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# Mariners Potentially Shifting Bullpen Strategy Priorities as Collin Snider Leaves for Cubs
- URL: https://www.emeraldcityspectrum.com/mariners-potentially-shifting-bullpen-strategy-priorities-as-collin-snider-leaves-for-cubs/
- Published: 2025-12-12T01:48:15.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-08T05:57:03.000Z
- Author: Callaghan Bluechel
- Tags: Analysis, News, Mariners, Collin Snider, Jose A. Ferrer, Matt Brash, Casey Legumina, Gabe Speier

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Playing for the 2024 Mariners, Collin Snider put up a 1.94 ERA, 1.176 walks and hits per innings pitched (WHIP), and 3.41 fielding independent pitching (FIP) in 41 ⅔ innings. He struck out 10.2 batters per nine innings and walked 2.8, both better than league average. 

And now, Snider is out of the Mariners organization entirely. He signed a minor league deal with the Chicago Cubs on Thursday, Dec. 11, meaning that any rebound in his baseball journey will come far from the western shore. On the one hand, this was a case of a pitcher taking a big fall and an organization losing faith in his ability to produce; that’s not exactly unheard of in the big leagues. But it, along with Seattle’s [Jose A. Ferrer move earlier in the month](https://www.emeraldcityspectrum.com/home/harry-ford-jose-a-ferrer-ms-bolster-bullpen-at-cost-of-planned-backup-backstop), indicate a directional shift in the Seattle Mariners bullpen strategy away from low arm angle, low-velocity projects and towards relievers with proven ground ball rates and elite pitch speed.

Non-elite relievers, as is often noted, are fickle. Snider declined precipitously to a 5.47 ERA and 1.443 WHIP in 23 ⅓ innings pitched during the 2025 season, suffered a right flexor strain in early June, and spent the rest of the year with the Triple-A Tacoma Rainiers. While his 3.70 FIP in the majors was still respectable (his 92 FIP- was 8% better than league average), Snider found a whole lot of difficulty in his post-injury time with the Rainiers, with an 8.06 ERA, 1.636 WHIP, and 8.10 FIP, though it’s worth noting that the offense-friendly environment in the Pacific Coast League gave him a 149 FIP-, still bad but better than the non-league-adjusted numbers suggest.

What happened to Snider? Fluctuations in reliever performance are to be expected, sure, but to fall from a sub-two ERA in the Show one year to performing almost 50% worse than the average Triple-A guy is not usually in the cards.

For starters, his four-seam fastball took a 1.8 mile per hour dip in 2025, from an average of 94.2 miles an hour to 92.4 miles an hour. This drop in velocity was also shared by his cutter (falling 2.8 miles per hour year-to-year) and sinker (falling 1.5 miles per hour), leaving hitters more time to catch up to all his fastball-type pitches. His cutter in particular got pummeled by opposing hitters in 2025, with a .407/.452/.815 slash line replacing the .321/.321/.464 line that the league had against that pitch in 2024\. His four-seamer, while weathering the decline more effectively, still suffered a whiff rate drop from 31.7% to 21.2% and a hard-hit rate increase from 33.3% to 54.5%. 

But the fastballs don’t tell the whole story of how far Snider fell in 2025\. His sweeper, which he threw 37.6% of the time in 2024 and 28.5% of the time in 2025, suffered no decrease in velocity, nor did it rely much on speed to begin with. Nor did it suffer a decline in spin rate or - according to FanGraphs - location. Still, batters went from a .227/.239/.439 clip against it in 2024 to .250/.323/.536 in 2025, with the pitch’s whiff rate declining from 29.9% to 17.8%. The sweeper did, however, lose 1.5 inches of glove-side break in 2025, and along with a measure of good luck, that was enough to turn it from an out-pitch to a meatball.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Collin Snider rebounds in the North Side. He has certainly shown the chops at the top level, if intermittently, and these kinds of stories are commonplace across professional baseball. But unlike in 2024, the Mariners aren’t looking to guys like Snider as the type of pitcher to produce a bounce-back arc in T-Mobile Park.

Snider’s history with the ground ball is a bit of a complicated one. During his first two seasons for the Kansas City Royals, he relied heavily on a sinker and ended up with a 51.4% ground ball rate during his time in Kauffman Stadium - but once he made the move to Seattle, the M’s focused on developing a low-approach four-seamer, and his grounder rate dropped to 31.2% in 2024\. While it increased a fair bit in 2025, any further re-development into a ground ball pitcher would require the return of a pitch he has thrown 51 times in two years.

Seattle would have likely had a fair bit more patience with Snider if his fastball velocity had remained stable from 2024, as other continued Mariners projects like Casey Legumina have similar profiles of mid-90s velocity and low arm angles. Indeed, both Snider and Legumina have four-seamers with vertical approach angles below five degrees. I venture to say the M’s may have been keener to keep him on if his vertical approach angle was in the elite low sub-four-degree category alongside Matt Brash, Bryan Woo, and the aforementioned Legumina. But despite his exceptionally low arm angle, Snider’s fastball came in at a 4.7 degree approach angle, much less rare than the others - and the real killer for his chances was a four-seamer that went from 95.3 miles per hour in 2023 to 92.4 miles per hour in 2025.

The bullpen guys that Mariners brass is putting trust into, from surer things like Ferrer to players who are more on the project side of things like Carlos Vargas, have two things in common that Snider lacks: elite ground ball rates and high fastball velocities. Unlike Snider’s declining heater, Vargas and Ferrer both scrape the upper 90s velocity-wise with sinkers that produce ground balls more often than most pitchers around the league. Both worm-wallopers have more unremarkable arm angles, but that isn’t where Seattle is looking for their value.

That isn’t to say the M’s are completely forsaking acute angles. Gabe Speier and Matt Brash have four-seam vertical approach angles of 4.2% and 3.4%, respectively, and the unique shape surely helps them miss bats and miss the air. It’s a *shift* in strategy, not a complete *change*, and this shift means that, without something else to offer, the approach angle alone won’t keep a reliever in the Mariners system.