Fallout from Justin Turner comments further provokes Mariners fans

One day after his no-holds-barred takedown of the team's 2024-25 offseason, we're getting a sense of how current members of the Seattle Mariners feel about what Justin Turner had to say. And it is not flattering for the organization.

Now with the Chicago Cubs on a one-year, $6 million deal, the 40-year-old Turner vented about the Mariners in an interview with Bob Nightengale of USA Today that went viral on Wednesday. We won't rehash all of it, but the key quote still jabs like an ice pick at the heart of the Mariner fandom.

“The fact that they missed the playoffs by one game, and didn’t go out and add an impact bat or two when you have the best pitching staff in baseball," Turner said, “just seems absurd to me."

This is a no-lies-detected kind of quote. The Mariners indeed did fall just one game short of the 2024 playoffs. They indeed do have an elite pitching staff yet a middling offense. And they indeed did respond by barely cracking eight figures in free-agent spending during the winter.

Yet the initial reaction from Mariners players that Nightengale spoke to was largely deferential, with Bryce Miller perhaps summing it up best: "[At] the end of the day, the guys who are in the locker room, that’s who were going with, that’s who we’re riding with. We believe in who we have."

Cue the revenge of unnamed Mariners players

This book is far from closed, however, as chiming in with his own report on the fallout of Turner's comments late on Wednesday was Ryan Divish of the Seattle Times.

Albeit under the guise of anonymity, Divish got several Seattle players to say how they really feel about Turner's assessment of the Mariners. “Not one bit,” said one in response to a question about whether he was wrong. Another responded to a query about whether the organization is falling short by saying: “Isn’t it every year?”

And then, the exclamation mark from still another player: “I would think any intellectual baseball fan that’s been following this team would see what has been happening. It’s pretty obvious.”

Again, no lies detected. Seattle's Opening Day payroll has risen amid the club's current run as a contender, going from 25th in MLB for 2021 to 17th in MLB for 2024. Yet stagnation has set in, as Spotrac projects the Mariners to once again rank 17th in Opening Day payroll this year.

At a certain point, silver linings don't cut it

The bright side, of course, is that the Mariners still project to have a good season. FanGraphs has them down for 84 wins, thereby putting them within striking distance of what would be a fifth straight season of at least 85 wins. Mariners fans are witnessing the team's best era since the early 2000s.

What nonetheless makes Turner's apparently non-exclusive discontent doubly frustrating is that an even better outlook for 2025 should have been possible. The Mariners franchise is not lacking in resources, whether we're talking revenue ($396 million in 2023, according to Forbes) or trade assets (a whole bunch of talented starters and MLB's No. 1 farm system).

In an ideal world, all of these resources would have been leveraged to further shape the 2025 roster into a championship-caliber unit. Making good on a more ambitious offseason would not have been a case of owner John Stanton and president of baseball operations Jerry Dipoto working miracles, but rather fulfilling what they should see as their responsibility to the franchise and to the fanbase.

Perhaps they will someday, when the timing is just right. But the question Mariners fans have seems to be the same one Mariners players have: If not now, then when?