I don’t even know where to start with the Mariners. This might be a bit of a rant.
We have one guy hitting over .250. We had five guys in the lineup last night hitting under .200, obviously Kelenic is a small sample and will get better, but the last four guys in the lineup were sub .200. I know baseball has shifted to a sport where you don’t hit for average, but it was almost unheard of to hit under .200 about 15 years ago.
As for the future of the team, I know we have all these prospects but I’m very skeptical about them panning our. Between Lewis, Kelenic and Julio Rodriguez, we probably need at least two out of three to be all star good for us to really contend. Lewis faded big time in the second half of the season and hasn’t looked great this season. I’m optimistic about Kelenic and Rodriguez, but history says they will suck like all our prospects. I went back to look at our prior first round picks, here they starting from 2017 to 2005: Evan White, Kyle Lewis, Alex Jackson (6th pick), DJ Peterson, Mike Zunino (3rd pick), Danny Hultzen (2nd pick), Taijuan Walker, Steve Baron, Nick Franklin, Dustin Ackley (2nd pick), Josh Fields, Matt Mangini, Phillippe Aumont, Brandon Morrow (5th pick), and Jeff Clement (3rd pick).
We have literally done nothing with our first round draft picks. The main optimism with Kelenic is we didn’t draft him.
I was actually all for the move to win now when we brought in Cano, Cruz and the other guys., I don’t trust the Mariners with a rebuild by drafting prospects. I’d rather they just buy established guys, even if they’re older. If these prospects don’t work out, we will have wasted a lot of time trying to rebuild. Also rebuild can be another word for going cheap on the payroll, M’s cap has scaled back a lot. In the mid 2010’s, our payroll was usually right around top 12 in MLB, and we would have a payroll in the 100-120 mill range, this year we are near the bottom of the league.
I just see little reason to be optimistic about this franchise.