The Mariners aren't changing

After another bad 24 hours for the Mariners in the media, it's clear that nothing plaguing how the organization's upper management serves the fans will change

Photo by Steven Bisig, USA TODAY Sports

“What the hell are we doing? Are you trying?”

This could easily have been one of several thousand angry replies to Mariners social media posts over a winter of discontent for their fans. Facing an opportunity to push their roster forward this offseason, upper management sat on its hands, hemmed and hawed, and came away with Donovan Solano as its biggest addition.

But that quote wasn’t from a reply guy, it was delivered by the Mariners’ designated hitter in their most recent regular season game, 16-year MLB veteran Justin Turner. Turner, who signed with the Chicago Cubs last month, aired frustration about the state of the Mariners to Bob Nightengale of USA Today in an article that lit social media on fire on Wednesday.

Turner took the criticisms of Mariners upper management, particularly ownership, to a new level Wednesday.

The fact that they missed the playoffs by one game, and didn’t go out and add an impact bat or two when you have the best pitching staff in baseball…just seems absurd to me.

Fans have similarly lamented the team’s lack of ambition from the moment they signaled they wouldn’t compete in free agency following the magical 2022 season. This offseason, I’ve noticed a much wider consensus throughout the online fandom emerge. Fans understand the team doesn’t suck, but they’re frustrated by the lack of effort to make the team great, exemplified by the Solano-headlined offseason.

That consensus expanded beyond the fanbase in the past few months and into the national media, left with no choice but to survey the raw “players in, players out” and scratch their heads at the approach. ESPN.com’s David Schoenfield gave the Mariners offseason an F grade, writing “The 2025 Mariners are going to look a lot like the 2024 Mariners, a team that missed the playoffs by one win -- for the second straight season.”

The Athletic’s Jim Bowden was slightly kinder, giving the Mariners a D, and writing “Seattle hitters led the majors in strikeouts in 2024, and the Mariners did nothing to address it in the offseason.”

Former MLB player and Talkin’ Baseball host Trevor Plouffe said the Mariners had “the worst offseason, relative to what my expectations are of them, and where they can be, which is a World Series team.”

The best illustration of the rise of this “good, not great” consensus around the Mariners came in a brilliant interview of Jerry Dipoto by KJR’s morning show hosts, Chuck Powell and former Mariner Bucky Jacobsen. Both Powell and Jacobsen have been more favorable toward Dipoto than many of their colleagues, but this first major question from Powell displayed the shift toward that aforementioned consensus:

“You’ve done a great job with the rebuild, and it feels like you have a championship foundation here, and yet, in the last couple of years, and particularly this offseason, where’s that championship move?”

Justin Turner torches the Mariners

The Nightengale article was a remarkable step forward for the mounting frustration around the direction of the team. He was not a fan, nor a local media member with an axe to grind, nor a national media writer swooping in to look at box scores or transaction logs, but an active player who appeared in the team’s most recent game, going on the record to criticize how the team’s baseball operations are being managed.

Turner, who was effusive in his praise for the Mariners young rotation, said “there’s never going to be a better time in the history of that franchise to have added a couple of bats to make a run than this year.” I’m not sure a quote from an active player in an article has ever lined up so well with an average Mariners fan’s disgruntled tweet. Except perhaps, as the article references, when Cal Raleigh publicly criticized the team’s lack of spending at the end of the 2023 season, and apologized the next day.

Seattle Times Mariners beat reporter Ryan Divish surveyed the scene in the Mariners’ clubhouse following Turner’s comments Wednesday, and wrangled this anonymous quote from a Mariners player: “I would think any intellectual baseball fan that’s been following this team would see what has been happening.”

An interesting wrinkle of Turner’s commentary to Nightengale saw the veteran mostly absolve Dipoto in his picture of the organization’s shortcomings.

“I think Jerry catches a bad rap for a lot of these trades and how crazy some of these trades have been," Turner said. “But now being a part of it, I kind of understand. He doesn’t have any money to spend, so he’s got to create money. Like, OK, is it really Jerry’s fault?

That quote stands out, particularly since Dipoto has earned a reputation for poor communication that has frustrated Mariners players over the years, most notably Kyle Seager. For Turner, a respected veteran who has seen almost everything there is to see in the league, to openly back Dipoto in that manner definitely indicates some progress in Dipoto’s perception within the Mariners clubhouse.

Jerry Dipoto gives an interview about his interviews

Photo by Steph Chambers, Getty Images

Where Dipoto has regressed and not progressed is in how he speaks to and about the fans of the baseball team he runs.

In an article published by The Athletic Thursday morning, Angels reporter Sam Blum interviewed Dipoto . . . about his interviews. The timing of the Blum-Dipoto article was almost definitely totally coincidental with the Turner-Nightengale piece, but in combination, it doesn’t paint a picture of an organization willing to do anything different than take the most frustrating possible path for its fans.

Dipoto, who primarily contributes to that frustration not through head-scratching transactions but by delivering quotes that insult fans’ intelligence, used this article to lament his reputation he has wholly earned since he delivered his infamous 54% and “doing the fans a favor” comments in October 2023. From the article:

“Is it a hard job? Yeah,” Dipoto said. “It’s a hard job. But most jobs are hard jobs. But in most jobs, they don’t stick a microphone in front of your face.”

Conscious of that, Dipoto has intentionally scaled back the number of times he speaks publicly. Seemingly every time there is a microphone in his face, he says something that rubs a disgruntled fan base the wrong way.

“Truly, I could say ‘hello,’” Dipoto said, “and it would turn into a thing right now.”

If I’m following this framing:

• Dipoto is claiming that what makes his job more difficult is the need to make public comments to the media and whenever he talks it will “turn into a thing”

• As a result, he’s intentionally doing less media and public talking

• He’s saying this in an exclusive interview with a media member about how he talks to the media

Got it. Jerry’s “I’m intentionally doing less media” shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by his shirt.

To be charitable to Jerry, he has done less media since his infamous press conference made him a national laughingstock for a news cycle. His weekly radio show/pizza oven check-in with Brock and Salk didn’t return for the 2024 season. That show was a staple of online discourse during the 2022 and 2023 Mariners seasons and led to another notable Dipoto quote, when he said in June 2023 that “we could go out and acquire prime Babe Ruth and it's not going to help us.” After he was traded in late 2023, Jarred Kelenic went on Foul Territory and said that particular comment brought “unwanted, unneeded attention to the team.” Dipoto has also recorded just six total episodes of his podcast, The Wheelhouse with Jerry Dipoto, since the 54% press conference, and just one in the last 10 months.

But to Blum’s point, when Dipoto still does speak to the media, it doesn’t usually go well for him. His national embarrassment at the end of 2023 caused the Mariners to convert the end-of-season press conference to a roughly 30-minute media scrum before the second-to-last game of the season. In February, on a private media call officially announcing the Jorge Polanco re-signing, Dipoto rankled fans by claiming the Mariners offensive issues are more perception than reality. He also said the team’s offseason was quiet since it didn’t have many holes to fill, despite GM Justin Hollander’s earlier identification of several infield holes that needed filling and weren’t filled except in the most charitable reading of the offseason.

Then there’s the continued insistence that somehow the fans or the media are at fault for misinterpreting his 54% comments some 18 months later. From the Blum article:

Dipoto now wavers between two competing thoughts. One is recognizing that he communicated his point poorly. The other? Maintaining that it’s not his fault that the message wasn’t fully understood.

“People obviously didn’t understand it the way I expressed it,” Dipoto said, speaking with The Athletic in his spring training office earlier this spring. “My guess is that 98 percent of people didn’t actually listen to it. They just read it off a tweet.

“It’s what it is. Maybe they wouldn’t have understood it any better had they heard the whole thing. And that’s on me for poorly communicating what I think is a simple idea.”

Leaving aside the fact that the videos of him saying the comments were what went viral and caused the national news cycle, what Dipoto still misses about the comments is the message he delivered directly to the fans. Not once in Blum’s article does the word “favor” come up, and the insistence that Dipoto is doing the fans of the only baseball team never to make the World Series a favor by trying to win roughly 87 games every year is what drives much of Mariners fans’ continued frustration with their president of baseball operations.

Dipoto even acknowledged franchise history in Blum’s piece, saying “I don’t want to continue to constantly apologize to people for not winning the World Series in 1979, ’89, ’99. I understand the history of the Mariners. We can’t erase 48 years.”

That’s wonderful to hear that you understand, Jerry. Do you get why we’re frustrated with making the playoffs once in nine years from 2016 through 2024, though?

Fans in the dark

Wednesday was a particularly challenging day for the Mariners that could have been boosted significantly by some good old fashioned endorphins derived from watching the franchise player hit the baseball. Sure enough, Julio Rodríguez went deep in both of his first two ABs against the Royals.

The only problem? No one could watch it.

And sure, the game was at the Royals’ Cactus League home and nowadays Spring Training games are largely broadcast by the home team. But as Julio was homering twice, the Mariners had zero coverage of the game except through the radio broadcast on Seattle Sports. Until the conclusion of the game, the team’s most recent tweet was a retweet of ROOT Sports promoting a new episode of Mariners All-Access that the team’s television station was premiering DURING THE GAME. As of Thursday, a video of just one of the homers had made it to social media and it wasn’t via the team.

At the outset of Spring Training, the Mariners released their spring broadcast schedule, which included a notable yearly uptick in broadcasts. That uptick came in the form of increased webcasts, a limited but direct-to-consumer format that has largely been a huge win for the team in terms of increasing access to the product.

But with that announcement came a curious claim; the Mariners announced the eight webcasts and seven ROOT broadcasts as “more Spring Training games than ever before” available for their fans to watch. Sure, the 15 broadcasts are certainly an upgrade on recent yearly spring offerings, but more than ever before seemed suspect.

Surely, that wouldn’t be verifiably false, right? Well, the Mariners neatly archive their press releases and a lucky shot Google search of how many exhibition games they broadcast 10 years ago before the 2015 season yielded a release announcing that there would be sixteen Cactus League games broadcast that year. So much for that.

In a rare offseason piece of good news, Kevin Martinez ascended to the role of Mariners President, Business Operations in October. As many of the tributes to Martinez when the news was announced indicated, he’s been the heart and soul of the last 35 years of Mariners baseball as much as any player or coach. Martinez gets how the organization should work, and often is a direct ear for fans satisfied and frustrated alike. He also has led the charge on several initiatives that have improved the experience of Mariners fans in recent years.

As such, it was actually a relief when Martinez joined Dave “Softy” Mahler for Softy’s annual President’s Day show on KJR instead of Dipoto. Martinez offered some great perspective about the state of the organization without directly addressing any of the nagging on-field concerns Dipoto would address days later with Chuck and Buck. Unfortunately, Martinez also parroted the same line about fans being able to watch more Spring Training games than ever. As he’s someone who deeply knows every corner of the organization, it’s hard to believe ignorance was involved here.

The “more…than ever before” framing was unnecessarily false and soured what otherwise would have been a welcome announcement about increased opportunities to watch the team during a depressing preseason.

What are fans to do?

It’s another week of Mariners news which reduces the plausibility that the organization’s leadership has the best interest of the fans in mind. Turner’s words portray ownership in a damning light, in a way that resonates perfectly with the sentiment of the fanbase. Dipoto continues to openly air his frustrations with the fans’ lack of appreciation for the way he does his job. The phrase “more than ever before” is apparently open for interpretation.

The negative forces attacking the heart and soul of the tortured Mariners fanbase don’t represent what I consider to be The Seattle Mariners. If there’s any fanbase that deserves to be catered to and given every possible consideration, it’s one that’s dealt with zero World Series appearances in 48 years. Those who would demean, deceive and gaslight that dedicated group don’t truly stand for the team those fans support.

That said, fans don’t buy tickets to watch the fat cats who control the purse strings or the baseball executives play. They spend their hard earned cash on the product, which is the players. Despite the Mariners’ failure to invest in hardly any new ones this offseason, they have a plethora of talented and likable guys on the roster.

Mariners fans haven’t loved a player like they love Cal Raleigh in some time, and the newly crowned Seattle Sports Star of the Year has both spoken up on the fans behalf before and shown he’s capable of carrying the torch for the franchise. Perhaps management’s last great gift to Mariners fans was a soft guarantee of the entirety of Julio Rodríguez’s career, and one of the greatest young players in the history of Major League Baseball should have higher highs sooner rather than later. The Mariners also boast four homegrown starters in their mid-20s, all of whom have their own unique appealing skillsets and personalities.

It’s going to be tough, with decades of bad baseball and trauma under our belts, to look at an unimproved roster projected for 84-86 wins and envision anything other than the team has repeatedly come up just short of their goals. If that’s not for you after the last two years, and frankly, the last four decades, I won’t hold it against you.

Despite our justified frustrations, the leaders of this franchise aren’t changing their ways any time soon. It’s up to the fans to make the best of a bad situation in whatever way we see fit.