Mariners firing Dan Wilson's coaches feels like start of Jerry Dipoto's last stand

Dan Wilson is out as the Seattle Mariners' manager, and he won't be going alone. The team has fired four members of his coaching staff in a clear attempt to move on from a woeful 2026 season as soon as possible. Now it's all on Jerry Dipoto to choose the right direction.

The Mariners announced the changes on Monday. Bench coach Manny Acta is out, as are infield coach Perry Hill, hitting coach Kevin Seitzer and first base coach Eric Young Jr.

That's four impressive resumes that just went out the door, and it hurts that a couple belong to Mariners institutions. Acta had been with the team for 11 years, including the last two as Wilson's right-hand man. Hill helped turn J.P. Crawford, Evan White and Dylan Moore into Gold Glovers. Young was something of a secret weapon in 2025.

Even if he has some amazing work on his track record, Seitzer is the one who most deserved his fate. The buck for the Mariners' 28th-ranked offense had to stop with someone, and hoping it would stop with Bobby Magallanes didn't work. If it was between Seitzer and director of hitting strategy Edgar Martinez, obviously the Mariners weren't going to fire the guy whose bat got him into Cooperstown.

All this house-cleaning only matters if Jerry Dipoto gets serious about Mariners' next coaching staff

As for where things go from here, Dipoto and Justin Hollander will focus on finding a new manager. There's buzz about Torey Lovullo, and it seems to be building. He checks the box for having managerial experience, something that Scott Servais and Wilson didn't when Dipoto hired them.

Still, we can't take mere buzz to mean that Dipoto has learned his lesson. All we can surmise for now is that he's determined for the 2027 Mariners to be under almost entirely new leadership.

Based on how things went this year, it's not the wrong idea. The final word on Wilson made it clear that he was all kinds of ineffective as the team's manager. Acta's fate might as well have been sealed as soon as Wilson's was. And since hitting, fielding and baserunning were hardly strengths this year, it made sense that the other three would go, too.

There is nonetheless that lingering question of whether Dipoto is the right guy to hire the right guys, so to speak. It's not often that a president of baseball operations gets three chances at hiring a manager. That Mariners owner John Stanton is allowing Dipoto to get such a chance tells us that he hasn't lost confidence in him, but Dipoto should be acting like a clock is ticking.

Even if it wasn't a lot, there was some noise in recent weeks about Dipoto not being totally safe in his perch atop the front office. There are valid ways to apologize for Dipoto's tenure, but two playoff berths in 11 years isn't a good batting average.

If Dipoto is assuming he could go down soon, you can't fault him for wanting to go down swinging.

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