On Opening Day, the Seattle Mariners were viewed as favorites in the American League by FanGraphs, but they reached the All-Star break a game under.500 and sitting well short of that standard. Mark DeRosa’s lens on the first half is pretty simple: Seattle did not get the level of production it expected from its top two hitters, and that put the entire roster in catch-up mode.
The Mariners’ opening-half story can be split into four parts: Cal and Julio, the rest of the position players, the rotation and the bullpen. The common thread is that the team’s projected star duo did not carry its usual weight for long enough, and the margin for error disappeared quickly.
Cal Raleigh’s early-season setback
Cal Raleigh’s first-half arc helps explain a lot of the offense’s early frustration. Manny Acta said Raleigh did not get enough reps with Team USA at the World Baseball Classic, then tried to make up for that afterward, overexerted and strained his oblique. Before landing on the injured list, Raleigh had posted a 62 wRC+.
That is a steep drop for a player Seattle needed to anchor the lineup. The good news for the Mariners is that Raleigh’s numbers improved after he returned. In mid-June, he rejoined the team and has posted an 88 wRC+ since then. That is still not the kind of impact Seattle was hoping for, but it is a clear step forward from where things stood early in the year.
Acta described Raleigh as a tough guy, and the timeline supports that. He tried to push through the consequences of a disrupted spring, but the early injury left the Mariners without the hitter they expected when the season began.
Julio Rodríguez’s uneven first half
Julio Rodríguez’s season had a different shape, but it also helped explain the Mariners’ slow start. In June, Rodríguez turned it around defensively. At the end of June, he started to get hot at the plate. That sequence at least gave Seattle a glimpse of the player it expected on Opening Day.
Then came another setback when Nolan Schanuel drilled Rodríguez in the back of the head while running the bases. Even without that collision, Rodríguez’s first half was defined by inconsistency before the late-June surge. For a team built around star power, the timing mattered. The Mariners needed that turnaround earlier, not after much of the damage had already been done.
Why the Mariners fell short
The simplest answer is that Seattle’s top end did not produce enough. The article’s broader point is that no team got less relative to expectations from its top two hitters than the Mariners did. That is a strong statement, but the first-half record backs it up. When your best players are not meeting preseason projections, the rest of the roster has to do too much.
The Mariners still had pieces around them, but the early damage was already in place by the time Cal Raleigh stabilized a bit and Julio Rodríguez started heating up. Seattle entered the year with a top-five type of outlook and still finished the first half fighting to stay above water. That is why the underperformance stands out so clearly.
