The Seattle Mariners’ season took another hit Tuesday night, and with it came a bigger-picture question about one of their major offseason additions. After a 10-5 loss to the Texas Rangers at T-Mobile Park, the Mariners slipped to 67-78 and sit seven games behind the Houston Astros with 17 games left. The math still exists, but the realistic path is all but gone.
That leaves the focus shifting toward 2027, and one of the first names worth examining is Josh Naylor. The 29-year-old first baseman, now in his eighth big league season with the San Diego Padres, Cleveland Guardians, Arizona Diamondbacks and Mariners, has not produced the kind of pop Seattle expected.
Naylor is batting .267, which is solid in a run-scoring environment where offense has been harder to come by. But the power and run production have fallen off sharply. He has only 10 home runs, which would be his fewest in any season in which he has played at least 70 games, and 49 RBIs, his lowest total since 2022, when he drove in 79 in 122 games.
The deeper damage shows up in the slugging line. Naylor’s .362 slugging percentage sits well under his career mark of .433, and his .686 OPS is also well below his .762 career average.
At first glance, that might point to a major change in approach. But the numbers suggest something more complicated: Naylor is still doing a lot of the same things he’s always done.
He remains a tough strikeout target. Naylor is in the 92nd percentile in strikeout rate and the 84th percentile in whiff rate, which is another way of saying he almost never misses in the zone. That kind of contact skill usually helps a hitter, but in Naylor’s case it may be part of the issue.
He has always been aggressive, and this season that aggressiveness has turned into trouble. On Tuesday, with the Mariners down 4-0 and two runners aboard in the first inning, Naylor chased two splitters, fouled them off, then went after a third pitch far out of the zone.
He thought he could handle everything, and he swung at everything. Seattle was rescued when Laz Montes followed with a huge home run to cut the deficit to 4-3, but the at-bat itself was a bad one for Naylor.
The strange part is that his contact ability has not gone away. According to Baseball Savant, Naylor has a 38 percent chase rate, which lands in the 10th percentile, but he still makes contact on 71.5 percent of the pitches he chases. In plain English, he swings at bad pitches and often puts them in play anyway.
That can be a trap. Hitting bad pitches is still hitting bad pitches, and it often prevents a hitter from getting to the kind of damage pitch he actually wants. Sometimes the better move is to miss the pitch, work the count, and wait for a mistake.
Even so, the profile is not radically different from what Naylor has been for most of his career. He is swinging at 69.1 percent of pitches in the strike zone this season, only a small dip from his career 71.2 percent.
He is making contact on 90 percent of pitches in the zone, up from 86.9 percent last season. His chase rate is 38 percent, a bit above his 35.1 percent career average, but not wildly out of character.
In 2024, he posted a 37.1 percent chase rate and had a strong season. In 2023, he chased even more often, hit .308 and drove in 97 runs.
He is also swinging at the first pitch 40.3 percent of the time. That is down from 44.1 percent last season and 46.4 percent in 2023, and only slightly above his 2024 rate, when he hit 31 home runs and knocked in 108.
The biggest outlier is his chase contact percentage. At 71.5 percent, it is the highest of his career by at least two percentage points and more than five points above his career norm.
There is also the wrist issue to consider. At different points, Naylor has clearly been bothered by a sore wrist, and that could be part of the story.
How much of his dip is tied to health may not be clear until the offseason, if it becomes clear at all. It is entirely possible that the same approach in 2027 produces better results if he is simply healthier.
Still, even with that caveat, there is a case for adjustment. Naylor does not need a wholesale overhaul, especially given the big seasons he has already put together with this same style.
But there is room for a better version of the same hitter: one who swings at more pure strikes, especially early in counts, and gives pitchers less help by chasing early. If he can get ahead more often, he can force more pitches back into the zone and create more chances to do real damage.
That is the balance here. Naylor has earned the benefit of the doubt because this approach has worked before. But this season, with the wrist issue in the mix and the damage output down, it has been a net negative.
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