11/13/25: Mariner Offseason Challenges EXPLAINED

It has been a tough start to the offseason here at Light Bat HQ. In part that’s a sign of just how wonderful the last few months of the season truly were. Typically late-fall’s Mariner withdrawal feels like the pangs of a long-overdue detox: You miss it, but you know its absence is for the best.

The 2025 season, however, was different. It gave us the deepest postseason run in franchise history, something like 30-40% of the greatest moments we’ve ever had with them, and memories this author will cherish for all time. If ever a Mariners’ season deserved a “don’t cry because its over, smile because it happened”-style montage played over Sarah McLachlan’s “I Will Remember You”, it was this one.

So, yeah, the sting hasn’t worn off. And now we’re faced with the cold dark of Winter and, glorious playoff run aside, the same cast of characters in charge that we’ve all gotten used to sleeping through the past decade-and-change of offseasons. The Mariners’ brass and ownership are known quantities, and what we know about them is going to make this offseason challenging for a number of reasons, which we will now discuss more at length.

The 2025 Mariners benefitted from multiple players’ very best performances in 2025. The obvious one is hopefully-soon-crowned AL MVP Cal Raleigh. His 9.1 fWAR tied with 1997 Mike Piazza for the third-most by a primary catcher in the past 50 years, and a whopping 58% higher than his previous career high. Cal is already one of the 10 greatest Mariners of all-time, and his career is off to a Hall of Fame start, but expecting anything close to a repeat of 2025 moving forward would be foolishly optimistic.

Jorge Polanco didn’t just bounce back from his atrocious 2024 but posted a season in 2025 that was offensively as good as he has ever been. His 132 wRC+ was a career high, and his 524 PA was the most since 2021.

And, of course, Josh Naylor. One of the most instantaneously-beloved Mariner acquisitions of all-time, Naylor’s play in a Mariners uniform was far and away the best production of his career in pretty much every statistical category you can imagine. If you love Josh Naylor I get it, but expecting him to play like a 5.5 win first baseman any year moving forward is going to leave you, uh, dissatisfied with reality.

On the pitching side, Bryan Woo not only performed at something like his 90th percentile outcome, he did so over 185 innings, which is more than he pitched in college and the minor leagues, combined.

Every team benefits from career years and outlier performance every season to some degree, and the Mariners certainly have better data than I and smarter people than myself looking at it. But that doesn’t change that in the unlikely scenario the Mariners bring back all their incumbents from 2025, that hypothetical roster is highly unlikely to repeat last season’s level of success.

I’m going to focus on the big three of Jorge Polanco, Josh Naylor, and Eugenio Suarez for this point. Polanco and Suarez are both well into their 30’s, coming off career-ish seasons right at the point in a player’s aging curve when real collapse becomes increasingly possible. Josh Naylor is significantly younger at 28, but plays a non-premium position and does so with a body that, well, typically does not age gracefully.

Crucially, 2025’s success for these three means they will all be at the very height of their potential earnings for players of their profile. We have over 10 seasons now with the Jerry Dipoto/John Stanton Mariners. They hate paying top dollar for any player, doubly so for ones over 30. The hilarious Mitch Garver signing aside, practically every post-prime player the Dipoto Mariners have ever acquired has been done so on a cheap, one-year deal off a down season that hopes to catch positive regression.

However you feel about the potential 2026 production for Naylor/Suarez/Polanco, history shows that the kinds of deals they are projected to receive are the types this organization has avoided like plague.

Now, in fairness, the Mariners have been extremely vocal about targeting Naylor specifically, practically since the day they acquired him. Is make the thought of literally Josh Naylor - something like the 8-10th best first baseman in baseball - receiving the third-highest free agent contract in Mariner franchise history humorous to me? Extremely, yes. Particularly when you consider all the truly elite players over the years this franchise has spurned to keep the metaphorical powder dry for the right time/player.

Assuming the likely scenario where the Mariners need to replace at least one of Naylor/Polanco/Suarez with an in-house option for 2026, the Mariners will need to lean on everyone’s favorite content-generating machine: The Farm. Unfortunately, at least for 2026, the prospects are a combination of underwhelming and/or underbaked.

Ben Williamson slugged .310 in 295 plate appearances in 2025. Despite a shadowy cabal of media and organizational voices insisting his defense was going to be generational, it was merely “good”. He will be 25 in 2026 and the prospect of him becoming a Real Boy hinges on learning to make me use more than one hand to count his home run totals.

Cole Young has the sheen of Top 100 prospect still attached, and will spend the next season at the tender age of 22. There is plenty of time for him to grow and fulfill his destiny as The Adam Frazier of a New Age, but there’s little guarantee that happens fast enough to make playing him everyday in 2026 an acceptable solution for a team smack in the middle of their contention window. Also his defense his not good.

Colt McColt, the team’s best prospect, benefits from being good enough at defense that the offensive struggles almost certain to come from being 20-years old and trying to hit major league pitching will not keep him from being useful. That said, those offensive struggles are indeed almost certain. It is possible - and would be wonderful - if he broke out into a young Kyle Seager 2.0, rampaging towards a RotY campaign that cements him as a core player moving forward, but counting on that is a tall ask.

Elsewhere, most of the team’s top positional prospects are either still in the low minors or Laz Montes. I like Laz Montes. Him becoming a bashing 1B/DH would be such a wonderful development for this franchise. It is far, far more likely he never gets the strikeouts under control and goes the path of Carlos Peguero (minus the credit card fraud plz).

Prior to 2025 everything this organization did flowed from the depth, youth, and relative health of its starting rotation. Luis Castillo/Bryce Miller/Logan Gilbert/George Kirby/Bryan Woo’s collective run of health and production from 2023-2024 allowed this organization to function with a preposterously high floor. Ex. The 2024 team spent half a season as one of the worst-hitting groups in the 150-year history of baseball and still managed to only miss the playoffs by a single game.

In 2025, that run of health and production finally ran out. The rotation was not bad, but it was not good. With Gilbert, Kirby, and Miller suffering from prolonged and protracted stretches of inactivity/below average form due to injury, the Mariners were forced to lean into their depth arms of Logan Evans and Emerson Hancock, largely to predictably poor results.

Looking ahead to 2026, a repeat of that poor injury luck feels unlikely, just as 2023-2024’s run of near-perfect health was unlikely. Additionally, thanks to Dan Wilson being Right With The Lord, the Mariners were able to use the number two overall pick in last year’s draft on Kade Anderson, who at worse should provide better rotational depth than Evans/Hancock should injuries reoccur.

That said, the struggles of 2025 are fresh, and they must be weighted accordingly. While it’s unlikely four of the team’s pitchers will struggle with injury again in 2026, that recency makes it highly likely some combination of them will. This makes the oft-floated concept of trading Luis Castillo - the one rotational arm clearly in decline - for salary relief extra risky. While peak La Piedra is unlikely to ever return, he was the sole Opening Day rotation member to stay healthy last season.

In my view, the Mariners’ best chance of overcoming their own track record of inadequate offseasons and looming negative regression lies in the rotation’s return to health and form. But that is a big unknown. Pitching health and production is quite possibly the most fickle and unpredictable quantity in the modern game.

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And there you have it, folks. Next week I’ll look into what I think this team could do this offseason to not only overcome these issues, but build a team that can enter 2026 as a World Series Favorite. While that plan will not quite be of the “Fantasy Baseball Player High on Cocaine” variety, it will neither seek to shape a roster that fits ownership’s vision for how best to run a baseball franchise..

Thanks so much as always for reading and supporting The Light Bat!