PECOTA projections for 2026 Mariners feel like a jinx waiting to happen

Mariners fans have quite a few reasons to be excited about the upcoming season. The team was already solid in 2025, winning 90 games and taking the Blue Jays to a competitive seven-game ALCS, but their future success still hinged on what they did in the offseason. Luckily, the front office did all the right things and early reports on some of the less proven additions are already encouraging.

So it's no surprise that many projection systems are optimistic about what Seattle can accomplish this year. Even before the Brendan Donovan trade, Dan Szymborski's ZiPS projections for the team were strong. Although his estimates tend to err on the conservative side, other projection systems haven't hesitated to set aggressive goals for this Mariners roster.

Baseball Prospectus projects that the Mariners will win 94 games in 2026

Every year, Baseball Prospectus releases its prediction for how the standings will look by the end of the year. Like many other projection systems, it's based on historical data and uses Monte Carlo simulations to arrive at win/loss totals and playoff percentages for each team.

They recently published this year's set of projections and Seattle's estimated 94 wins is comfortably more than any other team in the American League. The team with the second-most is the Yankees, who are expected to win 89 games. In fact, the only other team in MLB that's forecasted to win more games is the Dodgers (104).

This is a high bar, especially for the Mariners. The only time the team has won more than 93 games in a single season is 2001 when they won 116 games. The last time they even exceeded last year's total of 90 wins was in 2003 when they won 93 games.

It's even more difficult when assessing where the organization stands in the broader landscape of the business of baseball. Despite making a series of important roster additions, their payroll remains relatively low. According to Cot's Contracts, their 40-man payroll is just $162.1 million (16th in MLB) and their luxury tax payroll is $186.5 million (17th in MLB). For context, the Dodgers have a 40-man payroll of $318.8 million (2nd in MLB) and a whopping $412.0 million luxury tax payroll (1st in MLB).

The organization is benefiting from a nucleus of young talent. Young players like Logan Gilbert, Bryan Woo, and George Kirby are still in affordable arbitration years. Even those that are on contracts like Cal Raleigh, J.P. Crawford, and Andrés Muñoz signed team-friendly extensions that locked them in before free agency inflated their market value.

However, a 94-win season makes several major assumptions. First, the roster will have to avoid major injuries. A few weeks missed by members of the rotation, Julio Rodríguez, or Raleigh could throw the entire season off course. Raleigh especially can't regress too much under these expectations. It's rare that catchers string together multiple seasons with a .900 OPS or higher, especially ones as defensively proficient as Cal, but he'll have to keep it up to get the team over the line.

They'll also need their offseason acquisitions to pan out as intended. Josh Naylor and Brendan Donovan will get the most playing time out of any new faces, but Rob Refsnyder and Jose A. Ferrer will need to pull their weight as well. Finally, they'll need younger players like Cole Young to break out. Even asking for one or two of these goals to be met seems like a lot, but asking for all of them seems like wishful thinking.

The burden of dreams is a heavy one, but it's a good problem to have. They may not meet the 94-win expectation but more importantly, this projection is a sign of things to come. The consensus on the Mariners has clearly shifted away from them being the playoff-avoidant, laughingstock franchise of the MLB and towards being legitimate contenders. The product on the field lends credence to that claim and if nothing else, so do the numbers.