The Mariners climb the mountain

At the end of the Dipoto Decade, everything has finally clicked

Photo by Steph Chambers/Getty Images

Just months after I graduated from college, the Mariners fired general manager Jack Zduriencik near the end of a disappointing 2015 season. The move, and the subsequent hire of Jerry Dipoto, unleashed a decade of intrigue beyond my wildest expectations, culminating in one of the best months of baseball in franchise history.

The past decade, which I’ve pejoratively called the 54% Era, has featured plenty of ups and downs, most characterized by solid teams that have been unable to get over the hump and accomplish something truly meaningful. For nine seasons, Dipoto teams had winning records six times but won two total playoff games in their lone appearance in 2022. As recently as early September, the 2025 team threatened to be the seventh such team without adding to the latter total.

However, you no doubt know how the story has culminated, with the Mariners winning an absurd 17 out of 18 games and clinching a playoff spot, the AL West, and a first-round bye in consecutive games. Fangraphs fancies the team the favorite to win the World Series. Out of a decade of consternation and controversy, the team fans have been begging for all along has suddenly sprung.

A Magical Run

Without a doubt, the 2025 team boasts the most talent of any team that Dipoto has assembled in Seattle. However, that wasn’t always the case, as the team started the season as the classic “80% of a complete MLB roster” that’s come to define Dipoto’s teams. That was quickly exacerbated by early serious injuries to the team’s starting RF and 2B, Victor Robles and Ryan Bliss. It took a turn for the worse throughout the opening months, as George Kirby, Logan Gilbert, and Bryce Miller all missed about six weeks.

The Mariners were a pretty ordinary, flawed team for much of the 2025 season, as their pitching lagged behind one of their best offensive seasons of the decade. At the trade deadline, the front office deployed effective aggression, taking Arizona’s lunch money for two of the best bats available, Josh Naylor and Eugenio Suárez, but did very little to bolster the iffy bullpen, only adding LHP Caleb Ferguson. The team played well for the first part of the second half, but was a completely different team away from home, enduring consecutive ghastly East Coast road trips that threatened to scupper their status as a likely playoff team.

Suddenly, on Sept. 6, the Mariners sprang to life with a 10-2 drubbing of the Braves, followed by an 18-2 romp the next day. A perfect 7-0 home stand followed, as what would become a potentially franchise-defining 17 wins in 18 games kicked into high gear. The pièce de résistance of the run was a road sweep of the Houston Astros, burying their boogeymen six feet under and rendering their first AL West title since 2001 a statistical formality.

It has all happened so fast that I’ve admittedly struggled to wrap my head around it. The experience in 2022 was much different, with the season-saving run coming in the final 14 games before the All-Star Break, and the Luis Castillo trade at the deadline cementing the Mariners as true contenders with a consistently high-level of play down the stretch. They also never truly pushed past the Astros, as the division was never close and the Yordan Alvarez walk-off doomed their ALDS showdown. This year, the Mariners achieved everything the Dipoto regime has strived to accomplish (and come up agonizingly short of) in a whirlwind three weeks.

It’s hard to accurately assess where we are at the moment, and a good bit of this hinges on winning the ALDS against Detroit, but at this stage, I think it’s accurate to say that the Dipoto plan has worked, if just barely. Year 10 was dogged by many of the frustrating, unsolved problems of years one through nine, until the 17-of-18 stretch KO’d every single issue in one fell swoop.

Photo via Getty Images

If we zoom out a bit, what really flipped the script was the Mariners hitting the nuts at the trade deadline, timed up with improved health and effectiveness from their pitching. Before Aug. 1, the Mariners were 58-52, an inconsistent team that couldn’t seem to build up any momentum. After the trade deadline, they finished 32-20, a 95-win pace befitting the elite team they’ve become.

Specifically, the Josh Naylor trade was clearly the season’s most important transaction, and could go down as Dipoto’s best trade ever if the Mariners achieve something truly memorable in the playoffs and/or re-sign him this offseason. The Mariners hit legitimately well for the first part of the season, even without considering park effects that make their output look even rosier. The offense struggled to hit with consistency, however, and largely ran a ghastly Rowdy Tellez/Donovan Solano platoon at first base. Enter Naylor, as the Mariners acquired him on July 24 and he proceeded to hit .299/.341/.490 with nine homers, 32 RBI and an absurd 19 stolen bases. He posted a 137 wRC+ and racked up 1.8 WAR as a Mariner, particularly excelling at home, with a 194 wRC+ and an OPS over 1.000. More than anything, Naylor’s competitive fire has no doubt made a difference in a clubhouse filled with nice guys but short on “been there, done that” and “F U”. That’s not necessarily a statement against the Mariners’ existing core, but Naylor clearly invigorated a group accustomed to coming up short.

The Mariners weren’t the elite pitching team they were in 2024 for much of 2025. For the year, they finished 13th in ERA, ninth in FIP and 10th in K/9. In September, when they made their decisive run, they were fourth, third, and third in those categories. Luis Castillo, who was terrible in August, had a dominant September, flirting with perfection in his division-clinching start. The pitching staff had let the team down on the road for most of the second half, but they never allowed the Mariners to trail the Astros in the pivotal road sweep.

Simply put, it all came together at exactly the right time for the Mariners. The combination of the groundwork they laid throughout the year, the right moves at the trade deadline, and improvements in the pitching and how the coaching staff managed that group, coalesced perfectly for a lightning strike run. Just weeks after agonizing over whether they would even make the playoffs, they won the AL West for the first time since the 116-win season and we’re watching other teams play in a playoff round before the Mariners even take the field.

Where to next?

The plan, written in the stars since Dipoto convinced Mariners ownership to cut payroll to rebuild better after the 2018 season, finally came together. The Mariners were the Best in the West in 2025 after all these years toiling behind Houston, and they got there on merit, despite Houston’s injury issues.

That’s clearly a credit to everyone in the organization, including the players, the coaches, and the front office. I’ve already touched on a few of the things that turned this 85-win Mariners team into a 95-win team after the trade deadline, but on the whole, there have been a few other changes worth shouting out.

Photo by Lindsey Wasson/AP Photo

First and foremost, the installation of Dan Wilson and Edgar Martinez, and subsequently Kevin Seitzer and Bobby Magallanes to work under Edgar, have undoubtedly sparked a system that had run its course under Scott Servais and Jarret Dehart. I’ve been extremely pro-Wilson throughout his tenure, principally because the man is just winning ballgames. Wilson finishes the 2025 season 111-85 as Mariners manager over his first nearly 200 games, an unprecedented 56.6% win rate in the history of the franchise. His predecessor, Servais, never won more games in any season than Wilson won in his first full season (he won 90 games with less talented teams, though). While Wilson’s decision-making improved over the course of the season, it’s been clear from the jump that he commands the respect of the players, particularly the 2025 season’s most important player, Cal Raleigh, whom he mentored through Cal’s time growing up in the organization. To me, it’s not coincidental that Cal’s breakout season came after the Mariners replaced the previous manager, who told him he should know better when publicly addressing the organization’s cheapness, with his mentor and gave him an affirming contract extension.

Additionally, and this is maybe a tad personal versus an actual impact, but Jerry Dipoto has mostly shut up and let the team do its thing since another in a long line of silly interviews during Spring Training. He said the roster didn’t have many holes, and then when it did end up having quite a few holes, he (and Justin Hollander, whom Jerry credited for the moves) went and fixed them at the trade deadline and has mostly shied away from victory laps since. It’s a far cry from 2023, when Jarred Kelenic directly cited Jerry’s “Prime Babe Ruth” radio interview comments as negatively impacting the clubhouse of that would-be contender, and Dipoto followed that with his 54% disasterclass. He’s resisted the urge to dunk on the fans of the team he runs and has seemingly addressed this late run with the same relief we all have.

Where the Mariners and the Dipoto era sit now are on the precipice of a couple of huge opportunities.

The first, obviously, is a real chance to both make and win the first World Series in franchise history. They’re considered the favorites, at least in the AL, because of how well they’ve played since this roster came together in August. Despite some injury question marks with Bryan Woo and Naylor, they should be well-positioned to throw their best at anyone who stands in their way. They haven’t taken a prohibitive favorite into the playoffs like this in any year other than 2001, and you have to cash in on something that happens only twice in basically 50 years.

There’s also a real chance that the Dipoto perpetual contention machine has finally become self-sustaining. If the Mariners re-sign Josh Naylor, they have promise and solidity everywhere on the field. We’ve seen just how close top prospect Colt Emerson is to the MLB roster over the last month, as he finished the season in Tacoma and has played on the taxi squad in playoff tuneup scrimmages in the week since. It’s clear he’ll be a part of the MLB team in 2026. There are also two Top 100 starting pitchers, a slugging OF and 2B who could easily factor into the 2026 picture, alongside Harry Ford and Cole Young, not to mention the younger prospects they have in reserve. The annual conversation around which inevitably crappy veteran hitter Dipoto will bring in on a budget to try to squeeze production out of could finally be coming to an end.

In the present and the future, the Dipoto era might have finally reached its promised heights in the very last month of his decade in charge. It’s better late than never for Mariners fans dying to see a championship contender and desperate to feel good about the baseball team that always lets them down in one way or another.

Nothing left to write other than, “let’s win the whole f-ing thing.”