Hours before the Mariners were pummeled 22-0 in Milwaukee, Seattle’s director of player development, Justin Toole, was on the road doing the kind of check-in tour that can shape a franchise’s next wave. He had just finished a two-week swing through the club’s minor league system and the new draft picks in Arizona, and one of his stops brought him to Arkansas to spend time with Double-A Travelers left-hander Kade Anderson.
That visit offered a fresh look at one of Seattle’s most important young arms, and the picture is getting clearer by the day. Anderson, last year’s No. 3 overall MLB Draft pick, is putting up numbers that jump off the page: a minor league-best 1.06 ERA, a 40.5% strikeout rate, and a .147 average against. But the Mariners are learning that the production is only part of the story.
“The compete’s in there,” Toole said on the Mariners radio pregame show Tuesday. “And I think the cool part with the success that he’s had and the numbers and the stats that he’s put up, you would never have any idea he’s continually finding what he would say are holes in his game and finding ways to sharpen the blade, so to speak. Nobody has higher standards for himself than himself.”
That self-driven edge is what stands out when people get around Anderson. The focus is obvious.
So is the work. But Seattle is also seeing how he carries himself inside a staff, and that has become a real bonus for the organization.
“I think one of the things that’s kind of gone unknown throughout the course of the season, it’s been mentioned a little bit, is the relationship between him and Ryan Sloan,” Toole said, referring to Seattle’s other top pitching prospect in Arkansas. “He’s helped Sloaner so much throughout the course of the year.
So not only is he taking care of stuff on his plate, but he’s a team leader, pitching staff leader. And he’s definitely been more than just solid himself.
He’s helped that group down there in Arkansas so much.”
Seattle paired Anderson and Sloan together in Arkansas from the start of the minor league season on purpose. The idea was simple: put two elite arms in the same environment and let them push each other.
It worked on both fronts. MLB Pipeline has Anderson as the No. 5 overall pitcher, while Baseball America ranks Sloan as its top pitcher at No.
The two pitchers arrived there on different timelines. Sloan, now 20, was taken out of high school in the second round in 2024.
Anderson, 22, came from LSU, where he was Most Outstanding Player during the Tigers’ College World Series championship run last year. That difference in background matters, and Toole believes Anderson’s experience has helped Sloan absorb the daily habits that come with becoming a big leaguer.
“(Anderson) is helping (Sloan) speed up the maturity process of the routines, what goes into each and every day in terms of what am I working on, what am I focused on,” Toole said. “It’s important to have goals, the near-term goals and the long-term goals.
And that’s something that I think Sloaner has really done a great job with this year is learning from Kade about what can I do in the moment to get better right now, but also what can I do throughout the course of the next six weeks to continue to get better as I move towards the big leagues. He’s learned so much and has done such a great job this year, and having a guy in your corner like Kade, it’s been awesome for him.”
For the Mariners, Anderson has checked every box they could reasonably ask for in his first pro season. Whether that turns into a call to Seattle this year is still up in the air.
Workload management, the team’s postseason situation, and the possible effect of an impending lockout all factor into the decision. Teams cannot have contact with players on their 40-man roster during a lockout, and those players also cannot work out at team facilities.
The long-term outlook is already settled. Anderson is headed for the Mariners’ rotation. The only real question left is when.
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