After years of begging, pleading and fans burning Jerry DiPoto in effigy, the Seattle Mariners are pushing their chips to the middle of the table. Around midnight on Wednesday, less than 24 hours before Thursday's trade deadline, Seattle agreed to a deal with the Arizona Diamondbacks for star third baseman Eugenio Suarez — the second D-backs slugger the Mariners have landed in the last week along with the trade for first baseman Josh Naylor.
For most of the 2020s, Seattle has watched as tremendous rotations got wasted by a punchless offense. In just a few days' time, though, DiPoto has managed to flip that script, adding two All-Star bats to the heart of his order. That rotation is as deep and nasty as ever, and now, after a lot of patience, the Mariners finally have the lineup to match. Here's how they could line up one through nine for the rest of the year.
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Projected Mariners lineup with Eugenio Suarez
Order | Player | Position |
|---|---|---|
1 | JP Crawford | SS |
2 | Julio Rodriguez | CF |
3 | Cal Raleigh | C |
4 | Eugenio Suarez | 3B |
5 | Josh Naylor | 1B |
6 | Randy Arozarena | LF |
7 | Jorge Polanco | DH |
8 | Dominic Canzone | RF |
9 | Cole Young | 2B |
Remember when the Mariners were struggling for offense? How quickly things can change. Now, they have a 137 OPS+ bat in Arozarena all the way down in the No. 6 hole. Heck, even the bottom third of this lineup, particularly Polanco and Canzone, have been above-average at the plate this season, and Young is a former top prospect whose batted-ball metrics are starting to tick up as he adjusts to life in the Majors.
In other words, it's not hard to imagine a world in which the Mariners offer exactly zero easy outs for opposing pitchers, anchored by one of the best hearts of the order in the entire sport. Oh, and we're almost due for Julio Rodriguez's annual second-half slugfest (.888 in his last 23 games, five homers in the last week), which could add yet another MVP-caliber bat alongside Raleigh and Suarez.
Mariners fans have long begged for Jerry DiPoto to finally start acting with the sort of urgency that his spectacular starting rotation demanded. It took him longer than it should have, but he's at last pulled the trigger in a big way, landing the exact two boppers his team needed most without touching any of his inner-circle prospects. That's clean living, and it should make Seattle among, if not the, favorites to win the AL pennant for the first time in franchise history.