{"id":935743,"date":"2026-10-21T04:28:32","date_gmt":"2026-10-21T04:28:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/935743\/"},"modified":"2026-10-21T04:28:32","modified_gmt":"2026-10-21T04:28:32","slug":"next-mariners-manager-must-be-able-to-solve-clubhouse-leadership-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/935743\/","title":{"rendered":"Next Mariners manager must be able to solve clubhouse leadership problem"},"content":{"rendered":"

Of all the 2026 Mariners\u2019 various problems, one that loomed largest was a clubhouse-wide passivity<\/a> – a sense that the talent of the team would eventually win out and the Mariners would turn their season around, without a clear plan as to who would turn that season around and how.<\/p>\n

In postseason interviews, both the players and GM Jerry Dipoto were able to articulate this particular failing, bemoaning mistakes made but also insisting that hard lessons were learned. But the larger question remains of who will be able to make sure those hard lessons of a disappointing 2026 are carried into an improved 2027.<\/p>\n

The Mariners have now dismissed the majority of their coaching staff, wanting to allow a new manager to come in and handpick their own support staff. That person has a significant task before them, even beyond assembling a new major-league coaching staff: whoever it is will also have to learn the idiosyncrasies of this Mariners clubhouse and the particular way leadership functions among a group of largely younger, homegrown players – or, as was made apparent last year, doesn\u2019t function.<\/p>\n

When looking at the core leadership in the clubhouse, the first name that jumps to mind is Cal Raleigh. Raleigh ticks all the boxes for a clubhouse leader: he\u2019s a homegrown player signed to a longterm deal; he has a leadership position on the field; he\u2019s the one who steps up to do postseason interviews when things have gone sideways, as he did in 2023, and again in 2026.<\/p>\n

But this season also showed where Raleigh, who will be playing in his age-30 season in 2027, has some growing to do in his own leadership role. A disappointing, injury-marred season prevented Raleigh from fully being able to grasp the reins in a clubhouse that was careening off a cliff, and with his absence – both on the field when he went on the IL for the first time in May and in the box score – came a loss of identity for the team as a whole. At the end of the season, Raleigh spoke about the need for some \u201cself-reflection\u201d about the direction the team his headed in – not just from himself, but from his teammates, as well.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat is our team identity?\u201d Raleigh asked philosophically. \u201cI don\u2019t feel like there was one this year, and that\u2019s partly on me as a leader on this team. It\u2019s not all on me, but as somebody who\u2019s been here, it\u2019s important for us to come together and figure that out.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bryan Woo, as a leader on the pitching staff, affirmed that the plan this off-season would be to get players together and discuss where things went wrong and what can be done about it.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve already talked about a lot of the core guys having some conversations over the off-season, periodically putting our heads together and coming up with some ideas about how we want to make that come to life. Standards and accountability and all that stuff – they\u2019re great words, but if you don\u2019t truly act on them and make them come to life and are about them every day, then they don\u2019t mean anything. You can talk the talk, but can you walk the walk?\u201d<\/p>\n

The pitching staff is in a more perilous leadership position than some others – none of the core of young pitchers are signed to long-term deals, and therefore are often subjects of trade speculation and rumors. They also now lack their de facto leader in the veteran Luis Castillo, a leadership vacuum that opened up when Castillo was traded to the White Sox in early August. Someone from the pitching staff needs to step into that role. For his part, Woo seems to be comfortable with doing so.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m more comfortable now than I\u2019ve been in years past,\u201d said Woo, when asked if he would be willing to take a more vocal role in those conversations about standards and accountability. \u201cI think as a young guy in the clubhouse, you\u2019re just trying to find your way most of the time – when to speak up, what to say and whatnot. You want to say the right thing at the right time. Now I think I\u2019ve learned it\u2019s not about saying the right thing, but just saying something, and learning from the experience one way or another.\u201c<\/p>\n

The Mariners clubhouse is in a tricky position with leadership – the homegrown core that first brought the team to the playoffs in 2022 ranges in ages from 25 to 29: a tweener age in baseball, old enough to have been in the league for several years but not yet the indisputable voices of experience. The youngest player in that band is Julio Rodr\u00edguez, who\u2019s still finding his own footing with clubhouse leadership: the kid brother who was once trailing after players like Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Fernando Tat\u00eds Jr. now has a line of admirers of his own, starting with new teammate Lazaro Montes and reaching all the way down to the DSL, where Mariners MiLB hitter of the year Jarvis Gomez named Julio as his favorite player<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cI feel like I\u2019m more comfortable, especially this year,\u201d said Julio, reflecting on his changing relationship with leadership. \u201dSometimes people assume just because you\u2019re this player or that player, you should do this, you should do that, but that\u2019s not easy, you know. At the end of the day, we\u2019re all grown men here, and we all have different ways of doing things.\u201c<\/p>\n

\u201cBut at the same time, with time and experience and learning about guys and how they do things, you kind of get more comfortable speaking up and having those conversations that you know are for the better of the team, not like, taking shots or things like that\u2026I feel like that\u2019s a skill that everybody with time has to develop, and I feel like this year I\u2019m a little more comfortable with that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Seattle\u2019s new manager will also be tasked with making sure the two newer veteran voices in the clubhouse – Josh Naylor and Brendan Donovan – assume their leadership mantle, especially with the looming departure of the longest-tenured Mariner in J.P. Crawford. Donovan, who missed most of the year with a spate of injuries, never had the opportunity to fully connect with his new teammates. Naylor connected with his young infielders, especially Cole Young, but was hampered by both his own injury issues – a nagging wrist issue that took an off-season procedure to clean up – and injuries and inconsistencies across the infield that meant, aside from Young, he never knew who\u2019d be feeding him the ball on any given night. That\u2019s all further complicated by Naylor\u2019s leadership style, which tends to be more of a carefully observed slow burn rather than an immediate call to arms.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s my first year here, so I got to see a lot of things,\u201d said Naylor. \u201cI\u2019m a very big viewer, and I just kind of see things from afar and then go off that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Naylor did praise his teammates, calling them a \u201cgreat group,\u201d and noted that the team genuinely seems to like each other, going to team dinners or group events. However, he noted that the process of building a team identity is an ongoing one, something that might have been limited by the lack of consistency in a clubhouse that seemed to lack a clear direction.<\/p>\n

\u201cIdentity is huge in sports, personal identity and then a group identity\u201d said Naylor. \u201cI think it\u2019s just\u2014it\u2019s continuous work too. It\u2019s not just set in stone one day that you do this, this, and that, and it kind of sticks. It\u2019s a day-to-day thing, but we work on it really every day here\u2026With the identity aspect, I think we\u2019re going to do our best to bond more and bring this group together more, and find ways to win ball games going into next year, doing the little things right.\u201d<\/p>\n

Doing the little things right was a constant refrain in end-of-season assessments from both players and front office members – or rather, a lack thereof. That, more than anything, speaks to the lack of consistent day-in and day-out leadership in the clubhouse and the need for players to step up, no matter how discomfited it might make them.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re not going to be perfect,\u201d said Woo. \u201cBut you\u2019re gonna learn to lead by leading. You\u2019re gonna learn to do something by doing it. It\u2019s an honest process, but that\u2019s what you really need to do, just give it your best effort.\u201c<\/p>\n

The Mariners need a manager who can oversee this \u2018honest process\u2019 and empower team leaders to lead, however imperfectly. The pieces are all there: what\u2019s lacking is the person who can put them all together. As anyone who\u2019s undergone a leadership change will tell you, it\u2019s a fine line to walk between perpetuating the old ways that prompted the leadership change in the first place and importing an identity ham-fistedly. But it\u2019s the job of a manager to get the best out of their people, and will be the job of the next Mariners manager to bottle up the talent currently free-flowing in the clubhouse into a container with an identifiable shape.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Of all the 2026 Mariners\u2019 various problems, one that loomed largest was a clubhouse-wide passivity – a sense…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":935744,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[558],"tags":[64,63,591,410152,85],"class_list":["post-935743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-mlb","tag-seattle-mariners-analysis","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/935743","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=935743"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/935743\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/935744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=935743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=935743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=935743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}