Jason Shoot: As Mariners have surged into contention, Trader Jerry needs to deliver knockout punch to playoff drought
Trader Jerry’s phone calls to his baseball counterparts presumably are different in tone and substance than they were a few weeks ago.
Seattle Mariners general manager Jerry Dipoto watched his team flounder through the first two months of the season, but the M’s have been the hottest team in baseball in a stretch dating back to June and have roared back into contention in the American League’s wild-card race.
Through Saturday, the Mariners have reeled off 13 consecutive victories and won 21 of their past 24 games. That surge has catapulted the M’s over seven teams in the AL standings and into a wild-card slot as the projected No. 5 seed.
The Mariners are playing with the swagger of a team that has outscored opponents 115-64 since June 19. Seattle’s pitching staff has posted a 2.34 earned-run average in July, and the offense is averaging 4.6 runs a game this month despite suspensions and injuries keeping several of the team’s stars out of the lineup.
It’s been a stunning reversal of fortune for a team that was 10 games under .500 on June 19 with a 29-39 record and eight games out of the wild-card hunt. The Mariners had just lost four of five at home to the Los Angeles Angels and ended an 11-game homestand with three wins. Game recaps read like postmortem reports, and beat writers were signaling an inevitable continuation of the sport’s longest playoff drought.
The Mariners will exit the All-Star break with 69 games remaining on the schedule and the trade deadline looming on Aug. 2. The analytics-minded folks at Fangraphs place the odds of Seattle making the playoffs at 55.5%. Houston has built a near-insurmountable lead in the AL West, meaning the Mariners’ only path to the postseason will be through the wild card. Toronto, Boston, Cleveland, Baltimore and Chicago are within 3½ games of the M’s in the AL standings, a razor-thin margin.
Barring any setbacks, Mitch Haniger and Kyle Lewis will return to the field during the second half of the season. If both players return to form, that is some considerable thump in the lineup. But other deficiencies are unlikely to be fixed with in-house solutions, which leads the conversation back to Dipoto.
The Mariners clearly must be buyers before the trade deadline, but the number of teams still in contention only serves to drive the cost of acquiring players higher. Dipoto has been hesitant to unload the organization’s most highly regarded prospects in recent deals. Fortunately, two areas of concern – second base and finding an inning-eater for the rotation – are unlikely to cost the M’s a premium prospect.
Second baseman Adam Frazier’s woeful OPS of .604 is rooted in a .236 batting average, including a .143 mark against off-speed pitches. Backup Abraham Toro is batting .177 (just .079 against breaking balls) and doesn’t figure to push Frazier out of the lineup.
Cincinnati’s Brandon Drury signed a minor league deal in the off-season and has rewarded the Reds with 18 homers, the most he’s hit in a season. His performance is enough of an outlier given his past production, however, to justify concerns about his output moving forward.
Miami’s Joey Wendle offers a little more pop than Frazier and can bounce around the infield on defense. The Marlins are still within striking distance for the wild card in the National League, though, so Wendle’s suspected availability is a little more uncertain than Drury’s.
On the mound, concerns the staff could get overworked are legitimate. Seattle’s Logan Gilbert had allowed seven home runs in his five starts before Saturday’s five-inning, one-run effort against Texas, and he is projected to approach 200 innings pitched, a massive increase over his previous career high of 119⅓ innings last season. George Kirby is on an innings count. Robbie Ray, Marco Gonzales and Chris Flexen have amassed a combined 324 innings.
A veteran like Pittsburgh’s Jose Quintana – reports suggest Mike Clevenger of San Diego could be had, too – might be attractive if the cost for a top-of-the-rotation arm like Cincinnati’s Luis Castillo is prohibitive. Kansas City’s Brad Keller could be another relatively low-cost acquisition to stretch out the rotation.
Chasing a rental piece like Chicago Cubs catcher Willson Contreras would make sense for a late-season push without hindering the development of 25-year-old Cal Raleigh.
A question that will hover over the franchise until the Mariners snap their 21-year postseason skid is just how far the team is willing to go to compete with Houston and the AL’s best teams this year and beyond. Payroll remains depressed compared to seasons past even though the team punches “well above our weight on the television deal” with Root Sports, according to former team president Kevin Mather in February 2021.
Dipoto has proven he can make the Mariners competitive with the budget he’s been given. It remains to be seen if team ownership will invest the resources necessary to make the Mariners a perennial playoff team and a legitimate World Series contender.
Seeing is believing.