SEATTLE — The Seattle Mariners are undertaking a sweeping coaching overhaul as part of a "culture reset," general manager Jerry Dipoto said Monday at a postseason press conference at T-Mobile Park. The moves come a day after the club parted ways with manager Dan Wilson, with Dipoto saying, "We need to reset our culture and refocus ourselves on what we need to do to get back to an efficient, clean, crisp brand of baseball like the Mariners have played for a number of years."
Pitching coaches Pete Woodworth and Trent Blank will return, but Seattle has moved on from its hitting coaches with the exception of franchise legend Edgar Martínez, who Dipoto said would return "in some capacity." The club also parted with bench coach Manny Acta and defensive coaches Perry Hill and Eric Young Jr. Hill had overseen Gold Glove winners J.P. Crawford and Dylan Moore — with Cole Young a potential third this winter — while Young Jr. oversaw part of Josh Naylor's historic back-to-back 30-steal campaign.
Dipoto was emphatic about the team's defensive collapse and its impact on a pitching staff built to throw strikes and put the ball in play. "Being a bad defender is a choice," Dipoto said. "Our players have the skills to do it, and for a five-year stretch, they've somewhere between a slightly above-average to, in some areas, a well above-average major league defense, and we didn't beat ourselves. This year we led the league in throwing errors. It was awful to watch, and it was awful for the players." He added the club also led the league as the least likely team to convert a double play it started, citing a lack of range and positioning that the scouting and advance team must improve.
The defensive downturn, Dipoto said, exposed slipping standards that once connected the minor league pipeline to the majors. "The performance on the field this year has made us question a lot of the things that we are doing at the major league level," Dipoto said, noting multiple major leaguers who came through the system referenced player-development principles that "got abandoned in the big leagues this year." He added, "You can't be the worst defensive team in baseball. You can't make the mistakes that we made constantly throughout the year. You need to be better prepared and in line with a process that leads to winning."
Dipoto framed the broader issue as accountability and passivity, echoing postseason remarks from Cal Raleigh, and dismissed injuries as an excuse, noting Seattle had fewer injuries than many teams that played into the postseason. "What we saw in mid-season was a team playing with limited urgency and waiting for the water to turn on," Dipoto said. "Accountability is just a word, unless you are accountable to a standard that is preset," he added, taking responsibility: "I did an ineffective job of making sure that we held one another accountable, because we started with standards and it faded. And that's not just on our players. That's on me. It's on our front office group. It's on the staff and the players collectively."