2026 Team Previews: Seattle Mariners
A detailed fantasy baseball oriented team preview of the 2026 Seattle Mariners
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Intro
Life is pretty good on the Seattle sports scene these days. The Seahawks have made another Super Bowl and the Mariners dethroned the Astros last year and figure to be the favorite to do it again in 2026. They’ve built up one of the most impressive pitching staffs in the league, and a bonkers season from Cal Raleigh had the M’s faithful thinking about another World Series run.
It didn’t happen, but you can’t complain about how the season went and where the franchise is at right now. It should be another fun year of baseball for the northwestern-most club in the league.
And Starbucks coffee is honestly pretty good. I have to hand them that.
Let’s break down the 2026 Mariners, there are a lot of players to know.
Hitters
Julio Rodriguez
Age: 25
Pos: OF
We are about 2,600 plate appearances into Julio’s career, and it’s been an impressive one:
There was a slight power outage there in 2024, but he bounced right back up to 32 homers with a .477 SLG. He hasn’t been an OPS beast in his career; that much is true. He’s aggressive at the plate, which keeps the walks down. But he’s been a top 20 fantasy hitter (easily) in every year of his career. Last year, he finished #7 on my hitter player rater in standard roto (where the lower OBP doesn’t hurt):
So he’s an easy first-rounder again this year.
fScores:
EV Percentiles:
Expected stats:
The plate discipline is his only flaw. The 55% Swing% is high, and it means that he’ll have a high chase rate (36%) with it. So there’s some poor contact led on by swinging at bad pitches, and without a great contact rate (80.6% Zone Contact%), he’ll always be a guy who goes down on strikes a good bit.
But HR+SB+AVG, he’s great. He’s probably not going to be a .290+ hitter with the strikeouts, but the hard contact and strong launch angle profile gets him pretty comfortably in the “good” range.
For OBP leagues, you dock him a bit, but it’s tough rank him outside of the top dozen this year.
Projection
661 PA, 90 R, 28 HR, 87 RBI, 20 SB, .263/.320/.460
Ranking
Cal Raleigh
Age: 29
Pos: C
Sometimes, everything goes right. That’s what happened for Raleigh in 2025. Everything went his way besides a World Series ring, I guess. Oh, and he didn’t win the MVP award. So I guess it could have gone better.
But he probably had the single greatest season for a catcher in MLB history.
How often do you see a guy add 150 points to their slugging percentage? How often do you hit 26 more homers than you did the previous year when the previous year had 153 games played? None of it makes a ton of sense.
The plate discipline stuff didn’t look much different than in 2024:
But he became the king of air pull, boosting that up to 31.6% and putting up a crazy, crazy low 25.8% GB%.
Those are insane numbers, but not ones you figure he’ll be able to repeat.
He air pulled 130 balls by the way I calculate it. That was second-most in the league (JRam at 136), and well ahead of the rest of #3 (PCA at 115).
The batted ball profile is absurd:
He was right there with Judge in terms of damage done on contact. But there are lot of strikeouts and plenty of regression on most of these elite batted ball marks. You just can’t sustain a lot of what Raleigh did last year.
He’ll probably come back into the 40s in homers, but he has a long, long ways to fall before he wouldn’t be the #1 catcher in fantasy leagues. He’s closer to #2 in standard roto leagues, where you have to take on a pretty poor batting average. The extra ABs Raleigh gets are great for R+HR+RBI, but they do hurt even more when he goes out there with his sub-250 batting average. And he has two seasons under .225 now. That’s a problem we shouldn’t gloss over for leagues where batting average is 20% of the game.
Projection
624 PA, 90 R, 40 HR, 96 RBI, 11 SB, .241/.333/.515
Ranking
To me, he’s pretty close to a Pete Alonso-type pick, but the catcher eligibility obviously makes him a whole lot more valuable. He’s my catcher #1, of course, but I don’t think I’m willing to use a top 40 pick on him. So I probably won’t end up with any Raleigh this year.
Josh Naylor
Age: 28
Pos: 1B
Naylor has played for three teams in two years, but he’s settled in in Seattle now after getting the big contract from them. He certainly became a fan favorite there, and he had another quite good season as a hitter:
The 30 steals tripled his previous career best, he got the strikeout rate back down below 14%, and hit for a big .295 average. He’s been a solid contributor with the bat for most of his career. Notably, we’ve only seen one true “plus power” season from him, that 2024 year with the 31 bombs. We didn’t buy into that last year, and I think my projection was pretty right on.
And the reason for that is that the raw power marks haven’t been awesome. His EV90 is under 105, and he hits a good number of ground balls. The barrel rate was just 6.7% last season.
With the elite strikeout rate and lower walk rate, he’s getting a ton of balls in play. So that will turn into some dingers, but I think that 32 will prove to be his career high, and Seattle isn’t a great place to hit. For what it’s worth, he was absolutely incredible in Seattle last year (1.007 OPS in 100 PA).
But I’m not buying the steals. I think that was a one-time thing. He realized he could time up some pitchers. Nobody was really expecting him to run, and he was playing for a new contract. So I would be back in the 10-15 steals expectation for him, which knocks a significant amount of his fantasy value off.
Projection
620 PA, 77 R, 21 HR, 84 RBI, 11 SB, .262/.331/.435
I mean, that’s not a great projection! That makes him the #9 option at 1B. So I wouldn’t be looking to draft Naylor. I’ll just treat him as someone I’m fine with if he falls to me when I need a safe option at first.
Ranking
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