Analysis: The Mariners say payroll will increase in 2025. How much?

SEATTLE – A year ago, Seattle Mariners chairman John Stanton promised that player payroll would increase for the 2024 season.

And it did … on the margins.

The Mariners’ season-ending payroll in 2023: roughly $140 million.

The Mariners’ season-ending payroll here at the end of the 2024: roughly $145 million.

Stanton has taken a similar stance entering the 2024-25 offseason. He has, according to multiple sources, promised that player payroll will increase for the 2025 season.

How much? That’s not entirely clear.

How will that influence the club’s offseason spending? That’s not entirely clear, either.

What is clear: The Mariners do not intend to dive into the deep end of the free-agent pool this winter.

Which means they won’t pursue the likes of Juan Soto or Pete Alonso or Alex Bregman or any other high-priced veteran. Not because they can’t afford it, Stanton has explained, but because as matter of baseball economics the Mariners don’t want to pay top dollar for aging players.

The scars of the Robinson Cano contract, 11 years later, still feel like a fresh wound for the Mariners.

“We’ve got the resources to be able to do the things we need to do to put a good team on the field,” Stanton said in an interview with The Times in June.

“We’ve never been focused on free-agent, bats, (those) kind of big-dollar free agent bats as a matter of strategy, not because of anything having to do with resources.”

After missing out on the playoffs in each of the past two seasons, this looms as one of the most important offseasons in club history.

The team’s finances have been an increasing source of frustration for a fan base eager to see the club supplement its roster around a talented core that helped the Mariners end a 21-year playoff drought in 2022.

“My objective for us is to have a sustainable product on the field, meaning a team that is consistently competing every year,” Stanton said in The Times interview. “We’ve grown payroll each of the last three years. Maybe not as much as you would like us to … but we all deal with constraints, right? But we are doing everything we can to put a competitive product on the field.

“I think we’ve got a terrific team, and we built it the right way. And the most important thing to me is, is it sustainable over time?”

The Mariners’ payroll spending peaked in 2018 at roughly $162 million, per Cot’s Baseball Contracts. That was the final year of the Felix Hernandez/Cano/Kyle Seager/Nelson Cruz core, and that figure ranked as the 10th-highest payroll in MLB at the time. (The Mariners’ projected $145 million payroll for 2024 ranks 18th.)

The Mariners began their “step back” rebuilding plan after that season, and their payroll decreased each of the next two seasons.

A year ago the Mariners offseason was defined by cost-cutting – “payroll flexibility,” as the team called it.

They chose not to bring back Teoscar Hernandez; they traded away popular third baseman Eugenio Suarez for virtually free; and they moved on from former top prospect Jarred Kelenic as a mean to dump two other bloated contracts.

Will the Mariners have to take a similar tact this offseason?

Given the Mariners’ ongoing uncertainty surrounding ROOT Sports, their regional sports network, player payroll is not expected to make a sizable increase for 2025.

Three MLB sources recently told the Times that Mariners president Jerry Dipoto has been given a contract extension to return for a 10th season in charge of baseball operations.

Dipoto, in an impromptu press briefing Saturday afternoon the Mariners dugout, laid out a general plan for how the front office is approaching the offseason. He acknowledged that the Mariners’ payroll will increase simply because their young core players – notably, Julio Rodriguez, Logan Gilbert, Cal Raleigh and George Kirby – are due (deserved) salary raises.

“Last year, we had a pretty good feeling that there were a number of teams that were in a unique situation due to the RSN issues,” Dipoto said. “I don’t know how that’s going to play out this season or what it’s going to mean for other teams in the league. The only thing I do know going into this (off)season is how it’s going to play out for us, and it’s not going to be nearly the concern that it was this past year.”

The Mariners bill themselves as a draft-develop-trade organization, and that’s what they will again lean back on this offseason to supplement their roster … on the margins.

“Our team is here,” Dipoto said. “They’re under (club) control. And obviously we’ve been fairly active in the trade market, and there are different ways that we can address our holes that maybe don’t include (trading away) the players that are here.

“But our team is as sustainable as it gets, and with very few exceptions, it’s the same way in 2026.”