The Mariners could be getting the wrong message from this year’s World Series, and that’s what makes the latest chatter around MLB payroll so nerve-wracking for Seattle fans.
Former MLB general manager Jim Bowden, now writing for The Athletic, said Monday on Foul Territory that ownership groups around the league are already pointing to the Brewers and Rays as proof they don’t need to spend more. Bowden said, "Two general managers told me the owners are saying that if Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Tampa can do it, there's no reason we have to increase our payroll."
He added that those same two general managers have even talked about trimming payroll, depending on whether a salary floor shows up in the next Collective Bargaining Agreement.
For Mariners fans, that kind of thinking hits a nerve because it fits too neatly with the fear that John Stanton and the rest of the ownership group are already comfortable keeping spending in the same neighborhood. The expectation is that Seattle’s payroll will stay about where it is next year, not climb.
That lines up with what Stanton told Adam Jude of The Seattle Times at the end of last month. He said the preference is to build around players the organization drafts and extend them while they’re still in their 20s, rather than chase stars and pay them into their 30s.
It’s a philosophy that can sound reasonable in a vacuum. In practice, though, it feels awfully close to the opposite of what a team coming off arguably the most disappointing season in 50 years of Mariners baseball should be doing.
The payroll trends in Seattle also tell a very specific story. The biggest jumps have come after playoff appearances, not after disappointing seasons.
Post-2022, the payroll changed by 32.3%. After 2023, the increase was 1.6%.
After 2024, it was 4.5%. And after 2025, it was 10.9%.
Stanton also said in that Q&A that his role wasn’t to decide whether criticism of ownership’s financial commitment was fair or unfair. He pointed out that payroll had increased in each of the past five years, and that this past season’s Opening Day payroll was the highest in franchise history.
But those numbers need context, and that’s where the picture gets a lot less flattering. Aaron Levine of FOX 13 laid out the comparison that matters: this year’s payroll of $167.9 million was only $7.1 million higher than in 2017.
Once inflation enters the equation, the gap gets much bigger. The 2017 payroll comes out to $220 million in today’s dollars, which is $52 million more than what the Mariners spent in 2026.
That’s why the Brewers-and-Rays success story is such a dangerous one for Seattle to read the wrong way. There’s no indication Bowden was talking about the Mariners specifically, but it wouldn’t shock anyone if ownership around the league used this World Series as cover to argue spending less is a viable strategy.
It isn’t. If the Mariners decide to lean that direction, they’d be mistaking a one-off for a pattern.
Payroll and wins are not perfectly tied together, but they’re linked enough that pretending otherwise is a gamble. A small-market team hasn’t won the World Series since 2015, and that streak is about to end this year. Still, that’s not exactly a model anyone should rush to copy.
The broader trend is pretty clear. As Andy McCullough of The Athletic noted, a team with a top-10 payroll has won five of the past six championships. The Dodgers haven’t missed the playoffs since 2013, and the Yankees have made it in seven of the past eight years.
That’s the real lesson the Mariners should take from all of this: they need to spend more, not less. They don’t have the cushion or the track record to follow the Brewers’ or Rays’ path and expect it to carry them.
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