3 scenarios for Mariners at the Trade Deadline

This story was excerpted from Daniel Kramer’s Mariners Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

SEATTLE -- The tone in Jerry Dipoto’s voice was bleak and blunt early Thursday morning, and that was before the Mariners announced that Jarred Kelenic would miss an extended stretch with a left foot fracture.

For a team that for nearly four months hasn’t been able to meaningfully climb away from .500, Kelenic’s injury -- sustained when kicking a Gatorade cooler -- casts even more doubt on the prospect of Seattle making any significant additions ahead of the Aug. 1 Trade Deadline.

“We've not really separated ourselves in a meaningful way to be aggressive on the buying end,” Dipoto said in his weekly radio hit with Seattle Sports. “But we are constantly trying to find ways to make ourselves better, and we'll use these next couple of weeks of July to consider those ways -- whether it's better to make a push for the '23 season or to better situate ourselves for '24.”

Dipoto’s front office has typically always approached the Deadline in response to the team’s standing, last year’s 14-game winning streak leading to the acquisition of Luis Castillo being a prime example.

“This year, we're probably not going to be in that market,” Dipoto said. “We're going to be more in the margins market, trying to find a way that we can get a little bit better and 2023 and better situate ourselves for '24.”

It’s probably not what fans in Seattle were hoping to hear, especially in the wake of last year’s postseason appearance. That said, it’s become increasingly clear that it could be a quiet Deadline.

Here are three ways the Mariners can approach it:

1) Stand (mostly) pat

Seattle’s pitching staff has kept the club near .500 all year, pacing the league with 49 quality starts after George Kirby threw seven shutout innings on Thursday. Had the Mariners been in contention for a division title at this stage, maybe the font office would consider moving a younger arm, like Bryce Miller or Bryan Woo, to land that “big fish,” as Dipoto called it. But doing so now would seem imprudent.

Offensively, the Mariners need everything they can get, which would make dealing Teoscar Hernández all the more unpalatable. And even though Ty France has been in a funk, if they were to trade him, they’d have no other first-base replacements other than Mike Ford.

“We're about an average Major League offense by most advanced metrics and we need to find a way to be better than average,” Dipoto said. “And in order to do that we can tap into a lot of different avenues and some of it's going to come from our system some of its going to come from outside and it has to and maybe that starts now.”

2) Light selloff

Seattle has a bevy of bullpen arms that would appeal to any contender, particularly among veterans Gabe Speier and Justin Topa.

Most notable, though, is Paul Sewald, who’s having another standout year, with 19 saves, and is in his final year of arbitration eligibility in 2024. The Mariners, who already traded Trevor Gott to the Mets this month, in large part to shed Chris Flexen’s salary, could be motivated to move Sewald and roll with its younger relief arms long term -- Andrés Muñoz, Matt Brash, et al -- rather than pay the guaranteed increase in Sewald’s $4.1 million salary next year.

Offensively, Hernández is the clearest candidate given that he’ll be a free agent at season’s end and would be an enticing middle-of-the-order threat for an offense more productive than Seattle’s.

Regardless, if the Mariners -- whose best bats in the farm system are still a few years away -- intend to eye a more competitive start to 2024, they’ll likely need to add externally.

3) Heavy renovation

This is probably the most unlikely scenario, given that most of the Mariners’ core talent is young and under club control for the foreseeable future. And even among those struggling in that group -- Julio Rodríguez, Cal Raleigh and Kelenic -- there has been extended stretches of success at this level.

A deeper support system to surround them, Dipoto said, will be necessary in the long term. But the reality is that a more heavy-lift roster overhaul can’t realistically take place until the offseason.

“Some of the struggle that we have had is simply on me,” Dipoto said. “I didn’t do a good enough job of building a group around that core to support the bumps and the bruises. And that’s played out. Now we are four clean months into the season, and that’s been a real hole for us.”