David Forst’s dismissal in Oakland puts a familiar question back in front of the Mariners: how long does Jerry Dipoto get to keep steering Seattle?
Baseball rarely says the quiet part out loud when it moves on from a top executive. The language is usually softer than the reality.
On Aug. 7, the Athletics used the familiar phrasing, but the meaning was clear enough: David Forst was fired after 27 years with the organization and 11 seasons as general manager. Assistant GM Dan Feinstein will oversee baseball operations while ownership searches for Forst’s replacement.
The timing matters in Seattle because Forst and Dipoto arrived almost together. The Mariners hired Dipoto on Sept.
28, 2015. The A’s promoted Forst to GM one week later, on Oct.
- Eleven years on, one executive is out and the other is still running baseball operations for a Mariners club that entered the season as the defending division champion but has spent much of 2026 under .500 and stuck with an offense that hasn’t delivered.
To be clear, Justin Hollander is Seattle’s general manager. Dipoto is the president of baseball operations and the organization’s top baseball decision-maker. Hollander has real influence in roster building, but the overall direction and results of the operation ultimately sit with Dipoto.
That makes the comparison unavoidable. Forst reached the postseason three straight times from 2018 through 2020 and won the AL West in 2020.
Dipoto has made the playoffs twice in Seattle, in 2022 and 2025, and the 2025 club finally ended the Mariners’ 24-year wait for another division title. That run also took Seattle to Game 7 of the ALCS and one step from its first World Series.
Dipoto has plenty on the plus side. He helped end the longest postseason drought in major North American professional sports. He inherited a weak farm system, helped turn it into something far stronger, built one of the game’s most respected pitching-development systems and assembled a young core that looked capable of keeping the Mariners relevant beyond a single season.
And 2025 was the payoff. Seattle won the division, made its deepest postseason run in years and got a roster boost from deadline additions that helped push the team forward.
Cal Raleigh publicly credited Dipoto for putting the group together. It was the best season of Dipoto’s tenure, and it bought him some breathing room.
But it did not buy him a free pass.
The 2026 Mariners were supposed to build on that momentum. Instead, they’ve looked disjointed for long stretches, with pitching that hasn’t consistently dominated, defense that remains shaky and a lineup that has too often gone missing.
Dipoto recently described the offense as “abysmal for two months.” After that, Seattle removed assistant hitting coach Bobby Magallanes, even though manager Dan Wilson reportedly opposed the move.
Dipoto’s own line was that results have consequences.
That standard cuts both ways.
If this is supposed to be the most talented roster of Dipoto’s 11-year run, then prolonged failure can’t just be brushed off as a bad stretch. If the roster isn’t as strong as advertised, then that too points back to the people who built it. Either way, accountability eventually climbs to the top.
That’s why Forst’s firing matters beyond Oakland. The A’s decided that three playoff appearances could not outweigh a 45-70 record, an eight-game losing streak, a broken pitching staff, an injury-riddled roster and the uncertainty around the franchise’s move toward Las Vegas.
The Angels already fired GM Perry Minasian on June 27 after six losing seasons. Two AL West teams have now made in-season changes at the top of baseball operations.
Seattle, by contrast, has so far settled for a move lower down the ladder.
That can’t be the end of the story if the Mariners don’t change course. Ownership deserves its share of scrutiny here, too.
John Stanton and the group have often operated with payroll limits tighter than a team in its window should accept, and depth problems don’t appear out of nowhere. But ownership can’t be the only place responsibility goes.
After 11 years, these are Dipoto’s systems, his philosophies and his decision-making structure. The Mariners’ ongoing trouble producing a reliable offense is not some leftover mess from a previous regime.
There are 44 games left, and the AL West has been open enough to keep Seattle alive. The Mariners have caught fire late before.
They still have time to do it again. But if this season ends with the defending division champs missing October, it should be treated as a referendum on the operation Dipoto leads - not just another disappointment explained away and left in the past.
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