Analysis: Three reasons the Mariners chose to move forward with Jerry Dipoto

SEATTLE – Whatever you’re feeling right now about the Mariners, it’s valid.

Whatever your reaction was to the news that Jerry Dipoto is expected to return as the club’s top baseball executive in 2025, it’s fair.

Infuriated? Delighted? Confused? Exhausted? Indifferent?

As a Mariners fan, you’re entitled to all those emotions. They’re justifiable, just as the organization’s decision to run it back with Dipoto is justifiable.

To be clear: Dipoto, as much as anyone, is culpable for the Mariners’ free fall out of first place in the AL West this summer. His fingerprints are all over this roster and he has to own up to his repeated missteps in identifying and acquiring the wrong hitters at the wrong time.

The way the season has played out has certainly made things more difficult to stomach for Mariners fans. From a 10-game lead in the division in June to the botched firing of manager Scott Servais 10 weeks later, the club’s collapse is almost complete – and it has been a complete embarrassment at times.

Why, then, give Dipoto another opportunity to rebuild the roster this offseason? Why, the cynical fan might ask, give him another chance to mess it up?

Good questions.

And in an attempt to answer them – in an attempt to make sense of the Mariners’ thinking – here are three things that the ownership group, led by Chris Larson and John Stanton, likely considered when deciding to stand by Dipoto:

1. Stability

From the Mariners’ perspective, stability and sustainability appear to go hand-in-hand.

For all the flak Dipoto took for his “54%” comment last October – some of it fair, some of it overblown – he has, by all accounts, a shared vision with ownership for what the organization can be. That matters.

But is Dipoto the right person to make that vision a reality?

That remains to be seen.

There is a good case to be made that the organization, top to bottom, is in a better position than it was when Dipoto arrived in September 2015.

Dipoto orchestrated the first deliberate rebuild in franchise history, and did it about as well as anyone could have reasonably expected, leading to the club’s first playoff appearance in 21 years.

While one playoff in nine years is hardly a badge of honor, using that fact as the basis for criticizing Dipoto is disingenuous (and, frankly, lazy analysis). The Mariners were in a full-blown rebuild for three of those seasons – the front office wasn’t trying to win from 2019-21 – and their playoff berth in 2022 might have even arrived ahead-of-schedule of any rational projection.

That the organization has been unable to build off the success of 2022 – that it has, in fact, gone in reverse – is the real failure of Dipoto’s tenure.

Now all the goodwill from 2022 is gone, washed away in an endless sea of swings and misses.

Could ownership have committed to spend more the past two offseasons to capitalize on the young core that Dipoto had built? Absolutely.

And the club should invest more in player payroll for 2025.

But what Dipoto truly can’t afford to do this winter, is direct his limited budget to the type of hitters who can’t hit at T-Mobile Park.

To do that, he’s going to have to overhaul the front office’s hitting strategies – tear it down to the studs and start over – and he’s indicated that transformation is in the works.

Because if the hitting improves, Dipoto has proven he’s adept at constructing the two other major pillars for roster-building.

2. The pitching

The Mariners have the best starting rotation in franchise history, and one of the best rotations in MLB since the Atlanta Braves of the 1990s.

It’s that good.

And to dismiss that, to pretend that would magically continue with Dipoto out of the picture, could be a mistake.

Dipoto deserves credit here.

The Mariners’ pitching success isn’t just about the major-league staff, either. Dipoto has hired talented coaches and analysts to find and develop under-the-radar arms who, year over year now, rise through the ranks and arrive in Seattle

Logan Gilbert, George Kirby, Bryce Miller and Bryan Woo – all homegrown arms. Look around the league: Most organizations would be thrilled to have even one of those homegrown pitchers on their staff. That the Mariners have four is unprecedented in franchise history, and exceedingly rare for any club.

And yet, even those four, along with Luis Castillo, haven’t been enough to put the Mariners in a playoff position here in September. But having an identity as one of baseball’s best pitching organizations shouldn’t be taken for granted.

3. The farm system

A strong prospect pipeline is the bedrock for any well-run organization, and with how the Mariners operate – with a Tampa Bay Rays-inspired draft-develop-trade model – they have to regularly depend on young (and, ahem, affordable) players at the major-league level.

The Mariners had the No. 1 farm system going into the 2022 season, centered around Julio Rodriguez, Cal Raleigh and Kirby.

In two-plus years, under empowered director of amateur scouting Scott Hunter, they have another built a top system again.

Baseball America’s latest rankings put the Mariners’ system at No. 7 in MLB, and midway through the season Seattle had eight prospects ranked in Baseball America’s Top 100, the most of any MLB team. That matters.

Are all those prospects going to turn into major-league stars? Of course not.

But talent plays and talent is valuable; it’s Dipoto’s job now to extract the most out of that talent – in trades or in development – to build a sustainable contender for 2025, and perhaps beyond.