Dismal final results show Mariners must turn 2027 spring training into ABS school

The closer you look at the Seattle Mariners' 2026 season, the more it feels like they were lucky to win as many as 76 games. The things they were bad at include hitting, pitching and fielding the ball, as well as generally using their heads.

Tapping said heads was an issue, too. In the first year of MLB's Automated Ball-Strike System, the charitable way to view the Mariners' final results is as "mixed." They did OK on the defensive side, winning 59 percent of their total challenges. Yet when it comes to net overturns more than expected by a team seeing identical pitches, they were fifth from the bottom of MLB at -33.9.

Here's how the splits work out:

• For Mariners Catchers/Pitchers: -3.9
• For Mariners Hitters: -30.0

There's no sugarcoating how Mariners hitters used the ABS. Their 42 percent success rate tied for the worst in the league, which overrides how they flipped 23 strikeouts and 12 walks.

The Mariners can't hope that their ABS problem fixes itself in 2027

Before we go any further with this rant, it's important to acknowledge that being good at using the ABS doesn't necessarily look like a hack.

Using Statcast's total vs. expected metric, only three of the 10 best challenging teams made the playoffs. For the best offensive challenging teams, it was four out of 10. For the best defensive challenging teams, three out of 10. What we have here is not a particularly strong correlation between being good at using the ABS and being good at winning games.

Even so, let's be careful about conflating this for evidence that the ABS doesn't matter. Not using the ABS well amounts to leaving value on the table. No team should want to do that, least of all the mid- and small-market clubs that need every extra percentage point they can get.

For the sake of the Mariners' offense, the ABS is one area where the likely loss of Randy Arozarena figures to be addition by subtraction. Yet among the Mariners' five most prolific challengers on the offensive side, he was but one offender:

Cole Young and Dominic Canzone must do better, while the best thing to do with Josh Naylor might be to revoke his ABS privileges. This seems to have been the message to Julio Rodríguez, whose inability to win challenges (two times all year) was offset by how seldom he tried (seven times all year).

Even better, the Mariners can do something next spring that they didn't do during spring training this year: Use it to experiment.

Under Dan Wilson, Mariners hitters challenged only 24 calls last spring. That was in the bottom 10 of the league, and roughly half as many as willy-nilly challengers like the New York Yankees (49), Cleveland Guardians (48) and Tampa Bay Rays (43).

If there had been a directive for Mariners hitters to use the system more, maybe we wouldn't have gotten this beauty (derogatory, for the record) from Wilson on Opening Day: “It is new obviously for everybody, and I think maybe it doesn’t jump to the forefront of the mind all the time when you’re in the box. But again, it’s part of the game now and something definitely we will use.”

For what it's worth, Mariners hitters did issue 33 challenges in March and April. They then seemed to lose their taste for it, with two of their three least prolific challenging months coming in August and September. Heck, there were times when they even seemed to forget about it entirely.

To be sure, this is not going to be Priority No. 1 for Wilson's replacement. But given what was lost this this year, it shouldn't be too much to ask for better use of the ABS to be a priority.

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