Mariners’ Biggest Problem Is Letting Jerry Dipoto Operate Without Consequence

The Seattle Mariners are still alive. Technically. They are four games out of first place with more than a month remaining. In the 2026 season, it qualifies as a chance. But a 59-67 record is not what anyone ordered after the Mariners reached Game 7 of the ALCS last October. This season was supposed to be the next step. Instead, Seattle has spent the summer tripping over its own expectations.

Those who have been following this sport closely over the years understand that bad seasons happen. Stars regress and injuries can derail a season. But this isn’t a typical run of the mill bad Mariners season. It’s another reminder that accountability inside this organization rarely reaches the top.

Players get released way too far after damage is already done. Coaches get replaced — or scapegoated. Fans get another explanation for why the team is coming up short. Meanwhile, Jerry Dipoto gets another season to reset the clock.

Matt Calkins of The Seattle Times deserves a ton of credit for putting the comparison between the Mariners and the Milwaukee Brewers plainly. The Brewers have taken financial limitations and built a perennial contender. The Mariners have taken their limitations and turned them into an annual explanation for why the roster remains unfinished.

We don’t need to retrace that entire comparison. Milwaukee is useful here because it completely strips away Seattle’s most convenient alibi. The Brewers prove that a restricted payroll can make winning more difficult without making it impossible. The more pressing question is what happens when the Mariners fail…again.

So far, the answer has been consistent: not much.

Jerry Dipoto Has Received More Patience Than His Results Justify

Dipoto has run Seattle’s baseball operation since the fall of 2015. The Mariners have made the postseason twice during that tenure. Both appearances were big. Breaking the 21-year drought in 2022. Coming within one victory of the World Series in 2025. Dipoto deserves credit for helping construct the team that produced the deepest playoff run in franchise history. That doesn’t mean he’s earned immunity.

Nearly 11 seasons provide enough information to judge an executive without treating criticism as an emotional response to a team losing too often. Two postseason appearances over that span is not sustained contention. They establish two memorable exceptions surrounded by mediocrity.

The danger of 2025 was that it felt so rewarding that the Mariners could mistake it for proof that their entire operation worked.First, Cal Raleigh hit 60 home runs — a feat that is more than likely irreplicable. The deadline additions in Josh Naylor and Eugenio Suárez landed. The Mariners rode a spectacular collection of individual performances to the doorstep of the World Series. That run wasn’t fraudulent by any means, but it was also not a roster-building formula that could simply be carried into another season.

If Raleigh needed to produce one of the greatest offensive seasons by a catcher in baseball history for Seattle’s lineup to function, the Mariners hadn’t built a sustainable offense at all. They just caught lightning in a bottle and called it infrastructure.

Raleigh’s dramatic regression has hurt. So have the struggles of Josh Naylor, Bryan Woo and several other players Seattle expected to lead another postseason charge. They all deserve their fair share of criticism.

But regression isn’t an excuse for poor roster construction. It’s one of the conditions roster construction is supposed to anticipate. Regression is a fair prediction, no executive could reasonably predict that Raleigh would fall this far. But every executive should predict that somebody will.

Good teams have shock absorbers. They survive a star’s bad season, an injury to a key contributor or a free-agent signing (Rob Refsnyder) that goes sideways. The Mariners built a roster that required too many important players to approach their best-case outcomes simultaneously. When that stops happening, you have a team below .500.

The Mariners Turned Pitching Development Into a Crutch

Seattle has accomplished something genuinely difficult under Dipoto. The organization has developed high-end pitching with impressive regularity. That should have been the Mariners’ greatest competitive advantage. Young, controllable starting pitching creates financial flexibility. It creates trade capital. It gives a front office the freedom to spend more aggressively on offense because the rotation isn’t consuming the entire payroll.

Instead, the Mariners have too often treated their pitching pipeline as permission to tolerate an incomplete lineup. They built a pitching factory without nearly enough run support.

Seattle succeeded at one of the hardest parts of building a contender, then failed to convert that success into a complete roster. The pitching became capable of keeping the Mariners near the playoff race every summer. And “near” gradually became acceptable.

The Brewers matter to this discussion because their operation has demonstrated greater resilience. Players will leave or be traded when their value is high. Executives will leave for more money. Expectations will get lowered from the outside every time they pawn a closer off to another contender. All Milwaukee continues to do is win. The Brewers followed an MLB-best 97-win season in 2025 by returning to the top of the sport’s standings in 2026.

Milwaukee is proof that limited spending does not absolve the people responsible for baseball decisions.

Mariners Ownership and Jerry Dipoto Are the Same System

Seattle’s endless argument over whether Dipoto or ownership deserves more blame has outlived itself. John Stanton determines the resources and expectations. Dipoto runs the baseball operation within them. After nearly 11 years, Dipoto is not a new or temporary executive struggling against an unfamiliar ownership structure. He is the baseball policy that ownership has repeatedly endorsed.

If Stanton has restricted Dipoto’s ability to build a championship roster, then Stanton has chosen both the restrictions and the executive asked to work under them.

If Dipoto has possessed enough resources to succeed and repeatedly failed to finish the roster, the conclusion is even simpler. Either way, it’s all one system.

That is why changing another coach doesn’t really matter that much. Shuffling another lineup or waiting for another prospect cannot qualify as meaningful accountability. Those moves adjust the edges while preserving the people responsible for the complete operation.

So what is the standard in Seattle? Missing the postseason after entering 2026 with World Series expectations cannot be waved away by a late push toward .500, another collection of promising prospects or another presentation about encouraging underlying numbers. Accountability does not have to begin and end with Dipoto’s job. It does require ownership to explain what failed, identify what will materially change and establish a standard this baseball operation must meet. Otherwise, another offseason under the same leadership is not continuity. It’s permission.

A real October run would change the conversation because winning should change the conversation. But merely remaining mathematically relevant cannot continue passing for progress.

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