Who Are the 2025 Mariners?
It’s very difficult pinning down exactly who and what the 2025 Mariners are as a ballclub. In a little over two months of baseball, they’ve already experienced incredibly high highs, such as winning nine consecutive series, and even lower lows, including a 3-6 homestand over the past week that saw them go a combined 1-5 against the lowly Orioles and Nationals.
It’s impossible to have a conversation about them without heavily factoring in the litany of injuries they have accrued over the course of the year. Victor Robles, Luke Raley, Ryan Bliss, Logan Gilbert, George Kirby, Bryce Miller, Jorge Polanco, Matt Brash, and Dylan Moore have all either missed considerable time due to injury or have played through some sort of ailment that has evidently impacted their performance. You’d be hard pressed to find another team in MLB with a list that long of banged-up starters and key contributors.
For a while, the “next man up” mentality was present throughout Seattle’s roster, and it had to be. The offense ranked among the 10 best in baseball in most statistical categories for the first month-plus of the season, not just because of the red-hot starts for Polanco and Cal Raleigh, but also unexpected contributions from the likes of Leo Rivas, Rowdy Tellez, Miles Mastrobuoni, and others. Those contributions, however, hit their expiration date shortly before the midway point of May, and the other parts of the Mariners’ lineup and roster have not been able to make up the difference.
Raleigh has remained one of baseball’s best hitters and J.P. Crawford is enjoying a year similar to his breakout campaign in 2023, but Polanco has gone from one extreme end of the spectrum to the other. Julio Rodríguez has had a more consistent start to his season than in years past, though he hasn’t necessarily been the co-star to Raleigh Seattle has needed. Randy Arozarena hasn’t been able to pick up the slack in that regard, generating little-to-no power from the heart of the Mariners’ order while seeing his strikeout rate climb to heights never before seen in his career.
As a result, Seattle’s offense has found itself in the bottom-10 across the board since the start of May and has become overly reliant upon the home run ball. The Mariners have scored 117 runs over that span with 59 coming via homers (50.4 percent) and have gone 1-7 in games in which they failed to hit a home run since May 9.
They only know one way to win right now, and the lack of non-homer production does not mesh well with the state of the club’s pitching staff, which is simply nowhere near as good (and healthy) as it was in 2024. The numbers for both Bryan Woo and Luis Castillo are very good, but both have had some hiccups along the way. Emerson Hancock has been a pleasant and necessary surprise as well, despite a pair of blowup starts and a limited ceiling. But Miller has struggled mightily as he continues to try and pitch through right forearm trouble and Kirby has experienced a rough return to the rotation. Perhaps at least one of those situations improve, and the expected return of Gilbert in the next week or so should certainly help, but the rotation simply doesn’t elicit anywhere near the same level of confidence it has in each of the last two seasons.
On top of that, the bullpen has at times been a problem area outside of Andrés Muñoz, who’s even come back down to Earth recently with a pair of blown saves after an incredible start to the season. Mariners relievers as a whole rank 14th in ERA (3.80), 21st in FIP (4.19), 23rd in K/9 (7.98), tied-10th in BB/9 (3.40), 21st in fWAR (0.5), and 15th in win probability added (1.31), with Muñoz doing the heavy lifting on most fronts.
Seattle’s offense cannot get away with doing “just enough” and relying on its pitching to win a bunch of close games with the kind of regularity it has in the past. This iteration of the Mariners, even after Gilbert returns to their rotation, needs an offense that can carry the load at times, just as it did for the majority of April and into the early portion of May.
While this talking point was beaten into the ground by anyone who covers baseball and the Mariners in the months leading up to this season, the inconvenient truth is that this all ultimately ties back to a brutally uneventful offseason that should frankly embarrass every person who had a hand in it. The organization’s ownership group has given the public zero reason to believe that winning is at the forefront of its interests, and the front office has proven incapable of making the most of the limited resources it’s been afforded to work with.
There is a league-wide belief that the Mariners will be aggressive in adding to their roster at the trade deadline this summer, but it’s hard not to wonder exactly what position they will be in at that point. Will aggressive moves with the immediate future solely in mind even make sense by then? They’re still three games over .500 with a record of 32-29 and only 1.5 games back of first place in the American League West at the time of this writing, but as mentioned, there is a laundry list of concerns that makes further spiraling down the loss column and division standings seem likely.
Fortunately for Seattle, the rest of its division appears to be just as mediocre as it is. That may be what keeps it alive long enough for the trade market to develop and allow for some of its glaring holes to be plugged. But that’s what the club is right now at its best: mediocre.
