Final report on Dan Wilson exposes the futility of Seattle Mariners' faith in him

This is the final day of a Seattle Mariners season that nobody will miss. There's also a 99.9 percent chance that it is Dan Wilson's final day as manager, and nobody is going to miss him either. He has proved that someone can, in fact, be a franchise legend and a bad fit to lead said franchise.

Even coming out of last year's near-miss at the World Series, his quality as a manager was questionable at best. And as 2026 went along, both his leadership and his feel for strategy fell under near-constant scrutiny. He's not the reason for the team's 75-86 record, but he is a logical scapegoat.

Nobody needed to have been a fly on the wall to make these observations, or to make that final determination. Yet there was inevitably going to be that report. As in, the one that laid out what happened behind the scenes, and how it all doomed Wilson.

This is the report that Adam Jude of The Seattle Times dropped on Saturday, a few hours before the Mariners' penultimate game. It starts by reiterating that Wilson is not expected back as manager in 2027, and it really doesn't pull punches on anyone involved with the failure of this season. Wilson, though, ultimately doesn't come away as undeserving of Mariners fans' scorn.

What was the point of Dan Wilson as the manager of the Mariners?

Whereas Scott Servais was too hands-on when he was managing the Mariners, Wilson had more of a hands-off style that was effective late in 2024 and throughout 2025. Alas, this year proved it's not so easy to get away with a laissez-faire style when the players won't police themselves.

It wasn't just Cal Raleigh, either. He was but one of many veterans who struggled this year, and it seems that nobody felt like they could talk the talk while they weren't walking the walk. Here's how Bryan Woo put it:

"Every year is going to take on a life of its own … and learning that, like, it’s not the on-field performance that gives guys the leadership and the validation and the voice. At times where we all have struggled, maybe we didn’t feel as confident with speaking up because we weren’t performing in our own right. So it’s a tough spot to be in. But I think we all learned from that this year."

Bryan Woo

That's a leadership void right there, and one you'd hope Wilson would have jumped in to fill at a certain point. He clearly never did, so the listlessness that defined the season is no great surprise.

As for the Xs and Os, one of the more damning details in Jude's report concerns weekly offseason meetings between Wilson and Dipoto. These were meant to get Wilson, who had been away from the daily grind of MLB for 20 years before he was hired, up to speed on the modern game. You know, as if to do an end run around lessons normally learned through actual experience.

And yet, Wilson still had full autonomy over daily lineups and pitching decisions. That's a shocking level of trust in someone who had done little-to-nothing to earn it. Once again, the result is the result.

The Dan Wilson experience should show Jerry Dipoto what not to do with the Mariners' next manager

Even with all of that said, Wilson's hiring wasn't necessarily rotten from the start.

He was an outside-the-box pick when the Mariners announced him as Scott Servais' replacement in August of 2024, and not necessarily in a good way. But it's not like teams have the pick of the litter for managers when making in-season replacements. And besides, Wilson at least fit the mold of Servais' philosophical opposite. When he led that 2024 team to a 21-14 finish, that seemed to be good enough. That obviously remained the case last year.

Yet after Wilson pretty much single-handedly torpedoed the Mariners in Game 7 of the ALCS, there needed to be a stronger reaction than to assign weekly sessions of manager school. If not outright fired, Wilson needed to have been put on a short leash for the 2026 season. At the first sign of trouble, it's a warning. At the second, you're out. Or something like that.

That Dipoto and the Mariners brass instead chose to just let this season play out is mind-boggling. There's no way they didn't know what Jude reported on Saturday, and it's not like things came to a head only at the end of the season. The 2026 Mariners were a mess from Day 1, if not before then. We'll never know what might have changed, if only Wilson had been given the same boot the team gave Servais in 2024.

The reference to the "This is fine" dog writes itself. It was a nice house the Mariners built for themselves, as this year's team was a legit World Series contender on paper. That it burned down is sad. That they stood by and watched as it burned is infuriating.

Since Jude reports "indications are" that Dipoto will return for 2027, the only hope is that he'll finally get it right with what will be his third manager. That he should know what not to do with this next hire can only help. It's just too bad that a whole season had to go to waste as part of the learning process.

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