The Mariners fired the manager and kept the guy who built a 76-86 team

The Mariners fired a manager who was eight outs from the pennant a year ago, and on Tuesday they hired a 36-year-old who's never managed a game at any level to replace him. I don't have a problem with Jason Kanzler. I have a problem with the fact that the person who built the 76-86 roster is the one doing the hiring, again.

Start with what Kanzler actually is, because he deserves a fair shake. ESPN says he spent five years in the Astros organization, including two as a major league coach, and since the start of 2024 he's run player development for the Cubs, where Pete Crow-Armstrong, Matt Shaw and Pedro Ramirez came through on his watch. Seattle's whole lineup forgot how to hit this year. Hiring the guy whose job was making young hitters better is a reasonable answer to that problem. If you'd told me the Mariners picked him over Joe Espada, who ESPN says was also a finalist, because they wanted a teacher instead of a résumé, I'd nod along.

Now look at what actually went wrong. Josh Naylor slumped in the first year of a $92.5 million contract. Brendan Donovan, the big offseason trade, played 39 games. Cal Raleigh and Julio Rodriguez struggled. The rotation of Logan Gilbert, George Kirby, Bryan Woo and Bryce Miller had the sixth-highest ERA in the majors after the All-Star break. And they still finished only five games back in an AL West the Astros won at .500. I've covered a lot of bad teams, and most of them didn't play in a division that practically begged them to take it.

Some of that is on the manager. Not all of it, and not most of it. The Naylor deal and the Donovan trade weren't Dan Wilson's calls. Neither was hiring Wilson in the first place. When Scott Servais was fired late in 2024, the Mariners didn't even run an outside search. They promoted Wilson from a minor league coordinator job, ESPN noted, and he won 90 games his first full season before getting fired on the last day of his second.

Jerry Dipoto, who has run baseball operations since late 2015, said the goal was "finding a manager with the ability to challenge all of us to improve." I'll take him at his word on the "all of us" part. That's a nice line, and it's also an admission. Kanzler is his third manager. Firing two managers in a little over two years is what a front office does when it'd rather change the person in the dugout than the plan upstairs.

I'm old enough to remember when firing the manager was what you did to buy the general manager another year. It still is. The kid who gets the job (and at 36, to me he's a kid) inherits one of baseball's deepest rosters, per ESPN, and a front office that's now used up its last easy answer.

So here's my offer to Seattle. Give Kanzler three years, no matter what, and say so out loud at Wednesday's news conference. If the Mariners miss again in 2027, the next person who answers for it shouldn't be the one in the uniform.

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