SEATTLE -- The Mariners’ season has reached the point where the spotlight keeps swinging toward the kids.
Over the last five days alone, a different young player has taken center stage almost every night: Michael Arroyo got the call on Sunday, Lazaro Montes launched a 474-foot homer on Tuesday, and Kade Anderson finished Wednesday in style. That run of moments has put Seattle’s prospect group front and center, and Mariners president of baseball operations Jerry Dipoto made clear he sees a group that can shape what comes next.
“The future seems better than the present, but that's only because it's been such a struggle here, especially for these last 30 or 40 days,” Dipoto said in a pregame interview with Mariners.TV. “But really excited about the young players that we have that have kind of reached the Major League level and joined what we think is a really stable core to move forward with.”
Dipoto also laid out where several of the organization’s top names stand now, and what could be ahead for them in the rest of this regular season and into 2027.
Ryan Sloan, ranked Seattle’s No. 2 prospect and MLB’s No. 8, will not be part of a late-season push. Dipoto said the right-hander’s year will end with Double-A Arkansas on Sunday, after a summer in which a big league cameo felt far less realistic than it did back in the early days of Spring Training. Sloan had been one of the buzz names in camp, alongside Anderson, and scouts in Arizona even floated a loose comparison to what Trey Yesavage provided the Blue Jays last postseason.
That possibility faded as the summer went on and the Mariners slid in the American League standings. Sloan will now head to high performance camp and begin his offseason work, with 2027 looking like a real possibility for his debut.
“Ryan is in that family of some of the ace-type guys that we've had in our rotation over these last five or so years,” Dipoto said, “and he compares very favorably to a guy like George [Kirby], where he has pinpoint precision of a really wide menu of power pitches that give him a chance to do special things.”
Anderson, the Mariners’ No. 1 prospect and MLB’s No. 5, was still in the middle of his fourth major league start when Dipoto spoke, and he went on to deliver his best outing yet. He worked past the sixth inning and picked up his first big league win as the pitcher of record.
Seattle had already been managing his workload carefully. The club had roughly targeted 135 innings for his first professional season, which would leave him about 25 innings to go. That should line him up for at least three more starts, with two off-days giving the Mariners some flexibility to keep him on the seven-day rhythm he had before the promotion from Arkansas.
“We've intentionally limited his pitches to allow for him to contribute at the big league level right now,” Dipoto said. “And in September, we were hoping that it was going to put us in a position to make the postseason.”
Arroyo, Seattle’s No. 3 prospect and MLB’s No. 45, has had the quietest start of the group at the major league level, though he has only been up for a few days. Since his promotion, he has made one start in three games, with that start coming at second base on Sunday, the day he was called up.
His defensive home has been the biggest open question around him, and Dipoto offered a clearer picture of how the Mariners see him fitting in going forward. The plan is to use him as a right-handed complement to Cole Young at second base and as a right-handed option around the diamond. Dipoto also said the organization viewed him as a strong fit with Brendan Donovan because of the way their versatility overlaps.
“We don't think Michael's likely to play a number of different spots, but it's possible in the future. You could see him pick up the other corner outfield or first base as alternatives. The left side of the infield is not as easy for him from an arm perspective.”
Then there’s Montes, Seattle’s No. 5 prospect and MLB’s No. 56, who turned Tuesday night into a showcase of both the swing-and-miss and the raw thunder in his bat. Before he sent a ball to a place no one could remember seeing one go at T-Mobile Park -- the concourse beyond center field -- he had already endured a nine-pitch strikeout, the kind of at-bat he said helped set up what came next.
He chased and missed plenty of fastballs up in the zone in that first plate appearance, an area he still needs to clean up. But when he got a pitch down later, he crushed it.
“He's generally patient,” Dipoto said. “He takes his walks, and he is going to strike out a fair bit.
And part of that is what you saw last night with the high fastball and the adjustments that he'll make as he gets that ball down. And when he gets it down, as you saw [Tuesday] night, it gets really loud really fast.”
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