Cole Young's latest sign of life for Mariners is a distraction amid spring slump

If Cole Young was waiting on one good swing to get his bat going, he may have gotten it when he sent a ball traveling 442 feet on Sunday. But since it's only his first hit for the Seattle Mariners this spring, nobody should get too carried away.

To give credit where credit is due, the homer that Young hit on Sunday really was a nice piece. It was a left-on-left matchup against Texas Rangers reliever Jacob Latz, and he turned on a slider that was seemingly released behind his head.

Even before that homer, the Mariners had been talking up Young as a changed man relative to the green rookie who debuted last year. Jerry Dipoto described him as looking "chiseled," and Justin Hollander went a step further in speaking to Seattle Sports’ Brock and Salk: “I think he’s showing us that he’s ready to play in the big leagues and ready to just take the job and run with it."

Yet even if we're not out here wanting to dunk on 22-year-olds whose whole careers are ahead of them, this is a lot of hype for a guy who's 1-for-10 with six strikeouts in Cactus League play.

Cole Young's long home run is a highlight amid a string of spring training lowlights

Before Cactus League games began, we wrote about the one thing we really needed to see from Young to be convinced that he's ready for everyday action at second base: better production against fastballs.

And so far, it's just not there.

In a continuation of a theme that helped lead to Young's downfall in 2025, pitchers have thrown him four-seam fastballs 49.1 percent of the time this spring. You'd like to see him greeting that kind of exposure with an adjustment, but he's:

• 0-for-4 against four-seamers
• With a 30.8 Whiff%
• And three of his six strikeouts

Small sample size and all, but it's not exactly a change in course. Suffice it to say that in 2025, Young was worse against four-seam fastballs than any other Mariners hitter was against any other pitch.

So when one sees Young oohing and ahhing Mariners fans with a long home run, one is reminded of how he pulled the same trick with that 456-foot homer from last summer. That was awesome… but at the end of the day, he still ended up hitting just .217 with a 78 OPS+.

None of this is to suggest the Mariners are fooling themselves, and that they should be running out of patience with Young. This is the right time to give him some runway. And while Colt Emerson has indeed made an impression this spring, him beating Young for the keystone gig still seems less likely than him starting the year with Triple-Tacoma for more seasoning.

Even so, Young isn't exactly giving the brass excuses to lengthen his leash. The home run was a nice sign of life, but not the game-changer that his offensive game needs.