In the end, the crowning achievement of the Seattle Mariners offense in 2024 is that it won’t set the all-time strikeout record. It won’t go down as the most underperforming lineup in MLB history.
Bravo, boys.
Is that harsh?
Perhaps.
But so is the reality that the Mariners wasted the greatest starting rotation in franchise history — one of the most talented rotations across the sport over the last decade.
That’s harsh.
And that’s the lasting legacy of the 2024 Mariners.
Where did it all go wrong?
How did the Mariners, with the best (and most affordable) starting rotation in MLB, miss out on a postseason bid for a second year in a row?
There isn’t one thing or one swing to pinpoint.
From the top down, it’s an organizational failure.
It’s on the ownership group for not investing more in a roster that so clearly needed more than the Dollar Store upgrades.
It’s on the baseball operations brass for not spending more efficiently the resources it was given, and for stubbornly pushing a hard-line hard-numbers strategy in daily lineup decisions.
It’s on the coaching staff early in the season for overthinking and over-planning, and for its inability to connect with the team’s most important player, Julio Rodriguez.
And it’s certainly on the hitters for — well, you know, not hitting for the season’s first five months.
Through late August, it appeared to be a foregone conclusion that Seattle would set the all-time strikeout record, set by the Minnesota Twins last season with 1,654 strikeouts and a 26.6% K rate.
Through their first 128 games this season, the Mariners had a .216 batting average and a 27.7% strikeout rate, averaging 10.2 strikeouts per game.
The Mariners do deserve credit for being adaptable, and for their offensive turnaround over the final month under the direction of Dan Wilson and Edgar Martinez.
Their “simplified” approach — see ball, hit ball, baby — has worked. The Mariners have cut their strikeout rate.
The Mariners have been one of the very best offenses in MLB in September, an encouraging transformation that suggests they won’t need to entirely start from scratch with their offensive thinking going into 2025.
A new approach
Which was part of their problem coming into 2024.
Then-manager Scott Servais had high hopes last winter when the club hired his friend and former teammate, Brant Brown, and created the new position of offensive coordinator for him.
Because the Mariners had underperformed in 2023, they felt it necessary to make a strong pivot with their offensive strategy, and Brown — who had considerable success in the past with the Los Angeles Dodgers and Miami Marlins — was supposed to be the hitting coach to do that.
But some in the Mariners organization saw Brown’s methods as “extreme,” one insider said. Brown, in pregame planning meetings, asked hitters to hunt for one specific pitch in one specific zone; when they didn’t get that exact pitch in that exact zone, the strategy would backfire.
Add that specific strategy on top of the data-driven approach that the Mariners front office values — like many modern MLB clubs — and some hitters felt the team-wide plans were too complex, and too inflexible. Sensory overload, it seemed.
Hitters eventually started to tune out Brown, whose blunt coaching style did not seem to sit well with Rodriguez in particular.
By late May, the organization made a decision to fire Brown.
Servais took a more hands-on approach with offensive game-planning after that, and young hitting coaches Jarret DeHart and Tommy Joseph took on greater responsibilities too.
DeHart is renowned for his ability to break down swing mechanics — he’s been described as one of the best young hitting coaches in the game in that regard — but he’d had little experience in game-planning.
Servais had talked about trying to simplify hitters’ approaches, wanting them to be “super aggressive” and just be on time for fastballs. Hitting 101, essentially. It worked for a bit — helping the Mariners take a 10-game lead in the AL West by mid-June — but the only consistency from the Mariners lineup was its inconsistent run production.
At every turn, the persistent strikeout issues stymied any progress. There was a 14-game stretch from June 24 to July 10 in which the Mariners struck out no fewer than 11 times each game.
There were days when just making contact felt like a notable feat for hitters.
It didn’t help that Rodriguez, a subpar hitter for much of the first half of the season, suffered a high ankle sprain just as he was starting to heat up in July. He would miss the next several weeks — in hindsight, the most crucial stretch of the season for the Mariners.
On Aug. 11, the Mariners had probably their best day of the season in a 12-1 victory over the New York Mets to a complete a weekend sweep in their first appearance on ESPN’s “Sunday Night Baseball” for a home game in 20 years. It was a picture-perfect Seattle summer afternoon — roof open, bats unleashed — and everything seemed possible for the Mariners once again.
Then, like whiplash, they came crashing down.
In their next game, the Mariners were mauled in Detroit, 15-1. They lost the next two games after that when their offense couldn’t support dominant starts from their two youngest starting pitchers, Bryan Woo and Bryce Miller. That series sweep in Detroit, in hindsight, clearly marked the beginning of the end.
Servais had tried just about everything to spark the offense. Nothing stuck. And coming off that disastrous road trip through Detroit, Pittsburgh and Los Angeles — another sweep, this time to the Dodgers — and with the Mariners sinking to .500 and trailing by five games in the division, the club fired Servais and DeHart on Aug. 22.
A new (old) approach
Edgar Martinez’s greatest success in five weeks as the interim hitting coach has been his ability to get through to Rodriguez.
A Hall of Fame designated hitter, Martinez has the cachet and the experience that commands respect. Rodriguez even acknowledged that he’s glad he’s been willing to listen to new advice.
The cultural connection between the two, being able to talk in their native Spanish language, has certainly played a positive role too.
Martinez helped Rodriguez, and others, relax in the batter’s box. Be on time. Don’t overthink. Don’t overswing. Hit it up the middle.
“He’s proven to them that it can be this simple,” one club insider said.
The offensive turnaround — and the reduction in strikeouts, in particular — has been dramatic over the past month.
Will Martinez, at age 61, return as the hitting coach in 2025?
By all accounts, he had only planned to assist in a full-time capacity through the end of this season.
The door is open for him, if that’s what he wants to do, and the organization would certainly welcome him back with open arms. There is a possibility he could return in a hybrid role — perhaps he could assist during homestands, easing the burden of travel.
If Martinez doesn’t return, finding a new full-time hitting coach will be one of the first priorities of the offseason — and that process has already begun for the Mariners, per MLB sources.
From the larger perspective, how the Mariners address their offensive strategy — and whether they’re able to create synergy between the front office and the coaching staff — will be the most important story going into 2025.
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