How Should Mariners Approach Deadline Four Games Under .500 Yet Still in Playoff Hunt?

The Mariners certainly know what they’re doing wrong after they dropped their latest series to the Los Angeles Dodgers on Thursday with a 6-2 loss.

“Yeah, it’s up to us,” Bryan Woo said after his five-run, five-inning losing outing. “The front office and coaches and everybody has put enough into the product on the field. It’s time for us to do something about it.”

But they don’t quite know how. The team has a consistent discipline issue, careening between lethargic defeatism and frantic efforts to arrest their decline. The failures of the latter cause the team to return to lethargy, and the cycle repeats on a near-nightly basis.

With this in mind, how should the Mariners approach the upcoming 2026 trade deadline? They have a few more days than they would otherwise have most years - with the deadline set for Aug. 3 - but the hour is fast approaching when they have to decide on tune-ups, changes, and deals.

The team is in an odd spot. It’s not a situation where they can reasonably go out and get one-year rentals like they did in 2025, but it’s also not a sell situation, either; they could very well still go on a run and make a splash in the playoffs. An intuitive approach for Seattle is to deal away upcoming free agents in exchange for longer-term options, but those sort of minor sales would have to be augmented by long-term options for the relevant team (say, a prospect). The M’s also have a bunch of starting pitchers, including near-MLB prospects, allowing them to trade from that pool to deepen other areas of the team.

One thing they cannot do is stand completely pat. Beyond that, however, it’s prudent to examine the attitudes that the Mariners might have about their trade deadline situation; there are lots of ways to skin a catfish, after all.