Baseball is coming

Lots more chaos and catastrophe to talk about over the past couple of days, but let's take a break from that, ever so briefly, and talk about baseball broadly and Your Seattle Mariners in particular. Because spring training has begun, my season ticket group is prepping for our draft, and even the bad stuff on this subject is so, so much happier than anything occurring in our ongoing POTUS47 national nightmare. So to take my mind off our new fascist FBI director, our new pro-measles HHS secretary, our pro-plane-crash DOT head, the fact that the president is owned by the Kremlin, and that Phony Stark (h/t Joanne Carducci) is now sabotaging Social Security and the IRS, I dove into stats, quotes from camp, and other such frivolities. Here goes.

As always happens at the start of spring camps, people in the sports press act like they know what will happen and predict final MLB season standings. Most of these prognosticators seem to be pegging the 2025 Mariners as an 85-win team. ZiPS gives them 86. But these forecasters have not been paying attention and don't understand that the M's were massive underachievers the past four years because of their field manager, their approach to batting, and their alleged "hitting coach," who was so useless that any player wanting help with a slump or a mechanical issue or anything, really, had to seek outside aid on their own time—which there isn't a lot of during a season. People don't seem to get this, even after a way-too-late regime change in the dugout last August exposed it to the world.

The other day I did a little I-told-you-soing in regards to former Mariner infielder Ty France, now with the Minnesota Twins, who told reporters without naming any names that his last two seasons were ruined by the former Mariner "braintrust." Today I see similar remarks from Julio Rodríguez.

Julio, talking about the Mariners' disappointing 2024, said, "The beginning of the year was like, ‘It is what it is.’ But I feel I definitely took with me those last six weeks, what we did as a team, what we did as an organization and just kind of how we continued to push forward." I readily admit that I may be reading too much into this with some confirmation bias, but what I get from that is, Julio and the rest of the lineup were doing precisely what the team's manager and alleged hitting coach had asked of them, it wasn't working, and therefore "it is what it is" and complacency reigned as it had for years—the entirety of Julio's big-league career, in fact. Then with six weeks left in the season, upper management belatedly realized they had a crap field manager and an even crappier batting coach and philosophy. Those people were fired and actual smart people, namely former Seattle players Dan Wilson and Edgar Martínez, took their places and the team took off.

The M's were a .500 club before the changeover, a .618 club after. (The World Series champion Dodgers had an overall .605 winning percentage.)

The M's as a team batted .216/.301/.365 before, .255/.347/.417 after, with little difference in personnel. (MLB average: .243/.312/.399; champion Dodgers: .258/.335/.446.)

If this team could win 90, 90, and 88 games the prior three seasons (2021-2023) under their former utter garbage manager and batting instructor, they should be able to do at least that well in 2025 under Dan Wilson and the batting team of Edgar Martínez and Kevin Seitzer.

Yes, the M's completely whiffed on improving their infield. Yes, depending on Jorge Polanco to be an everyday presence is anxiety-inducing. Yes, first base is not a position where you typically find a platoon situation. Yes, the term "designated hitter" could quickly become a laugh line in the Seattle lineup.

Still.

I mean, I'm looking at the guys the M's will be counting on the most this year and noting the difference pre-changeover to post-changeover:

Aside from Arozarena, those are massive changes. A couple of guys—J.P. Crawford, Polanco—didn't improve, and others didn't have enough at-bats to give a decent sample. But then I look at guys that had terrible ’24s that were good in ’23 in Crawford (.266/.380/.438 in ’23) and Mitch Garver (.270/.370/.500 in ’23 playing about half-time). Throw Arozarena, who was a ’23 All-Star, in with that group too. It's actually a pretty good lineup. Nobody expects Victor Robles to bat .400 or Julio to carry a .360+ on-base all season long, but without spending all their time fretting about barrel rates and exit velocity these guys will put up good numbers.

That said, if they can find some more depth for third base, I wouldn't complain. Polanco doesn't inspire any confidence in me, even after his having knee surgery over the offseason to deal with injuries that hampered him last year, but he's the best available option and this club can carry him even if he turns out to just be an adequate-glove-no-hit type at this point. But it'd be nice to have someone on the bench to step in once in a while besides Dylan Moore. Maybe Donovan Solano can be that guy? Occasionally? When he isn't needed at first base?

Oddly, my biggest concern with the Mariners right now is relief pitching. Once can always hope that Dan Wilson will trend a little more old-school and use his starters for 6-7-8 innings on the regular, but assuming he doesn't things are fairly iffy beyond fireballing Andres Muñoz. On the other hand, the pitching side of things has been quite competent even when the batting sucked, so perhaps they'll do well with another crop of who's-that-guy and never-heard-of-hims alongside Muñoz and maybe Matt Brash.

Will they be good enough to win the division? Well, that one's hard to say. Houston isn't as good as they have been, which helps. The Rangers have a decent offense but, as usual, very questionable pitching. The A's and Angels will stink. It'll be a three-team race, and at this point there's no reason to think the M's can't finish atop the pile.

Meanwhile, Commissioner Rob Manfred managed to insult ESPN while announcing MLB was breaking its contract with them after this season. The league issued a statement that read, in part, "in recent years, we have seen ESPN scale back their baseball coverage and investment in a way that is not consistent with the sport’s appeal or performance on their platform." Really? That seems to be outside of MLB's authority to declare. And probably irrelevant. ESPN is a cable station, and cable as a business model is dying an ever-quickening death. As such, ESPN requested a renegotiation of some of the terms of the deal and MLB threw a hissy fit. "Given that MLB provides strong viewership, valuable demographics, and the exclusive right to cover unique events like the Home Run Derby, ESPN’s demand to reduce rights fees is simply unacceptable," the statement continued, before basically saying they'd take their business to other services in a manner that reminded me of Eric Cartman from South Park whining "Screw you guys, I'm going home."

If Manfred and company can recover from their little tantrum, they should recognize that this is probably for the good—getting away from the cable model is a necessity, as if the ongoing problems with regional sports networks going bankrupt hasn't made that clear already. Short term, they'll have to take less money from more distribution models to replace ESPN's playoff coverage and, if anyone continues to care, Home Run Derby/All-Star Week programming. Losing the ESPN exclusive Game of the Week is a financial hit, sure, but get creative. MLB already has smaller deals with streamers Apple TV+ and Roku for games throughout the season. Maybe investigate going back to a broadcast TV Game of the Week beyond the Saturday Fox game; broadcast TV is losing out to streamers, they might want back into the mix, and for years MLB had shared broadcast rights between ABC and NBC. Maybe don't try to replace the ESPN weekly game at all, maybe investigate a whole new system that fully embraces streaming options for every viewer wanting to watch their teams.

But no, that would require admitting the cable model is doomed and being proactive with individual teams about jettisoning their cable contracts.

Clearly the league will be dragged kicking and screaming into the future as more cable arrangements bite the dust from RSN bankruptcies or the staving off of such ruin, as ESPN seems to be doing here.