True to the Blue: Early Signs Positive for Mariners Slugger Julio Rodriguez in Spring Training?
Already a multi-time All-Star, Julio Rodriguez has been a face of the franchise for the Mariners since his arrival as a top prospect. But he's still yet to put together a complete season.
Emerald City Spectrum reporter Callaghan Bluechel breaks down early indicators from spring training that could be positive signs for Rodriguez overcoming his prior early season struggles, examines the swings of prospects Michael Arroyo and Jonny Farmelo from four spring training games thus far, and checks out several other prospects and veteran newcomers from the first week of Cactus League action.
Baseball’s Back: Five Notes from Mariners’ First Spring Training Action of 2026
With blue skies above and many excited fans all around in that picturesque Cactus League ballpark, the Seattle Mariners played their first game of 2026 Spring Training on Friday, Feb. 20. The first day of spring is perhaps the most hopeful time for all 30 teams in any given year, with a nearly clean slate injury-wise and the first harsh reality checks of the regular season still a month and change away.
A quite packed house of 9,956 spectators dotted the Peoria Sports Complex to see the Mariners and Padres both take to their home Spring ball yard. They saw prospects go up against powerhouses in exciting duels and yet also witnessed players trip over each other, lose cans of corn in the sun, and make Little League errors in base coverage. No one got hurt and the game doesn’t count, so both sides came away with a smile in a 7-4 win for Seattle. But what does the first preseason action of 2026 tell us about how things might go when real chips are down for the Mariners?
Michael Arroyo put on a good display at the dish, with a homer and double to power early Seattle production.
Seattle’s system has a fair amount of top-end hitting prospects, and although Colt Emerson and Lazaro Montes headline the system, the crown in Peoria bore witness to another of Seattle’s guys in the farm system. Michael Arroyo, who struggled a bit with his power after his promotion to Double-A in 2025 with a .255/.376/.341 slash line (though this was still a 121 OPS+ where 100 is league average) - and yet decreased his strikeout rate against better pitchers - went into Spring with the chance to show what exactly the Mariners have with him.
Five Mariners Hitting Prospects to Keep Tabs on in 2026 Spring Training
The Seattle Mariners announced 34 non-roster Spring Training invitees on Friday. These are players who are not on the 40-man roster - many of them some of the top prospects in the organization - who will nevertheless be able to compete in Spring Training exhibition games in Peoria as a test of their mettle in a more MLB-like environment. Not all of them are close to making it to the Show, but they will still afford the attention of Mariners-world as to where they are in their development. For guys higher up in the farm system, their performance in Peoria might make the difference between starting the year in Cheney Stadium or T-Mobile Park.
This is the first of a series of four articles going over some of the higher-ranked prospects in the Mariners system who have received the Spring training invite and the first of two covering some of the hitters.
Before we get into the prospects, it’s important to familiarize yourself with the 20/80 scale, which baseball scouts use to evaluate players’ abilities or “tools”. Each tool is rated on the scale, where 50 is MLB average, 20 is about the lowest things get for an MLB player, and 80 is about the highest. In statistics terms, each increment of 10 is one standard deviation from the mean, so roughly 95% of big league batters have a hit tool between 30 and 70. Some systems of scouting differentiate between present grades and projected future grades, while others only give those projected future grades. These analyses give the scouting profiles from FanGraphs (which separates present and future) and Baseball America (which does not).
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