The Athletic ranked starting pitchers from "just a guy" to "Inner Circle", where did the Mariners come in?

The season is almost here, but that hasn't stopped some of the major publications around the world of baseball from coming out with rankings. The latest one to come out is from The Athletic, and they look at things a little differently. We've seen rankings for starting pitching, but that's usually as a whole. They had 20 different people vote, with voters giving out votes that you may be familiar with when thinking about a starting rotation.

They gave votes to pitchers throughout baseball for where they think they slot in a rotation. A #5 gets a point, #4 gets 2, #3 gets 3, #2 gets 4, and #1 gets 5. An inner circle guy, a true ace, would earn 100 points (20 votes times 5 from each). They went through and totaled up the votes for 70 entrants, and ended up listing the top 50 guys.

So how many pitchers from the Mariners ended up being on the list?

If you go through the list, you'll see an *applicant* on some of the pitchers. This denotes that some of the voters thought that the pitcher would one day have a shot at being a true #1.

Well, this is where it can be fun to read things that are done by people who know what they are doing and what they are looking at. Go ahead and take a guess before we get into it, and try and predict where they are going to be. I'll give you a hint before we get there. The Mariners ended up with their top three pitchers on the list. So where did they end up at? Well, let's get into it, starting with my personal favorite pitcher on the team... Walter.