Breaking: Insiders Identify Key Factors Behind Mariners’ Offensive Decline

At the end of the day, the story of the 2024 Seattle Mariners is one of a team with an excellent pitching staff that was mired by a bad offense.

Drayer: Why ‘Who is the best Seattle Mariners pitcher?’ is a great question

It takes just one quick look at the season totals to see where the Mariners’ shortcomings were.

Pitching? Phenomenal.

The M’s were tied with the Braves for the lowest team ERA in the majors and first in walks per nine innings. And their starting staff led the league in the same categories, plus opponents’ batting average, WHIP and strikeout-to-walk ratio.

Hitting? Terrible until the final month.

Seattle entered the month of September with the league’s worst batting average and highest strikeout rate, and it was in the bottom 10 in on-base percentage and slugging.

Perhaps no better numbers sum up the Mariners’ 2024 campaign better than these: Seattle was was 70-15 and had the league’s third-best winning percentage in games where it scored at least four runs, but failed to score at least four runs more than all but seven MLB teams (all of which also missed the playoffs).

Seattle Sports’ Mariners insider Shannon Drayer, show hosts Mike Salk and Bob Stelton, and former Mariners reliever Charlie Furbush tried to make sense of what went wrong with Seattle’s offense during a special offseason Mariners roundtable.

“You can have all the pitching you want in the world, but if you don’t score runs, it just ain’t going to happen,” Drayer said. “And that’s what we ultimately saw this year. (We) saw some good stuff at the end of the year. We’ll get into what that might mean going forward, but what do they need to look at? And what got them to where they were in the first half?”

‘Contagious’ struggles

The problems at the plate were widespread early on, especially for the players the Mariners brought in during the offseason.

New acquisitions Mitch Haniger, Mitch Garver, Jorge Polanco and Luis Urías were all hitting .219 or worse by the end of May.

Meanwhile, J.P. Crawford took a big step back and was dealing with an injury, Ty France continued to decline and Julio Rodríguez was going through the worst power slump of his young career.

“Didn’t it feel contagious?” Stelton said. “It felt like as they struggled as everybody struggled, everybody started pressing more. Everybody felt like, ‘OK, I gotta get this out of this.’ It was crazy to see one through nine. … Everybody that they had brought in to fix their problems were failing and flailing up there, and that included Garver, it included Polanco, Urías, everybody.”