Listless in Seattle: The Mariners’ flailing offense is wasting their dominant pitching staff

What we are witnessing is an all-time waste of a dominant pitching staff. The Seattle Mariners lead the majors in ERA but rank near the bottom in runs per game. Since June 18, they’ve turned a 10-game lead in the AL West into a five-game deficit. A fourth straight winning season is in jeopardy, with their record now 64-63.

All is not lost, not with 35 games remaining. But after a 10-5 surge highlighted by the deadline additions of left fielder Randy Arozarena, first baseman/DH Justin Turner and relievers Yimi García and JT Chargois, the Mariners again have turned inept on offense. They blew a 3-0 lead in a 6-3 loss to the Los Angeles Dodgers on Tuesday night, making it seven losses in their last eight games.

Jerry Dipoto, the Mariners’ president of baseball operations, sounds flummoxed.

“Coming into the season, we all thought this was the most talented group that we’ve had,” said Dipoto, who became the Mariners’ head of baseball operations in September 2015. “We’re looking at everything. There is no stone unturned. We’ve talked about getting back to grassroots with what our hitting philosophy is and what we are about, the way we message it to our players. Or, are we overcomplicating it with the information we provide and the strategies we employ?

“I can say this: Me, our coaches, our staff, none of us is blameless. We have really struggled to play offense this year. And it’s not just on our players for not doing that. That would be a cop-out.”

Asked if he felt responsible, Dipoto said, “Very. Ultimately, the dirt roads lead back to putting the roster together, and that’s me. I don’t want to minimize the contributions of (general manager) Justin (Hollander), our scouts. But ultimately the responsibility is mine.”

Might the team benefit from hearing a new voice in place of Scott Servais, who has been the Mariners’ manager since 2016?

“It definitely has to be a consideration for us, to talk through everything. That’s just reality,” Dipoto said. “We’ve underperformed and there is some discussion for each of us to have about the part we have played in coming up as short as we have to this point.

“I say that, but until a week ago we were in first place or a game within for roughly the last 120 days. I don’t know that the season could have gone much better considering how inconsistent our offense has been. I don’t want to act like this has been an unmitigated disaster. But we have very much underperformed our own expectations, based on our talent.”

Entering Tuesday, the Mariners’ major-league best 3.26 rotation ERA was 0.20 runs per nine innings better than that of the next-closest team, the Philadelphia Phillies. That difference, if it holds, would be the sixth largest between the first- and second-place finishers since 2000, according to STATS Perform.

Oh, but that’s not the half of it. The last team to miss the postseason after leading the majors in overall ERA was the 2012 Tampa Bay Rays. The Mariners’ current .504 winning percentage would be the fourth lowest by a team ERA leader.

Though the Mariners cannot use it as an excuse, Seattle’s run-suppressing T-Mobile Park is playing almost like Coors Field in reverse, benefiting the team’s pitchers while stifling their hitters.

The park is the game’s most difficult in which to hit, according to Statcast’s three-year rolling park factor, which compares the rate of statistics at home to the rate on the road. It is the most difficult for overall hits as well as doubles, the fourth-most difficult for triples and the 11th-most difficult for homers. The rate of strikeouts is the highest in the league.

Yet, the Mariners under Dipoto often have produced average and even above-average park-adjusted numbers. At times, but not always, those numbers have translated to above-average run production. Last season, they ranked sixth in OPS-plus and 12th in runs. In 2016, Dipoto’s first season, they were third in OPS-plus and sixth in runs.

This season, they rank 20th in OPS-plus and 27th in runs per game. The pitiful Chicago White Sox are the only team with a worse slugging percentage. And the Mariners’ strikeout rate is the highest in the league even after their subtractions of Eugenio Suárez and Teoscar Hernández, who last season finished second and third in the majors in strikeouts.

As Dipoto said, none of this seemed terribly disconcerting on June 18, when the Mariners were 44-31 and led the second-place Houston Astros by 10 games. Since then, the Mariners have gone 20-32 while the Astros have gone 35-17. The Mariners actually have erupted for 10 or more runs five times in that span. But too often, their offense has been empty.

Why is it that so many hitters struggle once they get to Seattle? Hernández’s OPS-plus last season was his lowest in a full season; he is again an All-Star with the Dodgers. Jesse Winker, Adam Frazier, Kolten Wong and now Mitch Garver are examples of players who were coming off good years when they joined the Mariners, then stumbled.

This season, catcher Cal Raleigh again is producing at a high level. Two other core players, center fielder Julio Rodríguez and shortstop J.P. Crawford, have gone backward, though both have dealt with injuries. Victor Robles hit well enough after getting released by the Nationals to warrant a two-year, $9.75 million extension. But his sample size remains small.

On May 31, the Mariners fired offensive coordinator and bench coach Brant Brown, who was in his first season with the club. T-Mobile is particularly difficult for hitters early in the season. The Mariners’ offense since the move, with director of hitting strategy Jarret DeHart and assistant hitting coach Tommy Joseph taking on expanded roles, has been more than a half-run per game better. Still, only four teams entered Tuesday with fewer plate appearances with runners in scoring position.

Ownership hardly is an innocent bystander. The Mariners in 2022 ended their 21-year playoff drought, at the time the longest in professional sports. Instead of building on that momentum, they opened 2023 with a payroll that was lower than any they fielded between 2016 and 2019, and ranked 18th in the majors. After the team fell one game short of the playoffs, Raleigh called out ownership for its lack of spending.

Last offseason was more of the same. Despite the team ranking 10th in attendance, ownership’s concern over future local television revenue led to only a modest increase in payroll. Dipoto, after a series of cost-cutting moves, made a number of additions, including Garver, second baseman Jorge Polanco and first baseman/outfielder Luke Raley, plus several relievers. He then was active at the deadline, earning plaudits from The Athletic‘s Jim Bowden and others.

While the team’s playoff odds have fallen below 15 percent, Dipoto does not blame a lack of resources.

“I don’t think it’s been a problem for us. I really don’t think it’s ever been a problem for us,” Dipoto said. “Somebody is going to have the highest payroll. Somebody will have the lowest. Our general place in that continuum has been consistent with our revenue streams. We operate to our market.”

The operation, though, is failing. The Mariners aren’t even winning 54 percent of their games, the goal over a 10-year stretch that Dipoto laid out in ill-advised comments at the end of last season. He later apologized for his remarks, which included him saying, “So we’re actually doing the fan base a favor in asking for their patience to win the World Series, while we continue to build a sustainably good roster.”

In 2024, it’s more like half a roster. The Mariners possess the rarest commodity in the game, elite starting pitching. Their bullpen, despite some early injuries, mostly has been good enough. But their offense is so bad, their season is going to waste.