Last off-season, in the deep gloom of winter, the Mariners hosted an informal pre-spring training media event, an opportunity for local media to get to know Dan Wilson in a non-game setting after he was
thrust into the managerial role late in the season. At the time, the team’s major off-season moves included bringing back Jorge Polanco, who had suffered through a dreadful 2024, and adding the 36-year-old Donovan Solano. As I was leaving, I wished Wilson luck, tossing out an offhand comment about how tough the division was shaping up to be given the off-season moves (the Astros at this point had added Isaac Paredes and Christian Walker; the Rangers were looking to get a healthy Jacob deGrom back).
Immediately, the affable Wilson—clad in the official PNW dad uniform of sneakers, mid-wash jeans, and a gray Patagonia quarter-zip—straightened up, a steely glint in his eye. “We’re going to do this,” he said.
At the time, I dismissed it as typical manager-speak; really, what else was he going to say? It was the right answer to give, and I knew from covering Wilson even part of the year in 2024 that he is someone who will never, ever throw his players under the bus, or even show the slightest doubt about their abilities. What I didn’t know, what I’d learn over the next year, was that it wasn’t just manager-speak.
Dan Wilson has an unshakable, unwavering belief in his players, a faith that is equally as present in a sunny Sunday blowout win as it was on that dark winter night. It is, Jerry Dipoto has said, his superpower, and it is a difference-maker for a Mariners club that went further this year than any team in Mariners history. It’s the reason why, having observed him for the past year, I believe Dan Wilson is the Manager of the Year.
The voters did not share this vision, instead electing the Guardians’ Stephen Vogt as Manager of the Year for the second year in a row. The argument as laid out goes like this: Vogt did more with less, given the Guardians’ tiny payroll and willingness to trade off players when they get expensive (including Josh Naylor, who featured heavily in Seattle’s playoff run), and he led the team to a historic comeback as the Tigers lost their hold on the AL Central, allowing Cleveland to go on an incredible run down the stretch and capture the division title for a second year in a row.
But what that argument misses is what Dan Wilson did with less restrictive, but similar, constraints. The Mariners aren’t as aggressively small-market-minded as the Guardians, being actually willing to extend their young stars on team-friendly deals rather than trading them away the instant they start making real money, but they aren’t a team that adds heavily in free agency, as witnessed in their underwhelming 2024-2025 off-season. Ineffectiveness and injury dogged the Mariners at nearly every infield position as well as right field, as well as the entire rotation not named Luis Castillo. On June 11 FanGraphs gave the Mariners 45.5% odds to make the playoffs; it’s not as dramatic a turnaround as the Guardians’ late-season, Undertaker-like rise from the 15.5-games-back ashes, but I would argue it’s even more impressive to watch that teal line steadily climb over the stretch, closely entwined with the orange line until the decisive series in Houston in late September, when the Mariners went ghostbusting in Daikin Park.
Because that’s the real impact of what Dan Wilson’s Mariners did, and the biggest reason Wilson should have won Manager of the Year. The argument against Wilson as MOY is that he had more to work with than Vogt, with Cal Raleigh posting a historic season and Julio Rodríguez continuing to shine as one of the greatest young players in the game. But those players were both with the team in 2023 and 2024, when the Mariners missed the playoff. It was under Wilson’s leadership that not just those players, but the team as a whole, took not just a step forward, but went to places the Seattle Mariners have never been.
After years of being ground under Houston’s orange boot, Wilson’s Mariners turned the tide in the AL West. They came out of the All-Star Break with an important series win at home against Houston, then finished off the job with a September sweep in the house of horrors formerly known as Minute Maid Park, positioning themselves for the first divisional title in two decades and showing there ain’t no such thing as ghosts. They carried that forward, banishing the memories of the extra-inning playoff loss to Houston with a dramatic, extra-inning Game 5 win to propel them to the ALCS. Having watched the Mariners for the past four years consistently come up agonizingly short, watching this team succeed in big moments felt limitless.
Manager of the Year is, at the end of the day, an award about what a team does relative to expectations, which is why Vogt won. Wilson never really had a chance as the definition is commonly understood, as Scott Servais didn’t before him in 2022, because the Mariners have been hanging around in the upper tier of their division since then, with a pair of young offensive stars and a rotation that’s been the envy of MLB. But it’s exactly that ability to get the team over the hump, to turn that promise and potential into results, that makes Wilson the Manager of the Year—if not in the eyes of the BBWAA, certainly to Mariners fans, and to his players, who have felt the power of that unshakeable belief Wilson showed on a dark winter night from the very beginning.
