50 in 50: 2027 Mariners Need Viable Backup Options

“Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”

It’s one of those quotes that gets attributed to any historical personage broadly viewed as insightful, the kind of thing that shows up online next to the faces of Lincoln, Churchill, and Gandhi. It seems to have been popularized by Dwight Eisenhower, who himself attributed it as something he had heard in the Army.

Regardless of the origins of the phrase - or the various ways of putting it in the jargon of myriad different fields - it’s a good thing to keep in mind for anyone in a leadership role.

One of the phrase’s aspects is that the habit of planning creates the instincts necessary for good decisions in the heat of the moment, with a million neural pathways already primed for action when the time calls.

But more pertinent to the Mariners brass is the other part of that piece of wisdom: that the plan itself will fall apart once it has to go into action, as each potential point of failure gets tested and forces reaction and adjustment. 

Instead of taking this fact to heart, however, the front office has all too often gone into competitive seasons needing everything too many chance things to go right in order for the whole plan to succeed. If any one aspect meaningfully goes wrong - there are injuries, there are underperformers, and so on - the whole plan falls apart.

To be fair, the brass’ planning doesn’t end up as utterly longshot as some (there were things that went wrong in 2025 and that team made the ALCS) but managing to be a bit more realistic than Operation Citadel is not exactly an extraordinary feat.

But Jerry Dipoto’s Mariners have made such clockwork plans, where so much of the load falls on a series of ifs, a definite and unfortunate habit. If they get a career year from a stalwart, if all the prospects improve as expected, if other teams don’t break a 90-win divisional ceiling, and so on.

And though Dipoto assumed plenty of guilt for the communication breakdowns and the lack of accountability in his postseason presser - and even commented about the need for more depth - he still revealed his reliance on those ifs to pan out as he described the player core going into 2027.

Obviously, we have free agents coming up. J.P., Randy, most notably, but a couple of others. We need to refill those voids, and they're not small voids to to refill, especially Randy in left field.

But we are excited about our young players. Michael Arroyo, I think, had a wonderful 40 plate appearance transition to the big leagues. Laz (Montes) does exciting things. We have Brendan Donovan coming back, who left healthy. Hopefully, he is ready to go, and we see the version of Brendan we saw, which is an awesome player. We just saw him for 39 games; we'd like to see that for the full schedule and a postseason, and I think we will.

And if we do that, now we have the flexibility of, “Donny” can play a lot of different positions. Colt (Emerson) can play either of the two left side infields. Arroyo can spell Cole Young at second base versus a tough lefty. He can play left field and continue to evolve in that way. And then we'll look to trade and free agency to see if there's the potential of finding that impact bat that might come help.

-Jerry Dipoto, Sept. 28, 2026

That whole plan relies on just as many ifs that Dipoto’s 2026 plan relied on. If Emerson’s 2026 struggles aren’t indicative of anything more than the effects of injury; if Michael Arroyo’s strong rookie month wasn’t an overperformance; if Lazaro Montes can make enough contact; if Brendan Donovan is healthy. That only scratches the surface of the cascade of ifs that the Mariners must withstand if they are going to be viable in 2027.

And these aren’t anywhere close to guarantees. Just to take one of the examples, there were 39 rookies who had 150 or more plate appearances in 2026 and Emerson’s .581 OPS was the third-lowest of that entire sample. This was even in a year when plenty of rookies bedazzled the league; these 39 players combined for a .254/.327/.399 slash line. The 23 rookies (including Emerson) who matched or exceeded Emerson’s 241 plate appearances logged a combined .256/.335/.412 slash line, with an OPS 28 points higher than league average. 

If one of these guys doesn’t turn out as planned - a far more likely “if” than the chance they all turn out fine - the M’s will be back to their depth. And the lack of depth is what truly killed the Mariners offense in 2026.

The team gave 335 plate appearances to Leo Rivas, Weston Wilson, and Patrick Wisdom. Another 114 went to Rob Refsnyder, who at least had the justification of his 2022-2025 performances backing it up, but the 101 plate appearances that Taylor Ward logged had little merit given his looming free agent status, the state of the team, and his horrid performance. Brock Rodden stayed up long past the point where he got completely exposed by MLB pitching in his 72 plate appearances. Miles Mastrobuoni may have been more capable than all of them save Refsnyder in recent years, yet he also did poorly in his 30 plate appearances.

Those six players logged 690 plate appearances between them, roughly between the amount taken by Randy Arozarena this year and Julio Rodríguez last year.

Teams in the modern era, even those with roughly average means, are proverbially supposed to recreate good players in the aggregate. But instead of creating a good player in the aggregate, or even an average one, those seven guys created 1977 Jerry Royster - also known as the worst single-season wins above replacement (WAR) since integration, with -3.8 according to FanGraphs.

Four (rounding up) more wins wouldn’t have gotten the 2026 Mariners to .500, but more bullpen depth offered its own half of the proverbial 1,000 cuts that killed Seattle. Nick Davila and Josh Simpson combined for -0.6 WAR, sure, but it was the fact that the team couldn’t trust guys like Davila, Simpson, Cole Wilcox, Michael Rucker, and Alex Hoppe to do anything meaningful that led to Eduard Bazardo’s arm falling off by August. 

It may be presumptive of me, but I venture to say Bazardo’s 4.01 ERA, 4.73 FIP, and -0.5 WAR wouldn’t have happened if he were allowed some rest; you may only look at his 2.96 ERA and 3.57 FIP through the end of July to see that clearly.

Reverse that -4.9 WAR - mind you, this entails not finding good players or even average ones but replacement level, meaning what you could expect to acquire for league minimum - and the 76-win Mariners of reality round up to being an 81-win team in the playoffs. It would have been thanks to the utter mediocrity of their divisional rivals, to be sure, but it would have been a playoff team nonetheless [1]. 

The Mariners have an organizational philosophy of not paying relievers, which is actually a viable strategy - so long as you can produce enough good relievers other ways. Perhaps the M’s trusted their reliever lab too much, perhaps they foolishly expected the most injury-prone segment of baseball players to avoid injury, perhaps they fell asleep at the switch. But the players they did get were almost entirely organizational depth or reclamation projects, players who could not be counted on to all contribute. 

And some of the reclamation projects were far less feasible than others. The front office made a savvy acquisition in Cooper Criswell and got someone with actual potential in Hoppe, but Simpson and Davila were a bit less than realistic.

Going into 2027, that is the kind of move they have to avoid. Seattle got Michael Toglia off waivers from the Reds, but aside from one year of roughly league-average hitting in 2024 (a .767 OPS, but he played for the Rockies, so it was a 102 OPS+), he has done less than nothing in his career. 

Toglia is also bad at defense; in short, he can’t be reasonably penciled out for anything but organizational depth at this point. If he’s the next man into the major league roster when someone gets hurt in 2027, the Mariners are in a bad place. 

There is a good reason why good teams stack their bench with MLB-viable players, and why better teams store some of those guys away in Triple-A. The M’s, whatever their “Plan A” for 2027, have to be willing to do the same.

Otherwise, they will more than likely find themselves giving bucketfuls of at-bats to sticks like Wisdom, Wilson, and Ward.

[1] At least that’s true on a spreadsheet that uses FanGraphs WAR for pitchers. The math works in Baseball-Reference WAR (bWAR) as long as you swap Bazardo and Rucker - meaning no assumption or hypothetical about Bazardo, hence bWAR could be better to use here - giving -4.8 bWAR between Rucker, Simpson, Davila, Ward, Refsnyder, Mastrobuoni, Rivas, Rodden, and Wilson.