Mariners’ cohesive push forward sure beats whatever Astros are doing with new hires

Nobody can make any promises as to whether the Seattle Mariners' new coaching staff will work out, but at least there's a logic to it. Jason Kanzler won over the front office and veteran players to get hired as manager. And between CJ Gillman and Tanner Swanson, Kanzler has two lieutenants who look like real fixes for real problems.

Meanwhile in Houston, they're trying to figure out how Brad Ausmus became the Astros' new manager.

The "why" of Ausmus' hiring, which was formally announced on Wednesday, is baffling enough in its own right. The best thing he has going for him is five years of prior managerial experience with the Detroit Tigers and Los Angeles Angels. The worst thing he has going for him is the particulars of that experience. He has a .478 winning percentage as a manager, and was lauded as a bright bulb neither in Detroit nor in Anaheim before catching on as a bench coach for the Athletics under Mark Kotsay and the New York Yankees under Aaron Boone.

According to Chandler Rome of The Athletic, the decision to hire Ausmus to replace Joe Espada came from new GM Randy Flores, who was just hired away from an assistant GM post in the St. Louis Cardinals' front office on October 30. Yet there's also the twist that Ausmus interviewed with Astros owner Jim Crane before Flores' hiring. Ausmus also has a longstanding relationship with Jeff Bagwell, who wields what some Astros fans see as outsized power in the organization.

There's a plausible and harmless explanation for how Ausmus got hired, and it boils down to "great minds think alike." But the general perception that there were other hands on wheel besides Flores' when Ausmus got hired is already there. The whole thing feel like a powder keg, waiting to be triggered by an inevitable power struggle.

It's just as hard to make sense of the Astros' choice to hire Randy Flores as GM

All of this is to say nothing of the palace intrigue over Flores' own hire, which is perceived by some segments of the Astros fanbase as Crane having picked the lesser of two candidates. They also had Milwaukee Brewers assistant GM Matt Kleine on their radar as ostensibly their top choice as late as October 29, the day before Flores got the call.

Whatever happened there, hiring Kleine would have been an easy sell to the Astros' fanbase. An executive from the front office of a World Series champion known for its all-the-way-down ingenuity? Heck, the view from Seattle would been the same as in Houston: Nailed it.

That Crane instead went with Flores feels like an attempt to go back in time and try for Jeff Luhnow all over again. Luhnow came from working under John Mozeliak in the Cardinals front office in 2011, and brought a background in player development with him. Before long, the Astros were building a juggernaut that would eventually play in four World Series in six years between 2017 and 2022.

The circumstances this time around are different, however. Flores is like Luhnow in that he's also a Mozeliak acolyte. But whereas the Cardinals had a reputation for being innovative under Mozeliak in the late 2000s and early 2010s, that reputation dried up long before he handed leadership of the Cardinals off to Chaim Bloom after the 2025 season.

If Flores is going to prove to be some kind of genius, it needs to happen fast. And the first impression hasn't been great. Even if he has only been on the job for less than two weeks, he probably should have known why Carlos Correa no longer plays shortstop.

If you're the Mariners, you're not threatened by anything the Astros are doing right now

This is where it's important to pause and acknowledge that, yes, the Astros are the ones in the AL West with bragging rights. They only won 81 games this year, but they still won the AL West for the eighth time in the last 10 seasons.

Whatever else the Mariners are right now, though, they're not a house divided. And regardless of how it all pans out, they're also a team with a clear vision for how to move forward. Following a year in which Dan Wilson was at the center of a team-wide communications breakdown, everyone's rowing in the same direction now. John Stanton. Jerry Dipoto and his staff. Jason Kanzler and his staff. And at least several veteran players.

Though there's still work to be done to rebuild the roster, that is also true of every other team in the league right now. And while initial projections for the 2027 Mariners are probably too kind, that they are indeed kind captures the feeling that the 2026 Mariners were worse than they had any right to be. Simply by default, the notion that next year should be better has merit.

So, bragging rights notwithstanding, we know which of these two boats we'd rather be aboard right now.

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