Surging, slumping, scoreboard watching: A night in the pennant race with the Mariners' Jerry Dipoto

New York Times

8 hours ago

PHILADELPHIA — Jerry Dipoto once tried to collect the signature of every player in the history of Major League Baseball. He came reasonably close, gathering balls and cards, musty old licensing contracts, anything he could find. He sold them all, eventually, but never forgets a name.
Watching a game with Dipoto, the Seattle Mariners' president of baseball operations, is like hopping aboard the great glass elevator from the old 'Willy Wonka' movie. With the slightest prompt, you're bouncing sideways and slant ways and long ways and square ways and front ways and any other ways you can think of.
Advertisement
So it was Monday when the Mariners played the Philadelphia Phillies in the final stop of a punishing trip that has taken them from surging to slumping. The voice of Dan Baker, the Phillies' venerable public address announcer, transported Dipoto to old Veterans Stadium in the 1990s, when he was a major-league reliever. He could still hear Baker calling his name and his number, 45.
And that led Dipoto to a memory from 1995, when he lost a game for the New York Mets on the West Coast. The next morning, a call to his hotel room jolted him awake. His roommate, Rico Brogna, answered groggily and told Dipoto to pick up. The caller berated Dipoto for disrespecting his uniform number.
'Who is this?' Dipoto asked, and when the caller said 'Tug McGraw,' Dipoto hung up. Just an angry fan, he thought.
A few years later, Dipoto told the story to McGraw, a pitcher he'd grown up rooting for as a young Mets fan in New Jersey. Actually, said McGraw, who had worn No. 45, it wasn't some angry fan. It was him!
Dipoto never leapt skyward after the last out of the World Series, as McGraw once did in this city. But he's the only baseball operations president who used to be a major-league closer — 49 career saves for Cleveland, the Mets and the Colorado Rockies. That job, it turned out, was ideal training for this career.
'You hang the slider, move on,' Dipoto said, watching his team from the visiting executive suite in the Hall of Fame Club at Citizens Bank Park.
'And when you hang the slider and they hit the three-run homer, the worst thing you can do is hang on to that slider. It's too late. It's out of your hand. So don't hang on to the trade that went bad. Don't try to reassess an 8-year-old deal that people want to cut up on social media. Just move on and focus on this day, this team, and what we can do moving forward. That's kind of how I was as a player, and that's how I've been (since). Don't turn back.'
Advertisement
When the Mariners turn back, they are the only MLB franchise that doesn't see a World Series appearance in its past. Since hiring Dipoto in September 2015, they have reached the playoffs just once, as a wild card in 2022.
In the last five seasons, though, only seven teams have won more games than the Mariners. The team reached a crossroads last August, when Dipoto fired manager Scott Servais amid a summer slide and replaced him with Dan Wilson, a genial former catcher in the team's Hall of Fame.
'He's like the Mount Rushmore of good people who care about the people around them,' Dipoto said. 'He just wants to see you succeed, and it's a great trait. Scott did an awesome job for nine years here. He was, in 2016 when we came on, exactly what we needed: established organization and discipline, and we learned how to play the game the way we wanted to play the game.
'And then we were just having a tough time busting through that ceiling. It wouldn't be the first time that a different voice came in and was able to help.'
Wednesday will mark Wilson's 162nd game at the helm, and the Mariners are 89-72, consistent with the team's recent history. The Mariners have won 90, 90, 88 and 85 games each year since 2021 and stand 68-59, tied with the Boston Red Sox for the last two American League wild-card spots.
As it turns out, the Mariners weren't falling apart last summer, when they lost a 10-game division lead and missed a wild-card spot by one game. This is who they are, on the edge of something special. A year under Wilson has confirmed it.
'That's kind of been, in baseball's way, the productivity of our roster in general for most of the last five years,' Dipoto said. 'We're kind of hovering around that spot. We're trying to figure out how to break beyond that.'
Corner infielders Josh Naylor and Eugenio Suárez — acquired in separate trades with the Arizona Diamondbacks in late July — should be part of the solution. The Mariners' first division title in 24 years seems in their grasp, with the battered Houston Astros fading fast. But they haven't done it yet.
Advertisement
After a 10-1 stretch that started July 31, the Mariners have lost six of seven games and look exhausted on the final leg of a three-team, four-city, nine-game trip without an off day.
The Mariners have lost all three series — to the Baltimore Orioles, the Mets (two games in Queens and one in Williamsport, Pa.) and Philadelphia — but have scored in the seventh inning or later in every game. They tied Tuesday's score with three runs in the seventh but lost 6-4 when J.T. Realmuto homered off Matt Brash in the eighth.
'We have a really good lineup, we're deep, and we let everybody know that we're not going to give up the game,' said Suárez, who doubled twice Tuesday but is batting .176 since the trade. 'No matter who we face, we're ready to compete.'
The Mariners still strike out a lot (third in MLB), but after ranking 21st in MLB in runs per game last season, they're up to 10th now. Catcher Cal Raleigh leads the majors in homers, with 47, and five others have hit at least 15: Randy Arozarena, Julio Rodríguez, Jorge Polanco, Naylor and Suárez.
'It's a team that doesn't let down easy, and that's something that all good teams have,' said Wilson, a stalwart of four Seattle playoff teams from 1995 to 2001. 'We're able to strike and we're able to strike quickly.'
Alas, that is what the Phillies did Monday to Logan Gilbert, who had never before allowed six runs without pitching more than two innings. The Phillies fouled off his best pitches, hammered his mistakes and wound up with 21 hits in the game, the most they've had here in 16 years.
Dipoto understood why Wilson removed Gilbert before the top of the third; after nine hits and 65 pitches, it just wasn't his night. The bullpen wasn't much better.
'This is pretty unbelievable — we're not a particularly easy team to hit,' Dipoto said, mentioning a string of short starts on this trip, as another Phillie lashed a line drive.
Advertisement
'In a 162-game season when you're riding the wave, everybody's going to have a clunker now and then. When you start backing up three-inning, four-inning starts on top of one another, it does take its toll.'
By the middle innings, Dipoto was conferring with Andy McKay, the assistant general manager, on bullpen coverage for the rest of the series. Sure enough, two relievers were sent to the minors Tuesday, with fresh arms taking their place.
One of them, Bryce Miller, made his first start since early June after dealing with elbow inflammation. It marked the first time this season the Mariners have had their projected starting rotation together, with Gilbert, Luis Castillo, George Kirby and Bryan Woo. All but Miller have been All-Stars within the last three summers.
'It sucks it took this long in the season to get all five (of us) healthy and rolling, but we've got to start stringing together good starts and giving us a chance,' said Miller, who allowed four runs in five innings. 'We'll be all right. We're still in a good spot. Everything's going to be fine.'
It's easy to picture a rotation like Seattle's — with a bullpen anchored by Andrés Muñoz — pitching deep into October. Strong young starters carried the 2010 San Francisco Giants all the way, same as the 2003 Florida Marlins, 1985 Kansas City Royals, 1969 Mets and so on.
Then again, the Oakland Athletics of the early 2000s never got past the division series. Neither did the 2011 Phillies' stable of aces, nor the 2014 Detroit Tigers' Cy Young brigade. Study baseball long enough, and precedents bombard you from every direction.
'My favorite part of baseball history is that what we're doing, there's almost nothing you can do that hasn't been done before, in some weird way,' Dipoto said. 'It's just trying to carve out a modern way of looking at it and doing it. We're no better at predicting the future than anybody else is. We're trying to put a good baseball team on the field.'
Advertisement
The Mariners have done that. They are weary now; this weekend's home series with the Athletics can't arrive fast enough. But they are probably the healthiest, most complete team in the division. This should be their time.
Now they just have to pass the Astros, who have held or shared first place for 78 days in a row and now lead Seattle by a game and a half. Dipoto went hours Monday without checking his phone for the Houston score, but it was only a matter of time.
'Oh, I will,' he said. 'If you are actually the person in baseball that says, 'I don't look at that,' most of them are looking at it. It could be a glance at the out-of-town scoreboard, it could be checking the scores when the game's over, or periodically just popping over to the dot-com scoreboard. So, yeah, I'm watching. We're all watching.'
The past is the past, as every closer and general manager knows. The present is the pennant race. It's OK to peek.
Spot the pattern. Connect the terms
Find the hidden link between sports terms
Play today's puzzle