Seattle Mariners Executive Jerry Dipoto Comments on Team's Payroll Situation
SEATTLE — The Seattle Mariners will have one month to watch the playoffs before being able to officially start the offseason after missing out on the postseason for 22nd time in 23 years.
The Mariners will have a lot of options to try and improve the team. They've been tied to big name free agents like Pete Alonso and with other potential difference makers like Alex Bregman, Tyler O'Neil, Juan Soto and Anthony Santander available, there's a lot of different avenues for Seattle to pursue. And that's not even considering possible trade targets.
Of course, all of this depends on what Seattle President of Baseball Operations Jerry Dipoto is permitted to do via payroll restrictions.
The Mariners ranked 16th in the league this season in payroll and there's been some speculation that the team could still be looking to salary dump this offseason with Randy Arozarena set for a third arbitration and Cal Raleigh and Logan Gilbert due for raises as well.
There's also various kinds of options for players like Jorge Polanco and Mitch Haniger to sort out and several decisions to be made whether to non-tender players like Josh Rojas, Luis Urias and Sam Haggerty.
Seattle is unlikely to be big-money spenders in the offseason. But according to comments by Dipoto on Saturday, they might have more to spend than initially thought.
"The only thing I do know going into the (offseason) is how (payroll) is going to play out for us," Dipoto said before the Mariners game against the Oakland on Saturday. "And it's not going to be nearly the concern that it was this past year."
Dipoto also mentioned that the budget for in-house spending would also increase with Julio Rodriguez's salary jumping to $18 million next year and players like Raleigh and Arozarena just two of several players likely due for big raises with arbitration.
"That's going to jump payroll quite a bit anyway," Dipoto said. "But it won't be the only rise that we see in payroll. I can't give you an exact number; I don't know what that is. I can tell you we're not going the other way."
According to Dipoto, it seems like the Seattle won't be nearly as hard-strung for cash as it has been in previous years.
Or, at least it did. Until an article was released by the Seattle Times on Monday.
According to the a joint article from the Times' Ryan Divish and Adam Jude, team owner Jerry Stanton doesn't seem too interested in the big-name free agents according to an interview he gave in June:
"We’ve got the resources to be able to do the things we need to do to put a good team on the field. We’ve never been focused on free-agent bats, [those] kind of big-dollar free-agent bats as a matter of strategy, not because of anything having to do with resources."
The article had an interesting excerpt mentioning the team feeling the "scars" of the Robinson Cano 11 years after signing him. But it's interesting to wonder what those scars actually are.
Cano had an OPS of .826 in his five years with the Mariners, was an All-Star selection in three of those years and finished top 10 in MVP voting twice and was a big reason the team was able to sign Nelson Cruz.
When Cano was eventually traded, Seattle was able to get off the hook for most of his salary. Aside from an 80-game suspension for violating the MLB's performance-enhancing policy in 2018, Cano performed up to his 10-year, $240 million deal. The only thing that he didn't accomplish during his time with the Mariners was making the playoffs, which could hardly be blamed on him.
And if Cano is really being used as the benchmark as to why the Mariners are refusing to spend, then the organization is failing to realize the apples to oranges situation.
Seattle was over a decade deep into a playoff drought at the time of signing Cano and saw an opportunity to add one of the biggest bats in the league at the time to the team.
Flash forward to now, the Mariners are coming off their fourth consecutive winning season with just one playoff appearance to show for it. And they likely have one more year with this current core of players before needing to consider either shelling out big money to Raleigh, Gilbert, George Kirby and others, or seriously re-tooling in the trade market and free agency.
Seattle doesn't need Soto to be a playoff team. He would help the team exponentially, but the Mariners don't need to add him.
But players like Alonso and Bregman seemingly off the table — who would be instant upgrades at first and third base, respectively, (two positions of need) — makes it a curious thought as to what the payroll increase could actually be used for.
But those are questions Seattle fans will likely get the answers to in the offseason.
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