Even Cal Raleigh's blunt assessment of Mariners dances around the culture question

Cal Raleigh just came right out and said it, and validated every complaint fans have made about this year's Seattle Mariners. There was a lack of focus. There was a lack of energy. No lies detected there. So, too bad that observations are not the same as answers.

The Mariners were eliminated from the playoffs on Thursday before they even took the field. It was an outrage. It was also a relief. After so many months of bad baseball, it felt like a team being put out of its misery. And as much as we all wanted to see the Mariners back in October in the abstract, playoff baseball frankly would have been wasted on this team.

After 2025 and the buzzy offseason that followed, Mariners fans have every reason to feel like they were sold a false bill of goods. And the agony of watching this year's team go 74-85 is not rooted in a failure of perception. The 2026 Mariners were expected to be good because they had the goods. On Opening Day, only the Los Angeles Dodgers had better World Series odds.

At no point this year did the Mariners live up to the hype. They only went as far as four games under .500, and their particular brand of baseball was just plain ugly. If nothing else, it was refreshing to know what Raleigh saw it, too.

The Mariners' season can't have collapsed into a slog all on its own

Raleigh also had things to say about the Mariners' execution on defense, with runners and scoring position and so on. All that is true. Like ink and paper upon the purchase of a donut, we don't need to bring numbers into this.

Rather, here's the part that raises more questions than it answers about the team's broader culture:

"I don’t think it was one thing I don’t think it was one person. I don’t think it was one department that failed this year. I think it was a collective failure, unfortunately. It’s going to take a lot of people having some self-reflection, myself included, on the direction of where we’re heading, what we want to be, and who we want to be as a team. What is our team identity? I don’t feel like there was one this year and that is partly on me as a leader on this team."

Cal Raleigh

You're not going to hear any disagreement from Mariners fans that Raleigh fell short as a leader. Maybe it was some kind of shell shock from the World Baseball Classic. Maybe it was because he spent too much energy on busting out of his post-60 homer slump. Whatever the case, he just didn't have the beating-heart energy that was so vital in previous years.

And yet, he is just one guy.

Dan Wilson definitely should have been more of a leader, and he's all but certain to pay for that failure with his job. Yet the entire point of him as the manager was that this was a veteran squad that needed someone hands off. Other veterans besides Raleigh broke that premise. Josh Naylor felt like a background character all year. So did J.P. Crawford and Brendan Donovan, even if each has the very real excuse of being injured all year.

It's hard not to wonder if there could have been a proper center of gravity if the team had done things differently after last year's near-miss at the World Series. Was Jorge Polanco missed? Was Eugenio Suárez missed? Given his history in Seattle, one can definitely make a strong case for the latter.

Regardless, it's Logan Gilbert who hit the nail on the head about what happened this year. He spoke last week about how the Mariners spent this season "just waiting for it to turn around." That's certainly how it felt from the outside looking in. The Mariners didn't give up. They just never really showed up.

Now that the question is where to go next, Jerry Dipoto and Justin Hollander can't just assume that everyone will know what not to do coming out of this season. The two of them must do something they should have done months ago: Step in and shake things up.

We have ideas for how they can change both the form and function of the roster. And if Dipoto needs any further incentive, he should recognize that even his 54 percent model broke this year. The Mariners' winning percentage since their contention window opened in 2021 is now just .534.

If a return to form doesn't follow in 2027, that's when John Stanton will have to get past his purported reluctance to move on from this front office. If it isn't already, another failure to get to the World Series will only make it clearer that the right person to run the team is not merely someone with higher ambitions than sustainability.

If that's not Stanton's ultimate goal, then whether he's the problem the Mariners need to shake will only become more of a question than it already is.

Add us as a preferred source on Google

Follow