2 reasons to panic about Mariners' horrible spring training, and 2 not to

The Seattle Mariners will have high hopes when they begin their 2025 season at T-Mobile Park next Thursday. They're sure to be a contender again, and perhaps even one worthy of the World Series.

In other words: Hopefully their worst stretch of baseball for the year is happening right now.

Seattle isn't merely having a bad time in spring training. It's more like an abysmal time, as their record stands at 9-17 record through 26 games. It is the worst record in either the Cactus League or the Grapefruit League.

This can't be ignored, and is therefore deserving of a momentary pause for serious discussion. So, let's dive into two reasons why the Mariners' cold spring is meaningless and two reasons why it might not be.

2 reasons not to panic about the Mariners' spring training

No. 1: It's literally spring training

The conventional wisdom is that spring training does not matter, and this is one of these things that just feels true. In order for spring training to have meaning, everyone involved would have to treat the games as if they count. And since the games don't count, well, why would anyone behave that way?

It would be one thing if the data could poke its head in and say, "Um, actually, you'd be surprised." And at least where individual players are concerned, a 2015 study by Dan Rosenheck for The Economist found that there is a shred of truth to the notion that spring training is predictive.

Yet team records tend to be a different story, and even an amateur mathematician like myself can crunch the numbers and find that there's no meaningful correlation between spring records and regular season records. Bad news for standouts like the San Francisco Giants (17-6), perhaps, but certainly good news for the Mariners.

No. 2: At least they're hitting

Of all the reasons the Mariners fell just one game short of a playoff spot in 2024, there is one that simply could not be downplayed: they just didn't hit.

Well, they did once Dan Wilson yanked the manager's chair out from underneath Scott Servais, prompting the Mariners to score an American League-high 173 runs between August 23 and the end of the season. But it was too little, too late after the Mariners ranked third from the bottom of the AL in scoring through August 22.

Whether the Mariners will pick up in 2025 where they left off in 2024 remains an open question, but the early returns could not be more encouraging. They have scored 158 runs for the spring, the second-most of any team this spring.

There are some unusual suspects among Seattle's top spring performers, but it bodes well that Julio Rodríguez and Cal Raleigh have each homered three times and have 19 runs batted in between them. It has otherwise been a big spring for Randy Arozarena, who's batting .327, and Mitch Garver, who's also homered three times.

Is it a related story that Senior Director of Hitting Strategy Edgar Martínez and hitting coach Kevin Seitzer are preaching a simpler, ostensibly more effective approach? One would assume so, yes.

2 reasons to panic about the Mariners' spring training

No. 1: Having the worst record of the spring is a legitimately bad omen

Spring records may not be predictive as a whole, but what if the focus is narrowed to the most extreme outliers? What then?

This is where recent history is less kind to the Mariners. A tip of the cap is owed to a Redditor who noted in 2024 that out of the 15 teams that finished with the worst record of the spring between 2009 and 2023, only two made the playoffs.

The Chicago White Sox subsequently had the worst record of the spring for '24, and...uh, yeah. Mariners fans don't want any of that energy.

No. 2: As good as the offense has been, the pitching has been worse

As for how the Mariners are 9-17 this spring even though their offense has averaged 6.1 runs per game, it's quite simple: their pitching has permitted 6.7 runs per game.

The phrase "not what you'd expect" hardly does the situation justice. Pitching is, of course, kind of the Mariners' whole thing. This was particularly the case last season, as they co-led the majors with a 3.49 ERA and sat alone with the best marks for WHIP, walks and a whole bunch of other stats.

There are nonetheless actual alarming stories underneath the larger umbrella of Seattle's difficult spring on the mound. We know that George Kirby will start the year on the injured list because of shoulder inflammation. We also know that his replacement, Emerson Hancock, has remained hittable.

It's also been a rough one for Luis Castillo. He's fanned only eight of the 54 batters he's faced, and the fastballs he's had tracked have averaged a mere 93.8 mph. That's nearly 2 mph below his average from last season.

The Mariners still project well, at least

Even with all this said, a bad record isn't the worst thing that can happen to a team during spring.

Kirby notwithstanding, the Mariners have not been utterly decimated by injuries like, say, the New York Yankees. They've lost Gerrit Cole for the year and Luis Gil for three months, and nobody really knows when Giancarlo Stanton will be back. The defending AL champs are still a good team despite these misfortunes, but it's a lot harder to call them a great team.

As for the Mariners, FanGraphs puts their chances at making the playoffs, winning the AL West, and winning the World Series at 57.3, 32.7 and 4.6 percent, respectively. The first two figures are tops among the five teams in the division, while the third ranks behind the [gestures frantically to the paragraph above] Yankees among American League clubs.

In other words, there is a strong probability that the Mariners' poor spring will eventually become a bad memory. And not even the kind of bad memory that truly weighs one down. More like one of those that crops up every now and again and succeeds only in minorly annoying you.

When it comes down to it, a bad spring only matters if a team lets it matter. And these Mariners? They're too promising to actually be this bad.