It’s another reminder that accountability inside this organization rarely reaches the top.
Players get released way too far after damage is already done. Coaches get replaced — or scapegoated. Fans get another explanation for why the team is coming up short. Meanwhile, Jerry Dipoto gets another season to reset the clock.
Matt Calkins of The Seattle Times deserves a ton of credit for putting the comparison between the Mariners and the Milwaukee Brewers plainly. The Brewers have taken financial limitations and built a perennial contender. The Mariners have taken their limitations and turned them into an annual explanation for why the roster remains unfinished.
Jerry Dipoto Has Received More Patience Than His Results Justify
Dipoto has run Seattle’s baseball operation since the fall of 2015. The Mariners have made the postseason twice during that tenure. Both appearances were big. Breaking the 21-year drought in 2022. Coming within one victory of the World Series in 2025. Dipoto deserves credit for helping construct the team that produced the deepest playoff run in franchise history. That doesn’t mean he’s earned immunity.
Damn, I thought maybe DT wrote this since I didn't. Nicely done.Nearly 11 seasons provide enough information to judge an executive without treating criticism as an emotional response to a team losing too often. Two postseason appearances over that span is not sustained contention. They establish two memorable exceptions surrounded by mediocrity.
And it just gets better.
The danger of 2025 was that it felt so rewarding that the Mariners could mistake it for proof that their entire operation worked.
First, Cal Raleigh hit 60 home runs — a feat that is more than likely irreplicable. The deadline additions in Josh Naylor and Eugenio Suárez landed. The Mariners rode a spectacular collection of individual performances to the doorstep of the World Series. That run wasn’t fraudulent by any means, but it was also not a roster-building formula that could simply be carried into another season.
If Raleigh needed to produce one of the greatest offensive seasons by a catcher in baseball history for Seattle’s lineup to function, the Mariners hadn’t built a sustainable offense at all. They just caught lightning in a bottle and called it infrastructure.
The Mariners Turned Pitching Development Into a Crutch
Seattle has accomplished something genuinely difficult under Dipoto. The organization has developed high-end pitching with impressive regularity. That should have been the Mariners’ greatest competitive advantage. Young, controllable starting pitching creates financial flexibility. It creates trade capital. It gives a front office the freedom to spend more aggressively on offense because the rotation isn’t consuming the entire payroll.
Instead, the Mariners have too often treated their pitching pipeline as permission to tolerate an incomplete lineup. They built a pitching factory without nearly enough run support.
