PEORIA, Ariz. — If you’ve ever tried to build a snowman in the desert or sail across a frozen lake, you might know how it feels to hit a baseball outdoors in the Pacific Northwest.
The cool, moist air drifting in from Elliott Bay. The early-season winds swatting fly balls into gloves. The home run graveyard in center field. The pinched power alleys where doubles go to die.
“It’s probably best just to not think about it,” said Dylan Moore, the Seattle Mariners second baseman. “Thinking about how big the ballpark is, it’s not going to work out well for you.”
There’s no better setting for baseball than T-Mobile Park, no other venue where you’re always outdoors without getting wet. The retractable roof is only an umbrella, so you always feel like you’re in Seattle.
Moore is entering his seventh season there, the longest tenure of any Mariners player. As a Gold Glover last season, he mostly holds his own as a hitter with a career .777 OPS in road games. At home, though, that figure dwindles to .618, matching the OPS of last season’s woeful Chicago White Sox.
Even so, there’s no place Moore would rather play. The Mariners generally win in Seattle.
“With what we have pitching-wise,” Moore said, “I’ll take it every day of the week.”
The pitching-rich Mariners were 49-32 in Seattle last season. Only three teams — the Philadelphia Phillies, Los Angeles Dodgers and Cleveland Guardians — played better at home, and all won division titles. Seattle (85-77) missed a wild-card berth by one game.
“We have to do the small things right,” designated hitter Mitch Garver said. “We’re going to have to play old-school baseball: move runners, get guys in with less than two outs, sacrifice ourselves a little bit to give us a chance to scratch one or two across. Because the numbers show, when we score three runs at home, we’re like 47-10 or something stupid like that. Our pitching is that good.”
The Mariners were 43-7 at home last season when scoring at least three runs. Their biggest issue was pitching on the road; Seattle had an MLB-best 2.85 ERA at home but ranked 19th on the road at 4.18. The ballpark helps more than it hurts.
“It’s a tough ballpark to hit in. As a player, you felt that way a little bit,” said manager Dan Wilson, a former Seattle catcher. “But you can’t let it occupy a lot of space in the brain. It’s an advantage to us in that we know how to work with it.”
For now, at least, the Mariners won’t emphasize that edge. Spring training is for optimism and building a firm foundation. It’s not time to tell ghost stories — not quite, anyway — about the looming reality of home hitting.
“It’s a real thing, and the time is coming,” said Kevin Seitzer, the team’s new hitting coach. “I mean, they know where we play. They know what it’s all about. But Edgar and I are going to address it closer to the end of spring training because the attitude, the mindset has been so perfect so far that once we get ready to roll and get it going in the season, it’s going to come into play.
“We just want them to continue to build off what they did the last month of the season. It was the same ballpark, the same circumstances.”
Seitzer was working in Atlanta then, trying to coax more from a Braves lineup ravaged by injuries. He was Baseball America’s 2023 Coach of the Year when Atlanta slugged .501 to set a major-league record. After last season’s struggles, he was fired.
Meanwhile, the Mariners fired two hitting instructors last season: Brant Brown in May and Jarret DeHart in August when they let go longtime manager Scott Servais. Wilson replaced Servais and Edgar Martinez took over as hitting coach, and while the team fell short, the hitters rallied.
In the small sample of the season’s final 23 games, the Mariners averaged 5.48 runs, third best in the majors in that span. Martinez made a difference.
“They really became aware of the approach of fighting with two strikes, playing very fundamentally sound baseball, moving runners, working on situational hitting,” Martinez said. “They all bought into that and wanted to do that.”
Martinez has a statue outside the ballpark, which sits on a street named for him. His title this season is director of offensive strategy, and he will be in uniform for around 100 games. His everyday disciple is Seitzer, who led the AL in hits for Kansas City in 1987, the year of Martinez’s debut.
“He used the whole field, hit the ball the other way but also could pull the ball,” Martinez said. “He knows hitting well. He has an understanding of mechanics but also the approach and planning for the game. He’s just perfect for the type of hitter that we have. Gap-to-gap hitters, that’s the approach he believes in.”
Martinez and Seitzer combined for more than 3,800 career hits but had just one 30-homer season by Martinez in 2000. They preached what they did, two pure hitters with one voice.
“Seitz teaches simple things in simple ways, and he’s so subtle in how he goes about it,” said Jerry Dipoto, Mariners president of baseball operations. “I’ve joked that he’s Midwest Edgar. Now we get another voice that’s highly credible. He’s led one of, if not the, best offenses in baseball in Atlanta, and all you have to do is pull up his baseball ref page, look at how he did it and recognize that’s exactly how he teaches it.”
As a teenager, Seitzer arrived at Eastern Illinois as a dead pull hitter with pop. In the first week of his freshman year, coach Tom McDevitt reset Seitzer’s path: “The day you become a good hitter,” he said, “is the day when you can wait on an off-speed pitch and hit it on the line to the opposite field.”
The day arrived quickly for Seitzer. He took on McDevitt’s challenge and thrived, setting a school record for hits while batting .431 in three seasons. The Royals drafted him in the 11th round in 1983, and soon he started a 12-year major-league career as a two-time All-Star infielder.
Along the way, Seitzer noticed that teammates responded to his tips. Sitting in a duck blind one day with Mike Macfarlane, a friend from the Royals, Seitzer mentioned that he’d someday like to teach hitting. Macfarlane suggested a partnership, and the two opened Mac N Seitz, a youth training facility in Kansas City.
With it, Seitzer found his post-career calling.
“When they’re little kids, you start to ingrain good fundamentals to the swing and the approach, and as they get older and get more athletic and stronger, they’ve had (such) good habits in their brain that it all just comes to life for them,” said Seitzer, who switched to the pro ranks in 2007 with Arizona.
“When I got into pro ball, it blew me away that, well, big leaguers don’t want complicated, they don’t want hard — they want simple. So it was really the same teaching all the way up.”
Seitzer, 62, has kept up with the data flooding the game — “I feel like I show up ready to learn something every day,” he said — but too much information can cloud a coach’s message. The Mariners say they learned that lesson last season. When Martinez took over, Moore said, the players felt freer.
“He doesn’t speak much,” Moore said. “But when he does, it’s profound and you want to listen.”
Despite their late surge, the Mariners led the majors in strikeouts while hitting .224, the worst average in franchise history. They made only modest offseason additions — a Donovan Solano here, a Rowdy Tellez there — but did add two outfielders last summer by trading with Tampa Bay for Randy Arozarena and signing Víctor Robles, the former Washington phenom.
Robles lowered his hands, hit .328 and earned a contract extension; he said through a translator that he felt rejuvenated in Seattle. With Julio Rodríguez, the young franchise pillar in center, the Mariners might have one of the game’s better outfields.
Even so, producing at home will always be tricky, as past stars have learned. When Teoscar Hernández spent the 2023 season in Seattle, he slashed .217/.263/.380 at home, baffled by the oddly angled backdrop beyond center field.
“It wasn’t that I couldn’t hit the ball out in that park,” said Hernández, who signed with the Dodgers and helped them to a title. “It was more the way I saw the pitcher. I didn’t see the pitcher straight; I saw him, like, crooked. It’s not the same way that I see the pitcher in other stadiums.”
It’s easy to suggest that the Mariners make their park more appealing to hitters — both their own and potential free agents. But given the strength of their pitching, there’s a risk in overcorrecting. The plan is to rely on Martinez and Seitzer to keep things simple, squeeze more runs from the lineup and let the arms guide the way to October.
“It’s crazy the amount of talent the pitchers have,” Robles said. “I noticed it right away. If the offense can get a little better and keep up with the pitching, people are going to be talking about us.”
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