It’s too early to be sad
Browsing the comments over the Mariners’ opening series, it’s clear that none of you need my help identifying the problems with this team. There are many. But it’s only March, and I’ve had a rough six weeks. I’m not ready to let myself get into a negative headspace for baseball yet. After all, we follow the Seattle Mariners; it’s not like it will take very long to get there. It’s a franchise that’ll break your heart, over and over and over. But the beauty of the offseason is that it gives you a chance to heal. Not to be made new, but to heal. My favorite Taylor Swift image (from the criminally underrated “State of Grace”) is of a mosaic broken heart. It’s how I’m thinking of this season. Hurt by this franchise too many times to count, I’ve once again patched up my heart and am ready to hope. So here are three things from today’s game that left me feeling like 2025 could be the golden age of something good, and right, and real for the Seattle Mariners.
Bryan Woo
For as much attention as the Mariners’ offense has gotten over the opening series, I think it’s actually been defined more by how the starters have done. The offense is what it is, and the team will live or die by whether the starters are good or great. Logan Gilbert was great, and the Mariners won. Luis Castillo and Bryce Miller were merely good, and the Mariners lost. Today, Bryan Woo was great.
The Alameda native has dominated his hometown’s erstwhile team to the point that his one run allowed over six innings today makes it one of the worst-ever starts against them. It brings his ERA against the A’s to 0.72, which bumps him from the best in the A’s 125-year history to merely second best (behind Bob Lee, obviously).
He manhandled the Athletics today the way he normally does, by relying on his fastballs. He went to his four-seamer or his sinker 80% of the time, which would normally be a huge red flag for a starter. But why would you ever stop when you get results as good as Woo does? As Scott Servais once told Kate, “He’ll throw [fastballs] that much until the league tells him he can’t throw [them] as much anymore.” The one time he ran into trouble was a Tyler Soderstrom dinger, which, go figure, came off one of Woo’s six changeups.
But those fastballs were nasty. He’s already up to 95 with them, and picking up the kinds of whiffs you typically see against sliders. If he can stay healthy, this could be the year Woo steps out from the shadow of his longer-tenured teammates.
Randy Arozarena
Arozarena went 0-3 with a strikeout today, but I’m still plenty happy with what I’m seeing. In the fourth inning, he put a charge into a ball that the wind killed for a 402-foot flyout. By all rights that should have been his second big fly of the year, coming in just one series. After a bit of a down year last year, everything process-wise at the plate looks like vintage Arozarena, and his fourth inning fly ball was hardly the only ball he’s hit with authority. He’s averaging 98.7 mph on his eight balls in play, with a max that just four games into the year already outdoes anything he did last season. On defense, he slightly misplayed a ball early in the game, but manager Dan Wilson went out of his way to shout out a nice play in the ninth that kept Tyler Soderstrom to a single, saying that “keeping that runner out of scoring position there changed the inning quite a bit.” A 3-WAR year from Arozarena would do a lot for this team. It’s the kind of support that the pitching staff, Julio, Cal, and J.P. have been needing these past four years.
Juliooooooooooooo
Julio’s got his problems, and he may not be quite the player this roster needs him to be, but he’s still the best player on it. And he can still do stuff like hit a baseball nearly out of the stadium, and do it much more often than most people who can do that. He did it today, after Victor Robles beat out his second infield hit of the day. With Gregory Santos, Trent Thornton and Andrés Muñoz locking down Woo’s terrific outing, those two runs would be enough to win the ballgame. It also wins Julio the season’s first Sun Hat Award, an award to recognize a noteworthy individual contribution to a game. That alone is reason for optimism, considering he somehow went Sun Hat-less in 2024. Julio credited his approach of trying to stay down the middle on the fastball so that he could time up a hanging slider and yank it into oblivion, saying, “My approach is to go get the fastball down the middle, but he threw me a breaking ball and I was able to be on time for that.”
To be sure, I’m not saying that Bryan Woo will be an All-Star, or Randy Arozarena will have a 3-WAR year, or that just because Julio is now on pace for a 40-80 season, that’s what he will do. But rather than focus on the strikeouts, I’m choosing to live in a state of grace. I’m choosing to spend my Sunday afternoon imagining what that season would look like.