Seattle Mariners President of Baseball Operations Jerry Dipoto made his team's strategy very clear on Day 1 of the General Manager's meetings in Arizona.
Add high-contact hitters:
You can see Dipoto's comments below, which were put to video by Ryan Divish of the Seattle Times:
Dipoto said that he feels the Mariners have a good offensive team that sometimes struggles with contact, so his goal is to fix that this offseason. The Mariners struck out the second-most times in baseball last year. Only the Twins struck out more.
The desire to add contact could have played in a role in not extending a qualifying offer to slugger Teoscar Hernandez, who now hits the free agent market.
MLBTradeRumors put out a transcription of that thought process:
“Despite the fact he didn’t have a great start to his season, he put up his numbers and he contributed down the stretch as much as any player we had. But we felt like this was an opportunity to kind of take a new look at the way our team is built. If there was a reason why we were sitting home in the postseason, we felt like it was probably the inability to consistently make contact.”
Despite striking out 211 times this season, Hernandez did post a 26 home run season and drove in 93, so replacing him will not be easy to do.
Dipoto also mentioned that the team would like to add a right-handed hitter. Perhaps Whit Merrifield could be a fit since they have needs at second base. Lourdes Gurriel Jr. is also a possibility in the outfield.
The Mariners went 88-74 and missed the playoffs by one game.
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