What Jerry Dipoto said about Mariners' struggles, trade targets, top prospects

Everyone needs to be better.

That’s the theme of the season’s first half for the Mariners, and the charge from Jerry Dipoto as his team tries to rally in the second half.

“In general, I think the pitching staff continues to do the things that are required to play into the postseason, and that makes us feel really confident that eventually we will figure ourselves out,” the club’s president of baseball operations said this week. “But you know the rest of our group — our decision-making, our roster composition, it all needs to be better than it's been. And that's for me, that's for the staff, that's for the players to figure out.

“I don't think there's a single one of us who doesn't share in the responsibility of finding the answers to how we got here.”

As they begin the second half Friday against the San Francisco Giants, the Mariners sit one game below .500 at 48-49 and 1.5 games back of the Texas Rangers in the AL West. To date, they have been one of baseball’s most disappointing teams.

And yet, as incredible and incredulous at it might look, FanGraphs’ projections still have Mariners as one of the favorites to win the World Series. Among American League clubs, only the Yankees (10.9%) have a greater chance than the Mariners (8.4%).

“If the season ended today, somehow, magically, we're in the playoffs,” Dipoto said.

Dipoto discussed the state of the club, his trade-deadline wish list and his plans for the Mariners top pitching prospects in a Q&A with The Times this week.

Note: Questions and answers have been edited for brevity and clarity.

Times: How do you assess this team at the break?

Dipoto: Obviously, we're all frustrated by our inconsistencies and the path that we took to get here. We're better than we've played, and I believe there's not a single person that would respond differently if asked. Our pitching has been outstanding. We are at or near the top of the league in starter ERA, bullpen ERA, starter WAR. Our starters have pitched more innings than anybody else. Our relievers have pitched fewer. All in all, our pitching has been as advertised — and maybe even a little bit better than we would have anticipated. Less flowery on the offensive side, or even just the remainder of the team. I don't feel like we ever really got into a good groove. We've really struggled with runners in scoring position, and that's been a season-long issue. But more importantly, over the last 30 days, we've just struggled in general, and that has manifested in not just the struggle to score runs, but to play clean baseball. We have generally not played a clean game; we've not played the tight, buttoned-up, make-the-plays defense that we ordinarily do. We have not been particularly good on the bases. We have just not played like the Mariners play, and some of that is pressing. When you're up and down the way we've been for three months now, you press. Everybody's looking to find the right button to get the group into a groove. I can point to some highlights, and then obviously there have been some real lowlights.

Times: Has the team’s performance in the first half affected your thinking going forward?

Dipoto: Not at all. We have one of the most talented teams in the league, and I think if you polled others around the league you’d get a similar answer. We don't think we're the ’27 Yankees reincarnated, but we do feel like we are a very talented team with a very deep pitching staff and the ability to go play impact offense. We've been able to weather the storm (of injuries), and coming out of the break we’re very hopeful that Julio Rodríguez (concussion) and Brendan Donovan (groin) will be back out there, and that we get a cleaner, well-rested, more focused group than the one that went into the break. Because that's going to be required.

Times: The trade deadline has been an important acquisition phase for you the past five years. How are you approaching the deadline this time around?

Dipoto: We’re definitely going to look to help the bullpen. They've been operating short for quite a while now. I believe we're in the top five in MLB in bullpen ERA, and that is with Gabe Speier being down for a few weeks; Matt Brash and Cooper Criswell have been down for much longer. Those are some of our premium leverage guys. Ideally, we'd love to add an arm to that group. But I don't know what's going to be available on the market, and it's still a slow-to-develop market because so many teams are within a hair's breadth of a playoff spot. Obviously, we want to solve the offensive question — and I would be understating our overall offensive struggle by just focusing on how poorly we played offense against left-hand pitching. At some point we just have to be better offensively against all pitching. We do have a clear flaw for facing left-handed pitching, and that's something we'd like to resolve, although there are no really clear and obvious places we can fit those players on our roster, and there are no clear and obvious players who are available who can upgrade us in that way. The best players we can acquire are the players we have. We just need them to do the things that they have historically done.

Times: Over the past few years, you have balked at the idea of trading from your starting rotation. Has there been a shift in your thinking in that regard because of the quality of depth in your six-man rotation — and the prospects who appear ready to help you, too?

Dipoto: The fact that we've had to creatively navigate through the first half of the season [with the piggyback plan] — it's an amazing first-world problem to have, that you're overbooked with starting pitchers. But since we started the first Luis Castillo-Bryce Miller combo, ‘Louie’ got himself on track and since that time he's been pretty damn good. And Bryce has been spectacular. You cannot have expected the first half that Emerson Hancock delivered, and he has remained as solid an innings-churner as you can imagine. Logan Gilbert has had his normal Logan run, and this might be an even slightly better version of Logan Gilbert than we’ve seen in the past. And with Bryan Woo and George Kirby, it’s a pretty awesome group — and we also happen to have two of the better pitching prospects in baseball … It’s a comforting thing to have that kind of depth. But as we all know, it can evaporate in a minute, and you’d be loathe to not recognize that. Like we do in every other trade market, we go in open-minded for the various ways that we can help our team improve. In some ways, it would be unusual at this time of the year for a team that views itself as a contender, which we do, to trade from the ‘goodness’ of its major league roster to answer other problems, but I can't say that that's out of the question for us.

Times: What are your short-term plans for top pitching prospects Kade Anderson and Ryan Sloan?

Dipoto: They'll both head back to Arkansas and step back into their normal routines. They're having spectacular seasons, and they are generally regarded as guys who are either ready or near-ready for the big leagues. But, again, we have six starting pitchers, and we are not interested in the idea of sabotaging the development of either of those young pitchers by shortening up their development. Kade is in his first full professional season. For Ryan, this will be the highest volume of innings he'll have developed. But we’ve talked about this internally, and we will get to a point on our schedule where we simply focus on: Who are our 13 best pitchers and how can they contribute to getting us to the end of the road in October? And whether that begins in August or September, those are conversations we're having.

Times: Are there hard innings limits for Anderson and Sloan this season?

Dipoto: We've been very conservative, making sure that there were innings left for both of them to contribute in the event that we needed help in the big leagues as a starting pitcher or (if) we felt like either or both could make an impact for us in other ways. And they're on target to do that. We would love to see Kade get to the 130-140 range. It might be a slightly lower number for Ryan. We were so conservative with his innings at the start that he’s going to be in great shape when we get there.