Mariners' big offseason additions have horrifying comps that can't be ignored

There's an obvious way to be pessimistic about what the Seattle Mariners did this offseason. It simply involves pointing out that they lost Jorge Polanco and Eugenio Suárez, whose star credentials speak for themselves.

Of course, bringing back Josh Naylor was huge, and the club's two major additions have real upside. Brendan Donovan is precisely what the team needed both on the infield and in the leadoff spot. Jose A. Ferrer, meanwhile, has good control and closer-caliber stuff from the left side.

The best-case scenario for both players is straightforward. For Donovan, it involves being a table-setter for Cal Raleigh and Julio Rodríguez, in addition to a lockdown defender at multiple positions. For Ferrer, it involves breaking out as an All-Star setup guy in front of Andrés Muñoz.

But, screw it, let's go back to the pessimism well by remembering two names that Mariners fans would just as soon forget: Adam Frazier and Gregory Santos.

The Mariners are trying to succeed where they failed with Adam Frazier and Gregory Santos

Right now, the Mariners are selling Donovan as a consistent hitter and versatile defender who fits the roster like a glove. For Ferrer, the sales job involves pointing to his strike-throwing and excellent stuff as a distraction from his pedestrian results.

Sound familiar?

When the Mariners traded for Frazier in November of 2021, Jerry Dipoto talked him up as a "proven, versatile, well-rounded player." Like Donovan now, Frazier was coming off an All-Star season and offered a strong bat-to-ball skill and defensive chops at second base and left field.

That's how it started, anyway. How it went was this: Frazier followed a .305 average and 4.0 rWAR in 2021 with a .238 average and 0.9 rWAR in 2022, a downturn from which his career has never recovered.

As for Santos, it was obvious that the Mariners had gotten a guy with closer-caliber stuff when he came aboard in February of 2024. He had awesome metrics hiding behind a 3.39 ERA in 2023, including 98th-percentile fastball velocity and above-average whiff, hard-hit, ground-ball and barrel rates.

Once again, though, disaster ensued. Santos was limited by injuries to only 16 appearances for the Mariners across 2024 and 2025. When he did pitch, he had a 5.02 ERA with more walks (nine) than strikeouts (6). The Mariners non-tendered him in November.

It's hard not to see these as failed versions of the same experiments the Mariners are running again on Donovan and Ferrer. If they succeed this time, it'll be because they corrected for the right variables.

For his part, Donovan is younger and more established than Frazier was back in 2021. And while Ferrer is older now than Santos was in 2024, he has 77 more major league appearances under his belt than Santos did at the time.

All the same, it doesn't take a wild imagination to see how things could go wrong. Bat-to-ball types like Donovan are always prone to bad luck, and what could be increased exposure to lefties is a bad idea waiting to be revealed as such. And while Ferrer has swing-and-miss stuff in theory, it hasn't actually been that in reality. He has fanned just 7.7 batters per nine innings as a major leaguer.

Fingers crossed, everyone. Because if Donovan and Ferrer fall into the same hole that swallowed Frazier and Santos, this year could get rough.