lot of games. They should win a lot of games.
Julio and Cal
Nope. Not gonna do it.
That’s part of this for sure, I cannot and will not worry about the two best players on the Mariners and two of the best players in baseball because if things go sideways with either of these guys, the Mariners are so boned.
There’s also the part where it’s just not going to happen. Dudes have slow starts and Julio always has slow starts, though there’s no guarantee of even that continuing.
Cal, as others have noted, had a start similar to this one just last year. Through 55 plate appearances last season (he’s at 56 PAs this year), his wRC+ was 30 points higher, yes, but he was still rocking an unsightly .184/.286/.347 line.
Almost everyone on the team has to start playing better but as soon as these guys begin playing to their MLB The Show ratings—doesn’t have to be the Finest or Benchmark cards, either, just Live Series—then the entire picture, team-wide, changes quite a bit.
The Automated Ball-Strike system
Gonna be real honest with you—I did not have enough parts for the section on things that are going well or that I’m at least not worried about.
But ABS rocks. I could have and should have done a whole post on why it’s great but I think I can knock it out here in something a little longer than a tweet.
In today’s world, there are no repercussions for people in power. There’s barely even demand for a higher quality of work and better results.
And umps are a good bit like cops. They have little to no interest in being better.
The number of umpires who have ever checked a strike zone plot during or after a game in an effort to improve their craft, you could probably count it on one hand—of a guy who’d lost a couple fingers to a few too many cold pops on the Fourth of July.
To see not only a level of correction but also a form of public reprimand for an authority figure?
As we’ve quickly seen, it’s electric.
Monitoring the situation
Here’s the stuff that’s in the middle. I’m not worried about it. But I’m not not worried about it.
All the bat speed chatter
If you’re a plugged in Mariners fan, you’ve probably heard something about how Mariners’ bat speeds are down and down big. It’s not nothing and I may dive into the whole thing more analytically but there’s a little bit of sloppy work being done here.
For one, some folks are looking at this year’s average team bat speed and comparing it to last year’s—the entire year’s—average team bat speed. That’s suuuuch sloppy work, even with a new metric. It’s not a completely different group of guys but it’s not the same, either.
Then there’s people comparing early swing speeds to guys’ full-season averages. Yes, the metric does supposedly stabilize quickly but there are guys with a history of starting slow and then speeding up, including at least one of their best players (*cough,* Julio).
The platoons
They make so much sense in theory. Get one guy who’s good facing righties and get another guy who mashes lefties and, boom, you made yourself an All-Star from one fringe regular and one veteran journeyman.
Ah, if only it were that simple.
Someone on Twitter recently compared it to a parlay, such an apt comparison I was surprised I hadn’t thought of it earlier but I also do not gamble.
It doesn’t seem that crazy when you need just this team to win and only that guy to post his averages and the this total to be smidge over what you’d expect it to be. It can and should happen.
But when you need all of them to hit? It gets dicey.
The Mariners, as constructed, need—or would like to have—all of Luke Raley, Dominic Canzone, Rob Refsnyder and Victor Robles be solid Major League contributors in their expected roles.
That’s quite the quad of guys—or at least the trio of Mariners—who have been anything but consistent in their careers.
The Mariners’ roster, as constructed, was built for this group to go four-for-four on effectiveness.
We will see.
ABS challenge strategy
Putting this here is probably overly kind because it looks like the Mariners came out in 2026 with next to no plan whatsoever on what they wanted to do with ball-strike challenges.
In the second series of the year, the contrast between the Yankees’ operation and what the Mariners were doing was staggering. This is a little inside baseball, literally, but it made me think of how the Yankees were one of the first teams to stop listing their front office staff on their website because they had such an ungodly number of Baseball Ops staffers and didn’t want people poaching them.
And that isn’t a slight against the Mariners’ group, which punches above its weight and then some, but these gigantic clubs like the Yankees and Dodgers will throw resources at everything.
But maybe resources aren’t the issue, I don’t know. Regardless of cause, the results are all that matter and the Mariners have been sloppy here.
By Baseball Savant’s ABS leaderboard, which charts out “net overturns more than expected by a team seeing identical pitches,” the Mariners are 22nd overall. When you look specifically at how the hitters are doing—and these numbers do include challenges for and against the Mariners—nobody is seeing fewer net overturns than the M’s.
This can change. Maybe it’s all noise. But right now it looks sloppy and like a lack of preparation.
Hey, timely transition.
Yeah I’m worried by or annoyed about this stuff
I gotta wrap this up and negativity doesn’t play that well anyway so let’s rip through this.
Dan. Dannnnnnn.
Dan Wilson is managing like a catcher from the ‘90s who’s a franchise hero despite meh on-field performance and has never competitively managed a team in his life.
Crazy how that works.
If you had hoped last year’s Game 7 debacle may have scared him straight and forced him to modernize his in-game management, particularly as it comes to the bullpen, you should probably stop doing that.
There’s a lot going on here, a number of things to point to, but Wilson’s feel just has not been good.
I think first of game two of the season, when he had Gabe Speier hot as Eduard Bazardo walked a pair of batters in front of left-handed hitting Steven Kwan. Same as last October, Wilson was burned by his faith in Bazardo with Kwan singling in the go-ahead run.
So if in-game management isn’t his thing, it has to be something else. Theoretically.
One of the things I always liked about Scott Servais was how (stepback 2019 team aside), he never let his teams go in the tank. There were clubs, solid clubs, who could’ve folded after tough April, May and June stretches but they never did. He brought ‘em back.
Hopefully this early run is just random noise but, if it isn’t, we’re going to see here soon if Dan Wilson has the ability to pull back on the rudder when his clubhouse needs him to.
There’s a reason teams run high payrolls
It’s redundancy. It’s the margin for error. It’s adding another star even though you might not need one because a star is better than a regular and a regular is better than a bench guy.
Imagine if this team was so talented Brendan Donovan didn’t have a guaranteed spot on the field every day—or if Randy Arozarena was largely a platoon player.
The Mariners are gunning for their first World Series championship with a below average Opening Day payroll. They opened the year 17th, down from last year.
Another $40 million or so to put them at least on the level of other American League contenders would mean another star. It’d mean not leaning so heavily on Julio and Cal.
It’d mean a lot.
Money isn’t the solution to every problem, but it can sure paper over a lot of them.
The defense is not great
By Baseball Savant’s Fielding Run Value, the Mariners are the fifth-worst defensive unit in baseball. By Outs Above Average, they’re second-worst. By Defensive Runs Saved, they’re sixth-best—which, wtf.
The optimist would probably say the truth lies somewhere in the middle but the realist who’s watched this team day-in and day-out would surely disagree.
It isn’t as if this is necessarily surprising. We’ve seen it swing games for them with balls going under Leo Rivas’s glove at third, Connor Joe throwing a key double play ball to the backstop, Randy Arozarena letting lazy flies get behind him and so on.
It’s just—whew, it’s a tough way to lose games. It’s awful to watch.
Maybe Colt Emerson helps, eventually, by shoring up third and moving Brendan Donovan to a corner outfield spot and getting Randy, occasionally, out of one. Maybe. Maaaaybe.
Thing is, you wouldn’t expect the Mariners to be a good defensive team and they just aren’t one.
It’s obnoxious.
Let’s start winning some baseball games, huh?
Here’s to a pleasant Friday evening at the ballpark.
Go M’s.