The Mariners Are 4-9 and Their Bats Have Gone Completely Silent

Thirteen games in, and this doesn't feel like the team that made noise last year. The Seattle Mariners are sitting at 4-9 after getting swept by Texas, including a brutal 3-0 loss on Wednesday. They're last in the AL West and dead last in all of MLB in batting average at .184. Nobody else is even close to that bad. For perspective, the next worst team is still above .200.

Yeah, it's early. The Nationals were 19-31 fifty games in during 2019 and won the World Series. The Mariners were 13-2 fifteen games into 2019 and finished 68-94. Baseball is weird that way. But context only goes so far when your offense looks this broken.

The Pitching is Carrying a Dead Weight

Here's what's keeping the lights on: the pitching staff. They're posting a 2.62 ERA, third best in MLB. Your starters are doing their job. Your bullpen is doing its job. And then the lineup comes to the plate and just... doesn't show up.

Cal Raleigh is 7 for 49 (.143) with one home run. Julio Rodriguez is 7 for 49 with zero home runs. Josh Naylor is 5 for 48 (.104) with nothing. These aren't massive sample sizes, but they're screaming something uncomfortable that Mariners fans probably don't want to hear.

Last Year Might Have Been the Outlier, Not the Blueprint

Look, Raleigh's 60-home-run season was one of the best in MLB history. He finished second in AL MVP voting. It's totally fine if that ends up being the ceiling of his career. But if his 34-homer 2024 becomes his second best year? That's a tough pill. Right now, he's looking like the pre-2025 version of himself, not the guy who made jaws drop all last season.

Rodriguez is in Year 5 and doing what he always does: starting slow. He's a three-time All-Star and will almost certainly snap out of it, but the gap between getting top-5 MVP votes and actually contending for MVP comes down to what he does in April and May. This ain't it.

Naylor was a revelation in his final two months last year with a 2.2 WAR, which matched his best full-season WAR (2.3) from any other year. The Mariners signed him long-term because that looked sustainable. But expecting him to replicate that production might be wishful thinking.

The Road Trip Tells the Real Story

The Mariners had one game where they scored more than three runs on this road trip. One. They're averaging 2.16 runs per game. That's not a T-Mobile Park problem in cold weather. That's just bad baseball.

The pitching will keep games close. But you can't win consistently when the bats stay frozen. Something has to wake up, and fast.

This article was created with AI assistance and reviewed by Seattle On Tap editorial staff. Always verify information with official team sources.