Mariners dodge a headache with Randy Arozarena's discount arbitration salary

Thursday was the day for the Seattle Mariners and seven eligible players to exchange salary figures ahead of arbitration. They ended up going 6-for-7 in locking players down for 2026, good for a solid .857 batting average.

The two surprises consist of good news and bad news. To the latter, the Mariners failed to reach an agreement with Bryce Miller, meaning the two sides are headed for an arbitration hearing that could get testy. To the former, they saved a decent chunk of change on Randy Arozarena.

The left fielder was the first player to settle with the Mariners on a salary for 2026, with Francys Romero of BeisbolFR.com breaking an agreement on a $15.65 million contract. Arozarena had been projected to earn $18.2 million by MLB Trade Rumors.

Randy Arozarena's discount arbitration salary can only help the Mariners flesh out their roster

If it's fair to refer to that as a "savings," then the Mariners saved themselves $2.55 million on Arozarena's deal. It's still a nice raise on the $11.3 million he made in 2025, and it's still a big enough salary to make him the third-highest paid player on the club for 2026. Yet even so, it's a bit more befitting of his outlook than a salary as large as $18.2 million.

Though Jerry Dipoto can count his July 2024 trade for Arozarena among his more notable wins from recent years, the 30-year-old's trendline is not pointing up. He endured a dismal finish to 2025, with his bat going deathly cold in the last two months of the regular season and the playoffs. It could be a blip. Or, it could be the beginning of the aging curve taking hold.

Granted, if the Mariners thought Arozarena was too big a burden heading into 2026, they would not have tendered him a contract in the first place. And that was simply never going to happen. Cold finish to 2025 notwithstanding, you don't look a gift horse that just gave you 27 home runs, 31 stolen bases and 4.0 rWAR in the mouth.

Lest anyone get too excited about what Seattle could do with $2.55 million in savings, agreements with Logan Gilbert ($10.927 million) and George Kirby ($6.55 million) ate up a good chunk of that money. That's a total of $17.477 million, whereas they had been projected for $15.4 million.

The terms of the other three deals reached with Matt Brash, Gabe Speier and Luke Raley were not yet public as of Thursday evening. But if MLB Trade Rumors is accurate on them, they stand to add another $5.3 million to the 2026 payroll.

As for Miller, he was projected for a modest $2.4 million salary. It's interesting that he chose to take things to a hearing, given that he's coming off a down year that featured two separate stints on the injured list with a bum elbow. Evidently, he and his reps think he should do better than whatever Seattle was offering.

As of now, the Mariners are projected to spend $156.3 million on their 2026 payroll. Depending on their settlements with Brash, Speier and Raley and how their hearing with Miller goes, that gives them a hair under $12 million in spending capacity before they match what they spent in 2025.

That could be enough for a big bat, which remains the last order of business before the Mariners report to Peoria next month.