Eugenio Suárez has a good reason to refuse a 3rd Mariners reunion

From the Mariners’ side, a Eugenio Suárez reunion keeps making sense. They know the player, they know the personality, and they know what the clubhouse looks like when Geno is running the show with that big-kid energy.

But if we’re going to be honest about what a third go-round would actually mean, you have to flip the camera to Suárez’s perspective — and from his angle, Seattle is the one place that’s consistently made his life harder at the plate.

The park splits are the tell. In Great American Ball Park, he’s looked like exactly what teams pay for: thump, damage, and comfortable aggression (.851 OPS with 101 homers). In Chase Field, he’s been even more productive (.928 OPS with 47 homers). And then there’s T-Mobile Park: a .717 OPS with 35 homers, plus the ugliest detail of all — his strikeout rate spikes there, with a 31.2 strikeout percentage. It's the only park where he’s logged 200-plus plate appearances and whiffed at that kind of clip.

Mariners’ Suárez reunion feels tempting until you see where his bat actually plays

And this is the part Mariners fans don’t always want to hear: some hitters just don’t see the ball well in certain environments, and T-Mobile has a long history of turning good swings into uncomfortable at-bats.

Whether it’s the marine air, the way the ball carries (or doesn’t), the crooked batter’s eye, or just the visual backdrop at certain times of day, there are guys who never quite look relaxed there. Suárez might be one of them. When a hitter’s K-rate rises in one specific home environment, it’s often a signal that the first move — simply tracking the pitch — is a tick harder.

The Mariners lived with that friction in 2022 and 2023 because Suárez brought other things that mattered. But you’re pointing at the scary recent data point: a .479 OPS in Seattle last season. If that’s even close to the current reality of how he’s seeing the ball at T-Mobile, then you can understand why Geno — who’s absolutely trying to maximize the back half of his career — would hesitate to willingly put himself back into the one setting that seems to suppress his strengths.

That’s the human side of it, too. If you’ve been somewhere that made you press, where the same kind of contact died on the warning track, you don’t sign up for that again unless the fit is perfect. The Mariners can pitch nostalgia all they want, but nostalgia doesn’t help you win a World Series.

A reunion can feel inevitable as options narrow. But from Geno’s view, the numbers say the quiet part out loud: if he wants the version of himself that shows up in Cincinnati and Arizona, choosing T-Mobile again might be choosing the hardest possible path. And that’s a pretty good reason to say, respectfully, “no thanks.”