The one trade Mariners fans begged for but didn't get at 2025 deadline

When the Seattle Mariners awoke on Thursday morning, it felt like the whole baseball world was united around one opinion: they were winning the trade deadline.

The shoe fit well enough. The Mariners had already struck for Josh Naylor and Caleb Ferguson in earlier deals, and then the really big one hit on Wednesday night when they secured a reunion with Eugenio Suárez, who has 36 home runs and was tied for the MLB lead with 87 RBI at the time.

Talk of the Mariners being the most improved team in MLB exploded, with ESPN's Buster Olney going a step further: "This is a team that absolutely to me is the best team in the American League going forward."

Yet even as all this was going on, those of us who actually follow the Mariners on a daily basis [waves and says, "Hello there!"] knew there was still a missing link in the bullpen. And when the trade deadline passed on Thursday, the work of finding it was somehow left unfinished.

The Mariners messed up by not completing their pursuit for an ace reliever

Look, it's not our fault that we got our hopes up for a brand, spankin' new reliever to join Gabe Speier, Matt Brash, and Andrés Muñoz in Seattle's late-inning relief corps. President of baseball operations Jerry Dipoto was openly hyping up his "aggressive" approach to the relief market, and the need was said to be a priority even over the pursuit of Suárez at one point.

To be teased with that kind of messaging only to get Ferguson and nothing else is a bait-and-switch if there ever was one, and the sting of it got more severe as the trade deadline inched closer.

We found out via Daniel Kramer of MLB.com late on Wednesday that the Mariners were in on Jhoan Duran before he went to the Philadelphia Phillies. He had been our No. 1 target for Seattle's pen, so that one definitely hurt.

There were still options aplenty when day broke on Thursday, but not for long. In the end, the Mariners stood and watched as Mason Miller, David Bednar, Griffin Jax, Camilo Doval, Ryan Helsley and more came off the board. And for this, Dipoto's explanation rings a little hollow.

“Today we tried a ton of things that didn’t really work out for us, but super busy day today (around the league),” he said Thursday, via Zac Hereth of Seattle Sports. “I was fascinated with what was happening with relievers around the league. We were in a lot of those conversations for weeks now on the on the back-end bullpen guys, and felt like we were in the end zone in one case and then near the goal line in some others.”

In all fairness, Dipoto did note that the addition of Ferguson will have a positive downstream effect on Speier, who now has "a little bit of a partner who could help him out." Whereas Speier had occasionally been needed in the middle innings to get key outs against lefties, he's now free to handle more high-leverage situations for Dan Wilson.

Even still, this will only do so much to resolve the fundamental problem that Seattle's bullpen has had all year. Its 3.68 ERA is solid, but its 21.6 strikeout percentage is only 19th in the league. Should the Mariners make it there, that would be a potentially fatal flaw in October.

The good news for now is that the Mariners' odds of playing in October are strong indeed. They hold the American League's third wild card at 58-52, with FanGraphs giving them a 77.0 percent chance of making the postseason in any capacity. That is up from 60.4 percent on Opening Day.

The Texas Rangers are only 1.0 game off the Mariners' pace, however, and it obviously doesn't get more precarious than holding only the third wild card spot. And even with the new additions, the lack of a big one for the bullpen has the Mariners' margin for error in the last two months of the regular season feeling that much thinner.

If the result is them narrowly missing the playoffs, well, at least there will be comfort in the familiar.