Mariners fans groan as Jerry Dipoto doubles down on controversial approach

Opening Day of the Seattle Mariners' 2025 season is just three weeks away. Fans have ample reasons to be excited, as this year figures to be the team's fifth straight as a top American League contender.

Yet things have taken a turn for the...well, if not "worse," then certainly for the "exasperating." The Mariners franchise is suddenly at the center of a sort of war of words between a side that thinks things are broken and another that thinks everything is just fine.

On one side of the trench is former Mariner Justin Turner and, albeit to a less audible extent, a few current Mariners players. Their position is that the team is stuck in the mud after four straight seasons of 85-plus wins, thus rendering little hope of better results in 2025.

On the other side is Mariners president of baseball operations Jerry Dipoto, who went on defense in an interview with Sam Blum of The Athletic that published Thursday. It was only half effective.

Dipoto makes a compelling case that he's not the bad guy

Much of what Dipoto told Blum is worth unpacking, including his defense of his infamous "54 percent" remark from 2023. Many fans took that as Dipoto expressing a modest goal to get the Mariners to 87 wins annually, but he was more so making a point about sustainability rather than ambition. And it was honest, if nothing else.

“I am who I am. I talk with passion. I talk with confidence,” the 56-year-old told Blum. “I’m not always as confident as my voice sounds. It’s just the way I talk. It’s who I am. I lean into it. I love our team. I love what we’ve been able to do with our franchise. I think there are a lot of organizations that look at us and say, ‘They’re doing it the right way.’”

Dipoto otherwise comes across as sympathetic in lamenting how easily fans take things out of context, as well as in espousing the value of building from within rather than upon hired guns.

“Very few, if any, of the great teams that were able to sustain...very few of them weren’t built on a foundation of draft, sign, develop or trade," he said. "That’s what we’ve communicated to our fans for a decade."

Dipoto's team-building philosophy deserves this kind of defense. It is under him that the Mariners have drafted/signed and developed the likes of Julio Rodríguez, Cal Raleigh, Logan Gilbert, George Kirby, Bryce Miller and Bryan Woo. It's an enviable track record, and it amounts to a mic drop that the Mariners' farm system is still No. 1 in MLB.

Where Dipoto's defense falls apart

As the Mariners spent only $11.25 million in the latest free-agent cycle and $29.25 million in the one before that, fans won't be surprised that Dipoto left free agency out of his preferred means to build a successful team. And from 30,000 feet up, there is room to criticize any attempt to build a contender by sinking big bucks into generally older players.

Yet this perspective has its blind spots. Mariners fans aren't greedily asking for endless World Series titles, as merely one will do after 48 seasons of swings and misses. And besides, the 2024 Los Angeles Dodgers and 2023 Texas Rangers will vouch that free agency can indeed help bring the Commissioner's Trophy to a city.

The Mariners entered the 2024-25 offseason in an ideal position to borrow from those teams' playbook, which leaves cheapness on the part of owner John Stanton and stubbornness on Dipoto's part as the only viable reasons they didn't do so. And while the alternative for adding outside talent involved trading from the team's surplus of arms, Dipoto referred to that as "Plan Zero."

The ultimate result is a roster largely unchanged from the one the Mariners had in 2024, a season that ended up being the club's second consecutive near-miss of a playoff berth. If anyone was wondering if this was some kind of accident, Dipoto can clear that up.

“We feel like we’re closer to that goal than we’ve ever been," he said. "We’re just not moving at a pace that is universally accepted. And I understand the frustration.”

But for Mariners fans, the problem isn't the pace of the movement. It's that there appears to be no emphasis on movement whatsoever, therefore making it possible to condense everything Dipoto has to say down to that one meme from The Simpsons: We've tried nothing, and we're all out of ideas.