Jerry Dipoto didn’t spend Monday afternoon on the field at T-Mobile Park watching the Mariners ease through light drills before a division series opener. He was in the back of the press box instead, answering for a season that went nowhere near the finish Seattle expected.
The Mariners ended at 76-86, a jarring fall after a 2025 season that came within one game of the World Series. And while the record surprised plenty of people outside the organization, Dipoto made it clear the warning signs had been there for a while.
The offense sagged as key contributors fell well below career norms. The rotation slipped from its place among baseball’s better staffs.
The bullpen took hits from lost arms and never really found a bridge to the leverage relievers, especially after the club moved to a six-man rotation. The defense, long treated as a strength in theory, was unexpectedly poor, and the overall product too often looked sloppy.
Dipoto put the responsibility on himself.
“This is what I’m in charge of, is overseeing all of it. So the blame falls on me first,” he said Monday.
“I wake up and I look in the mirror every day trying to figure out why this happened. For the last five years, we’re one of the winningest teams in Major League Baseball.
This year, we stunk and it never got on track.”
The Mariners already went through a similar late-season collapse in 2024, and this time the reaction appears set to go deeper than another in-season managerial change. Dipoto said the next manager will come from outside the organization, a notable pivot for a club that has leaned heavily on internal ideas and continuity.
“We will go outside to hire our manager,” Dipoto said. “We need fresh thought.
We need something new. It could be a shift in programming.
It could be a shift in messaging. It could be a shift in language.”
He acknowledged that the Mariners’ recent approach has been largely inward-looking.
“Most of what we’ve done, in recent years especially, has been insular,” Dipoto admitted. “And I think this year’s failure requires that we look outside to find someone who might be able to poke holes in what we’re doing and help us see something that perhaps we’re blind to. Because obviously this is not been what we intended nor what we expected from our team.”
Accountability has become a central issue in the aftermath, and Dipoto said he did not do enough to make sure it was enforced throughout the organization, from the front office to the clubhouse. He defined it as a culture issue, not just a buzzword.
“Holding accountable looks like culture,” he answered. “It is, what are you willing to tolerate?
Are you willing to tolerate less than full effort? Are you willing to tolerate less than full focus?
Are you willing to tolerate what we saw in midseason was a team playing with limited urgency and waiting for the water to turn on? And it just didn’t come on instead of turning it on ourselves, and we saw it unfolding.
Our players saw it unfolding. And we talked about it a lot as the season went along.”
But talking about it was not enough.
“Again, it’s where I would count myself most at fault, is you can talk about it or you can just go out and do it,” he said. “We had a tendency this year to just shrug it off to, ‘We’re more talented than the teams around us. Don’t worry, it’ll happen,’ instead of going out and making our own thing happen.
“That’s what accountability looks like. It’s calling that out in the moment.
It’s stopping it before it gets rolling any further. It’s being truthful in our discussion with one another.
And for years, our program has always been built on truth. We tell the truth with love, and sometimes you might get your nose out of joint for a moment, but you wake up the next day and you realize that you’re loved and you’re just trying to help one another.”
That theme has come up before. Multiple players mentioned accountability in their final interviews, and a few unnamed players had said during the season that they wanted more hard truths when needed. Instead, patience and belief in one another carried the clubhouse through the year, even if that approach never produced the turnaround the Mariners were chasing.
Dipoto said the organization now has to turn the failure into something useful.
“Part of my job is making decisions for how to get better and make sure this doesn’t happen again,” he said. “And, you know, it happened.
And failure is only failure if you don’t learn from it. We’re hoping to learn these lessons and move forward in a productive way.”
In Other News...
Mariners Fans Have Every Right To Question How Dan Wilson's Exit Unfolded
The Mariners wrapped up their regular season and then immediately shifted into a quieter, more awkward kind of news cycle, with Dan Wilson announced as no longer the clubs manager after the finale. Wilson still went on the record after the game, reading a prepared statement about his departure, which gave the moment a formal edge even as it left plenty of room for questions about how the breakup was being presented.
Inside the organization, there is at least some indication that Wilson had a hand in the way the news was handled, and preferred to address the players and the media himself. Even so, the timing and the staging of the announcement have made the exit feel unfinished from the outside, the kind of ending that naturally prompts fans to wonder who decided what, and why it came together this way. [Read more 🡒]
Former Mariners Bat Just Gave Seattle Fans An Unexpected October Reason
Rowdy Tellez showing up on the Braves Wild Card Series roster gave Seattle fans a familiar name to track in October, even if he arrived there through an unexpected route. The former Mariners first baseman spent part of his career building a reputation as a left-handed power bat, especially against right-handed pitching, and his path through Seattle and Milwaukee has made him one of those players who tends to linger in a fan bases memory long after he moves on.
What makes his inclusion notable is the timing. Tellez had limited regular-season action for Atlanta, which makes his place on a playoff roster more intriguing as the Braves prepare for their series against the Phillies. For Mariners fans, it is one more reminder that October has a way of resurfacing old faces in new settings, and Tellezs role is the kind of detail that can end up mattering once the bracket pressure starts to build. [Read more 🡒]
Mariners Rotation Outlook Just Got More Interesting For 2027
Kade Andersons rise gave the Mariners another reason to feel good about the pipeline, and Baseball Americas Minor League Pitcher of the Year honor only sharpened the spotlight on how quickly he moved through the organization. The left-hander dominated at Double-A Arkansas with a 1.06 ERA and 0.64 WHIP, then got his first look in the majors in August, giving Seattle a late-season sample of what kind of arm it might have on the way.
Andersons year ended with a 3.79 ERA in seven big league starts, a reminder that the development curve is still in motion even after all the early success. Because he remains eligible for rookie status in 2027, his progress now folds into a rotation picture that could get crowded in a hurry, and Seattle will have a real decision to make about how soon his long-term role starts to take shape. [Read more 🡒]