Making New Year’s Resolutions for the 2025 Mariners

How specific Mariners can improve in 2025

Despite the calendar flipping to 2025, the Mariners remain inactive as yet during this off-season, so the focus remains on the club as currently constructed. Obviously, that’s not a great feeling for Mariners fans, since the club as currently constructed missed out on the playoffs last year (and now features 100% less Josh Rojas). Still, if improvements must come from within—and it seems like they must—here’s what the LL staff thinks various players should resolve to do, as the rest of us are eating more quinoa and hitting the gym:

Bryan Woo

Resolution: Stay healthy

Coming into last season, Bryan Woo was the starting pitcher I was the most excited about. With the flashes he showed in 2023 at such a young age, I expected a huge step forward from him in 2024. He certainly didn’t disappoint, but a true breakout season was hampered by numerous injury scares in the first half of the season. Woo missed all of April with elbow inflammation and half of July due to a hamstring strain. He was also scratched or pulled early from several starts in late May and early June as the team tried to figure out a good rhythm for his workload.

Remarkably, the Mariners kept him healthy for the entire second half, and he was brilliant. Despite the durability concerns, Woo threw more than six frames in seven of eight starts between August 1 and September 11, posting a 2.42 ERA with just four walks over that span. If Woo can continue to improve while staying on the field in 2025, the sky truly is the limit for what he can achieve. -Anders Jorstad

Randy Arozarena

Resolution: Be less aggressive on the bases

All these years later, Randy Arozarena’s most iconic play is still probably that breakneck mayhem that ended Game 4 of the 2020 World Series. Of course, an important fact about that play is that by all rights, Arozarena should have been dead meat. This is the give and take of Arozarena’s aggression on the basepaths. He forces defenses to make a play, and although they often do, sometimes they don’t, and some of those times, it wins his team a game in the World Series. But as fun as it is, you can’t feed your family with Chaos Ball; you feed your family with runs scored.

Now, back in the days of the High Pandemic, Arozarena’s confidence on the bases was well warranted as he boasted a sprint speed above the 90th percentile from 2019-2021. But it’s fallen over the past couple years as he’s approached his 30th birthday, and last year, he was down in the 71st. That’s not really the kind of sprint speed where it’s advisable to flit around and find out. And indeed, courtesy of Baseball Savant’s new baserunning metrics, we know that Arozarena has been a net negative on the bases since 2022. Not by a lot, but still. Stolen bases in particular have been a problem, as he’s been caught in 20 of his 62 attempts over the last two years. That’s below the breakeven point for stolen-base success rate.

And now that he’s changed uniforms, it matters more than ever for Arozarena. Between roster construction and, especially, the park factors, the Mariners score a much higher percentage of their runs on home runs than the Rays do. The 2024 Mariners scored 42.9% of their runs on big flies, above the league average of 40.7%, and way above the Rays at 36.9%. So the extra base is worth less relative to the out for the Mariners than it is for the Rays. Picking his spots a little more selectively could be the difference for a franchise that has come up one win short of the playoffs in three of the past four seasons.

So I can’t believe I’m advising one of the most thrilling players in the game to be less aggressive, but here we are. It’d be very cool for Randy to get a fifth 20-20 season in a row. But a ring would be even cooler. -Zach Mason

Luke Raley

Resolution: Hit lefties

I get it, Luke. I really do. When I try to write my name with my left hand, it looks like someone handed a pencil to a chimpanzee and then put that chimp into one of those indoor skydiving air chambers. Handedness is hard. But the benefit of this is two-fold:

• 1) Watching big galoots play baseball is shown to improve happiness and, subsequently, life span, so by transitioning into an everyday player you’d basically be saving lives.
• 2) Outside help does not appear to be coming for Seattle.

A bonus resolution? Blast the Rocky theme song and get to picking at first.
-Isabelle Minasian

Julio Rodríguez

Resolution: Shine.

Buddy, listen. I get it. We all get it. You’re not gonna get the help you need in terms of roster construction. Not this season and maybe not ever with the Mariners. I get why you feel like you gotta swing out of your shoes during so many at-bats. If not you, who else? You’re an incredible ballplayer and we’re very fortunate to have you play center field for our favorite, deeply unserious baseball team. If there is ONE thing you can resolve to do better on in 2025, it’s avoiding the prolonged slumps at the plate. “Haha oh okay, rando, great idea” you surely laugh. I know, if only it were that simple, right? Your various coaches have certainly tried to help you with this, but from the general fan’s perspective, it does seem very clear. You have more consistent success at the plate when you’re trying to put the best swing you can on any particular pitch to drive the ball to whichever part of the field gives you the best chance at a hit as opposed to swinging for I-90 on every breaking ball away. Almost every pitcher from 2023 on seems to approach you the same way. They’ve adjusted to you, and now it’s your turn. Baseball, like most sports, is a game of repetition and striving for consistency. We’ve seen the excellence you can achieve in this game, but now we need it to see it more often. No easy task, obviously, but I believe in you. To many more good years in the sun, Julio. -Eric Sanford

George Kirby

Resolution: Stop being so predictable

I understand that throwing a pitch outside the strike zone is completely antithetical to George Kirby’s whole schtick. Since the mound was lowered in 1969, Kirby’s 7.58 career strikeout-to-walk ratio leads all starting pitchers by a pretty hefty margin, and unsurprisingly, he has the lowest walk rate among that same cohort. He gets absolutely furious with himself when he allows a free pass. What’s a little more surprising is that the rate at which he locates in the zone, 55.3% of the time, is just 25th among all those pitchers (pitch tracking data only goes back to 2008). You’d think that someone with his precise command would lead all of baseball in that metric, especially with his astronomical strikeout-to-walk ratio. Once he gets to the precipice of allowing a base on balls, he becomes far too predictable; his zone rate jumps up to 73.6% with three balls in the count and his overall whiff rate plummets to 13%.

The solution isn’t exactly easy to parse either. Earlier this year, Michael Rosen coined the Kirby Corollary (following his work on the Kirby Index to quantify command) — essentially Kirby’s impeccable command works against him when he’s seeking a swing-and-a-miss because his pitches aren’t deceptive enough when he locates them in the zone so frequently.

“The slider doesn’t look like the fastball out of the hand, and so batters can more easily dismiss it. This is the Kirby Corollary — his commitment (and ability) to repeatedly throw four-seam fastballs inside to right-handed hitters is so strong that those hitters choose to give up on the outside part of the plate.”

Kirby is already working to throw his slider outside the strike zone with some regularity; that pitch’s zone rate of 47.9% ranked 136th among all 444 sliders thrown at least 100 times in 2024 but that’s well below where that pitch ranked in zone rate in 2022 and ‘23. Still, batters aren’t swinging at his breaking balls, and he’s often struggled to put batters away as a result. The solution isn’t to continue throwing his slider out of the zone more and more often; instead, he needs his whole arsenal to work together to produce the kind of deception that begets swings and misses. He needs to stop being so predictable. That might mean a few more walks over the course of the season, but if the result is more strikeouts and fewer balls in play, Kirby will likely continue to thrive. -Jake Mailhot

Victor Robles

Resolution: Stay golden.

This could have been a simple screed, extolling John Stanton, Chris Larson, et al to stand up, dust the crumbs off their needlessly $400 relaxed fit slacks, and dig down deep for an ounce of pride and self-respect that has thus far eluded them in their pathetic mismanagement of the Mariners over the last few seasons. Thankfully, it’s not that.

What it is skews softer, a tender embrace of my favorite fallen hatchling, scooped up from the underbrush after a long and painful separation from his nest. Nursed back to health and given the tools and confidence to fly once more, Robles was the brightest surprise of an often-underwhelming Mariners season. What I fear from a club that’s treating Robles as a lock for full-time reps in the outfield is that he’s flashed and fizzled before. Unlucky injuries and inconsistent production have strangled would-be breakouts in their infancy for Robles before. While I see plenty of cause to buy his production now, there’s more riding on him now than when he was merely a surprising delight in 2024. Keep bunting, keep swiping, keep slugging, fly Victorious. -John Trupin

Cole Young

Resolution: Find some power, especially against lefties

This is cheating, because Cole Young isn’t even on the team yet technically, and it feels a little like being mean to a puppy to already tell him what he needs to be working on. But since it seems like the Mariners are going to be content to sit on their hands this season rather than meaningfully address the holes on their infield, Cole, buddy, get ready to accidentally become important at work but hopefully not have it ruin your life. Young’s plate discipline is beyond reproach, but the one thing that’s been lacking in his generally well-rounded minor-league campaign is power. Obviously you don’t want him selling out for power; that’s not his game. But the dropoff in power at Double-A is concerning when thinking about how the pitchers only get better and the parks bigger from here.

There’s also work to be done against lefties. Young’s superior plate discipline means he can grind out an at-bat against lefties and do something productive, but his slugging, particularly, takes a sub-.300 nose dive against southpaws. Young has been working on building strength and looks bigger and stronger, and he’s still just 21. Ideally, he’d have this year to split time between Double and Triple-A to refine his game even further, but the Mariners’ penny-pinching ways might force him up to the big-league club sooner rather than later, leaving Young to figure it out at the highest level. -Kate Preusser