Yesterday brought sweeping changes to the Mariners coaching staff on the heels of a disappointing 2026 season. Jerry Dipoto, in meeting with the media, described the need for a “culture reset” in the organization, noting specifically the sense that the big-league club had gotten away from organizational principles preached in the minor leagues.
“The performance on the field this year has made us question a lot of the things that we are doing at the major league level, and I will say multiple of our
major league players who came through our system have referenced what they learned in player development that that got abandoned in the big leagues this year. And not just the players who came up for the first time, but we have a host of players who’ve come through our system, and they saw a difference. We need to get back to to what we believe is a Mariners baseball process.”
Dipoto expressed particular consternation about the defense – with reason, as the Mariners were the worst defensive team in baseball from wire to wire, never improving – not just as violating the vision of “crisp, efficient Mariners baseball” but also because of the additional strain the poor defense put on the pitching.
“A starting pitching staff who attacks the strike zone and has the ball put in play is harmed by by the lack of range and positioning of our team,“ said Dipoto.
Perhaps this is why the pitching coaching staff escaped the ax that fell on many of the other coaches, as the organization cleaned house so the new manager will be able to install a hand-picked staff. Pitching coaches Pete Woodworth and Trent Blank will both return, despite a pitching staff that also underachieved this year – as the offense started to turn things around late in the season, the rotation fell apart, posting the worst WAR in baseball down the stretch. But despite the setback, Dipoto still believes in the Mariners pitching philosophy and in Woodworth and Blank’s ability to enact that vision with the big-league club. In answering a question about why those two remained on staff, Dipoto cited past performance, specifically their “goodness over time” and the “unquestionably awesome” nature of the quality of the pitching programs which has allowed all 13 members of their pitching staff at any given time to succeed.
“From 2021 until mid-season of 2026, we’re one of the three or four best pitching staffs, one through 13, in MLB. We don’t want to take three months and and use that as the criteria to ruin a program that has been the backbone of what we’ve done for for a decade.”
The key to the pitching core’s success, beyond programs that work, is their communication with players. Dipoto spoke extensively about communication issues in the organization, from the breakdown in expectation of standards in the front office to how it was borne out in the clubhouse and on the field. Personally, Dipoto took responsibility for his own breakdown in communication with the pitchers regarding how the “piggyback” strategy was implemented – while pointing out it was actually a success on the field, he spoke with regret about the failure of how it was communicated to the players, and how that breakdown in communication was indicative of a larger organizational failure.
“The way [the piggyback strategy] was communicated, the way it was received, and the drama around it was part of what I think was a bag that we were carrying around with us all year and couldn’t shed, and the piggyback is one piece of that. I could come up with 10 other things that were contributing factors, but we need to communicate more clearly. And we talked about this with the players during that piggyback period, that we handled the kickoff of that as poorly as you possibly could from a leadership standpoint.”
One exception to that organization-wide communication issue is and has been the pitching staff, which is why the piggyback drama stood out so starkly. But Dipoto reasserted his full-throated support behind Blank and Woodworth as messengers.
“Those guys communicate incredibly well,” said Dipoto. “Our pitchers love them for what they what they provide. Trent has all the TLC in the world and the ability to keep guys healthy and moving forward. And Woody is as good a messenger as exists in that clubhouse space.”
That doesn’t mean there isn’t work to do to get the pitchers back on track, however. Cal Raleigh, in his season postmortem, talked about how Mariners pitching might have gotten too predictable, noting how aggressive he saw teams – even ones that aren’t usually aggressive – in attacking the first pitch, and saying pitchers have to do a better job of executing strike one and less thinking about throwing strike one.
“It’s not not necessarily all the time about winning your 0-0s, your 1-1s. It’s about executing a pitch and how can we get this guy out,” said Cal.
For Dipoto, the problem wasn’t necessarily with strike one, but with strike three. Over the course of the season, Mariners pitching took a moderate step back in strikeout percentage and strike-to-walk ratio this year, but if you isolate it to just the last two months of the season, Mariners pitching fell to middle of the pack in K% percentage and 28th in average allowed – only the A’s and Rockies were worse.
“We’ve had a culture of relentless filling of the strike zone. That’s what we do. We get ahead, we stay ahead, we work ahead,” said Dipoto. “Where we struggled this year was we struggled in our two-strike execution, particularly in the second half of the season. It’s something our pitchers are aware of. All of them have talked about it openly in private discussion, and we know that’s an area we need to focus on moving forward.”
But Dipoto views this as a fixable problem, not a systemic one, echoing almost exactly what Cal Raleigh said about an over-focus on winning the counts and losing the bigger picture.
“It’s something that kind of happened over time. We got so focused on winning our 0-0s and winning our 1-1s that we forgot that was only a proxy for the greater goal, which was finishing the at-bat. Our prompt became the goal at times, and and that’s not what we were ever intending. And again, we let it get away from us. And perhaps you know, new eyes, new voice, new thoughts can stop that from happening the next time.”
So it sounds like the new manager will also have the job of working with a pitching staff already steeped in the organizational culture and help them refocus. Add it to a long list of tasks for whoever that person might be.
