The Mariners have no one to blame but themselves

The Mariners were swept by the Arizona Diamondbacks this week, continuing their free fall losing eight of their last nine games.

The series sweep was more of the same from the Mariners — their pitching has not been quite as reliable as they might’ve hoped coming into the year, with Logan Gilbert still out on a rehab assignment and Bryce Miller returning to the injured list while he continues to deal with elbow inflammation from a bone spur.

With Emerson Hancock and rookie Logan Evans filling in in the rotation, more help has been desperately needed from the offense to keep the ship afloat — and with the exception of a hot April, the Mariners have simply not gotten that.

Throughout the entire series against the D-backs in Phoenix, runs were hard to come by for the Mariners, and every single time they ended up paying the price.

Monday night, despite trailing by four runs headed into the ninth, outfielder Dominic Canzone made an emphatic return to the Mariners roster after being recalled the same day, hitting a two-out, two-run homer to help send the game to extra innings.

His efforts would go to waste, however, as D-backs first baseman Josh Naylor hit a walk-off grand slam off of Carlos Vargas in the 11th.

The next day, the Mariners would drop a blowout, 10-3, to lose the series.

The M’s needed a win on Wednesday to avoid the sweep. They jumped out to an early lead.

Everything changed in the sixth inning, when former Mariners third baseman Eugenio Suárez hit a grand slam off of Bryan Woo to take a lead they would not relinquish.

The foundation on which their roster is built makes them especially vulnerable to way it is currently failing — and they’ve done nothing to safeguard against it. The team is built with the assumption that otherworldly pitching will carry an offense that will produce just enough.

It’s no surprise that the Mariners’ slide is happening at this juncture. With the starting rotation having been not entirely healthy the whole season to this point, an offense built to accomplish the bare minimum isn’t enough. Even worse, the offense has been slumping hard.

In an era of baseball littered with arm injuries due to a constant ‘arms’ race to increase velocities and spin rates — physiologically pushing the limits of peak performance — it really should be no surprise that a rotation staying healthy for an entire season isn’t all that likely.

The Mariners’ rotation was healthy the entire season in 2024, but this was a fluke. The discourse then was that the team was wasting an all-time great rotation because they didn’t do enough to compliment it.

In 2025, we find ourselves in the same spot. This time, unsurprisingly, the pitching isn’t as healthy. That cannot be an excuse for the organization. The Mariners facing some injuries to their pitching staff should have been foreseeable.

Despite that, the team once again did the bare minimum in the offseason, looking to spend pennies on the dollar to fill large holes in their lineup — some of which they created on their own, also in an effort to save money.

It’s only fitting that in the middle of a slide that can be chalked up to the team not being deep enough offensively, Suárez, the very third-baseman they traded away in a salary dump with no true backup plan in place, changed the final game of this series with one swing of the bat.

The Mariners have no one to blame but themselves for their current conundrum. In that same season that they traded Suárez, they raked in MLB’s highest operating income. The money to spend was there, but instead, they chose to save.

Despite a playoff berth in 2022, excitement in the fan base, and high income from the All-Star Game, the Mariners ran out a roster ranked 16th in total payroll in both 2024 and 2025. They’ve relied almost entirely on unproven talent and/or bounce-back candidates to fill the large holes in their lineup.

Look, I agree with the Mariners’ philosophy of allowing themselves payroll flexibility for when they need it. It defeats the whole purpose to have that flexibility, though, if you never use it on anything outside of the bargain bin. If the last couple of years haven’t been the time to use it, when else would be more appropriate?

We are currently witnessing the consequences of the Mariners’ actions. Will they still make the playoffs this year? Maybe. The American League is extremely down. The reality, though, is that this shouldn’t even be a question. It’s disrespectful to the fans that have spent decades waiting to see a winner in this city.

Assuming no help is coming for the Mariners’ lineup, here’s to hoping they turn it around.

This is Rolling Roof Rundown’s twice-weekly Mariners newsletter. You can follow James @rollingroofrundown.com on Bluesky and, if you haven’t already, subscribe to the newsletter for more news and commentary. Rolling Roof Rundown is now on Instagram and Threads as well.