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# Mariners Quiet After Refsnyder Deal - But Moves Around League Offer Slightly Clearer Signal of 2026 MLB Environment
- URL: https://www.emeraldcityspectrum.com/mariners-quiet-after-refsnyder-deal-but-moves-around-league-offer-slightly-clearer-signal-of-2026-mlb-environment/
- Published: 2025-12-29T05:24:24.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-08T05:56:56.000Z
- Author: Callaghan Bluechel
- Tags: Analysis, Mariners, 2025 MLB Offseason, Rob Refsnyder, Ketel Marte, Brendan Donovan, Eugenio Suarez, Cole Young, Colt Emerson, Ben Williamson, Kazuma Okamoto

[Embed from Getty Images](https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/2231856573?ref=emeraldcityspectrum.com)

The Seattle Mariners got a right-handed platoon bat in Rob Refsnyder on Monday, Dec. 22, pivoting away from Jorge Polanco after the latter signed a two-year, $40 million contract with the New York Mets. Since then, however, scarcely a blade of grass has shifted in T-Mobile Park, as little in the way of Seattle’s direct targets seems to have been meaningfully altered.

In some corners of the league, mountains have been moving; in others (ones the M’s are keeping a keen eye on) there is just rock slowly scraping past rock, with time aplenty until the decisions must be made. But the M’s can be sure that once Opening Day rolls around, the road to glory won’t be any easier than they remember.

### Tyler Soderstrom is the A’s left fielder of the future, and Sacramento might be a surprise contender after four straight losing seasons.

The (formerly Oakland) Athletics have perhaps been baseball’s premier poster child of cheapness for quite some time. Sure, the Pirates and Marlins might have had things more hopeless over the years and the Rays have spent many seasons as Oakland’s seemingly more effective Gulf Coast version, but only the A’s got themselves a Brad Pitt movie (and Michael Lewis book!) about, in part, their unwillingness to spend. Things got so bad in the 2020s that East Bay fans boycotted the team as owner John Fisher’s desire to move the team to Vegas became the worst-kept secret in sports. Since 2025, they’ve been stuck in stadium limbo between an expired lease on the Oakland Colosseum and a stadium in Sin City that won’t be complete until 2028, and are currently set up in the Triple-A Sacramento River Cats’ ballpark in West Sacramento. It’s not Bakersfield or Stockton - or worse, Turlock - but it’s still a minor league stadium meant for an affiliate of the cross-bay Giants.

On the field, though, things have been progressing along a pretty clear plan, which is more than can be said for the Pirates and Rockies. The A’s won 50 games in 2023, 69 in 2024, and 76 in 2025, as a real young core of hitters has emerged. Breakout colonel Nick Kurtz was a horror for 29 MLB teams - and a great first baseman for the A’s - in his rookie season last year, with a .290.383/.619 slash line (batting average/on-base percentage/slugging percentage) and 173 OPS+ (where 100 is league average), accumulating 36 homers, 26 doubles, and 86 RBIs, 5.4 Baseball-Reference wins above replacement (bWAR), and 4.6 FanGraphs wins above replacement (fWAR). Catcher Shea Langeliers, 27 years old and in his fourth season, continued building his game, with improvements in blocking and framing coming alongside a 134 OPS+ to bring him 3.9 fWAR. And Tyler Soderstrom, a left fielder in his third year who under-performed his underlying metrics in 2024, had a 126 OPS+, 25 homers, 34 doubles, 4.3 bWAR, and 3.4 fWAR in a breakout 2025 campaign.

These amazing crops of new players have been inevitably followed in the Athletics’ recent history with the departure of those stars to teams that will pony up the big bucks, rinse and repeat. But a twist has come with Soderstrom: ESPN’s Jeff Passan announced on Christmas that the [A’s signed him](https://x.com/JeffPassan/status/2004278207701492168?ref=emeraldcityspectrum.com) to a seven-year (through 2032), $86 million contract extension with a club option for the 2033 season. It was the largest guarantee in club history, but perhaps something along those lines should have been expected; designated hitter Brent Rooker had signed a five-year, $60 million extension the previous year with a $22 million vesting option for 2030.

Soderstrom’s extension wasn’t even the first monetary splash coming out of West Sac this off-season, as the [Athletics sent](https://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2025/12/athletics-to-acquire-jeff-mcneil.html?ref=emeraldcityspectrum.com) pitching prospect Yordan Rodriguez to the Mets for Jeff McNeil. Although McNeil is set to make $15.75 million in 2026, Queens will reportedly cover $5.75 million of that as part of the trade, while the A’s are probably hoping that his lagging offensive output in the 2020s can be remedied by the team’s bandbox ballpark. McNeil still slashed .243/.335/.411 in 2025 with solid defense at second, so the addition does measurably bolster the A’s.

The important thing for the Mariners is that they might have a tougher road to the playoffs than they did in 2025\. The Astros likely won’t have the cavalcade of injury problems that allowed Seattle to be in position snipe the AL West crown late in the 2025 season (and so winning the division will likely require that the M’s avoid some of their long losing stretches they managed to overcome in 2025), but if the M’s are pushed down to the familiar realm of the wild card chase, they might find themselves facing the Athletics in addition to three or four AL East teams, one AL Central team, and perhaps the Texas Rangers, all competing for three wild card spots. Seattle still has an easier road to October than many in the Junior Circuit, but that’s only in the comparative sense.

### The complete friction in the infield market isn’t breaking super soon - when a move is finally made, will the slow burn continue or will an earthquake move a lot more ground?

There hasn’t been much in the way of news around Seattle’s more discussed infield targets such as Brendan Donovan or Ketel Marte; in fact, infield news around the league has been positively glacial. After Polanco’s deal with the Mets, the only major free agent infielder to sign a contract has been Munetaka Murakami, who went to Chicago’s south side in the waning hours of his posting window. The M’s are consistently and publicly projecting confidence in Cole Young and so might be outside players at most in the second base market - but on the other hand, they could be doing so in an effort to make agents and other teams more amenable to a relatively Seattle-friendly deal. 

Fueling the confidence-projection theory is the fact that Seattle has long been reported to be in talks with the Diamondbacks for second baseman and former Mariner Ketel Marte, but with Arizona apparently looking for an MLB pitcher and multiple high-level prospects, such a deal has been at an impasse for quite some time. Utility man Brendan Donovan from St. Louis has also come up in negotiations (ones that perhaps appear more fruitful), but since new Cardinals president of baseball operations has been measured in his arrival to the Redbird team brass, talks on him are also moving like molasses.

In the third base market, a return for Eugenio Suárez is [among the likelier possibilities](https://www.emeraldcityspectrum.com/home/five-options-extra-mariners-bat-after-jorge-polanco-signing-mets), with the M’s already very familiar with the corner infielder. I’ve argued before that teams can [probably bank on at least another solid year from Suárez](https://www.emeraldcityspectrum.com/home/should-mariners-bring-eugenio-suarez-back-2026), but given that he’s 34, he wouldn’t represent a permanent fixture at the hot corner. Since the DH role in 2026 will probably be filled with a platoon of Refsnyder and Dominic Canzone, bringing Suárez back would ostensibly block Seattle’s plans to get Ben Williamson and Colt Emerson serious big league reps. 

However, it’s not entirely clear if Emerson will start out the year in the Show, and if Williamson’s late-season Triple-A improvements with the bat in 2025 fail to translate into anything meaningful in 2026, the team could very well have a serious issue at third base in what’s looking to be a quite competitive American League. In the event Víctor Robles also fails to make improvements with the stick, the Canzone/Refsnyder platoon could move to right and open up the DH spot for Suárez if Williamson or Emerson prove immediately viable at third.

Neither has much noise been made about other available third basemen. 29-year-old Kazuma Okamoto, posted from the NPB’s Yomiuri Giants, will have to make adjustments to MLB pitching - but he projects to have a clearly beneficial offensive output and would fit Seattle’s needs in roster construction. [MLB Trade Rumors](https://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2025/11/2025-26-top-50-mlb-free-agents-with-predictions.html?ref=emeraldcityspectrum.com) estimated that Okamoto would pull in a four-year, $64 million contract, and that $16 million average annual value (AAV) is [right around the range](https://www.emeraldcityspectrum.com/home/seattle-mariners-offseason-tracker-timeline-salaries-depth-charts) of what the M’s top brass has left for the opening day roster. But the team hasn’t been substantially linked to Okamoto, and as Beisbol FR’s Francys Romero reported on Sunday, Dec. 28, he’s expected to sign with an MLB team [much closer to Jan. 4, 2026](https://x.com/francysromeroFR/status/2005108036256567783?ref=emeraldcityspectrum.com), when his posting window ends.

The through-line for much of this, however, is that there simply hasn’t been much meaningful movement in these markets. Roughly the same sets of suitors are looking at the same group of options they have been for some time, and until one of them blinks in their demands, everyone’s eyes will be locked on everyone else. The question is whether that one slip will send the whole thing into a frenzy or whether the present equilibrium will quickly reassert itself as it did after the Polanco and Murakami deals.