Ootp baseball series#

He is the team leader in both major versions of wins above replacement (3.0 at FanGraphs, 4.0 at Baseball Reference). 5 - so far being unable to make a splash in the big leagues.) Despite the lack of overall run production, the M’s are short on easy outs.Īnd the main attraction in Seattle, of course, is Rodríguez. (They’ve managed to do this despite outfielder Jarred Kelenic - who entered 2021 as MLB.com’s No.

The Mariners have 11 players with an adjusted OPS at or above the league average of 100, tied for the second-most such players in baseball. Crawford has maintained an elevated level of offense that he discovered in 2021, and catcher Cal Raleigh has emerged as a solid everyday player. Suárez has kept on hitting while playing a smooth third base. Third baseman Eugenio Suárez is tied for the major league lead in home runs since 2018 with 148 - a shocking fact given his relative national anonymity, though no surprise to Mariners fans. First baseman Ty France has built on his breakout 2021 campaign in 2022, continuing to hit for average while also boosting his power numbers and cutting down on strikeouts. The simplest answer is that they have a few big mashers and a pretty well-rounded team behind them. What, then, is the Mariners’ identity, or the thing that has made them a likely playoff team? The defense is pretty good and clearly playoff-caliber, but nothing exactly jumps off the page as a major strength. Offense has been hard to come by, with the fewest runs per game of any playoff contender. The club’s pitching staff is fine but not special. Meanwhile, the team around Rodríguez has been good enough that it should give Mariners fans a resource that the team has beaten out of them more than enough times over the last two decades: optimism.įrom 30,000 feet - or, at least, from the tip of the Space Needle - the Mariners’ winning formula in 2022 is not obvious. They also have a 21-year-old star center fielder, Julio Rodríguez, who’s in the opening stage of what looks like the next great Mariners career - and that might be understating things. FiveThirtyEight’s forecast gives them a 79 percent chance to make the playoffs, almost certainly as one of the American League’s three wild card teams. The 2022 season has been a breath of fresh air, however. And 2021 was a special twist of the knife: a 90-win non-playoff year in the last season before playoff expansion.

Ootp baseball series#

Since the division series era began in 1995, Seattle has missed the playoffs with at least 85 wins nine different times no other team has done that more than six times. The club is stuck on four playoff berths all time, all between 19, never reaching a World Series. Yet it has amounted to almost zero postseason participation, much less success.

The team co-owns the MLB record for most wins in a single season, and a sweeping handful of the game’s most iconic players have either launched their careers or played prime years in Seattle: Ichiro, Ken Griffey Jr., Randy Johnson, Edgar Martínez, Álex Rodríguez, Félix Hernández. Julio Rodríguez and the Mariners are having fun trying to end the franchise’s two-decade playoff drought this season.ĭespite an existence that only stretches back to 1977, the Seattle Mariners’ franchise history is a winding rabbit hole - a nearly four-hour documentary is the grandest attempt to give it justice - with more nooks and crannies than one would think possible for such a young franchise.