Take a look inside the Mariners offseason with GM Justin Hollander

SEATTLE — It's hard to believe it was just over four months ago that the 2023 Major League Baseball regular season ended. A season that saw a summer surge on the heels of the MLB All-Star Game in Seattle, and ultimately the Mariners fell just one game short of the postseason.

One of 162.

That was followed by an end-of-season press conference that was not well-received by fans.

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Fast forward from the first few days of October to the first few days of February and things are drastically different.

The Mariners front office got to work. With the caveat that any offseason move can't be ruled a win or otherwise until the next season plays out, the Mariners made the moves they absolutely had to on the heels of that 2023 disappointment.

As of this writing, with potentially more to come, the Mariners have made trades with nine different MLB clubs this offseason. In other words, the M's have made trades with 30% of the league.

A staggering statistic, one borne out of identifying what went wrong in 2023 and wanting to avoid that heartbreak once again.

Earlier this week, I caught up with M's General Manager Justin Hollander. As spring training is a week away, the Mariners are still active but certainly can take a look back at the major moves they've made over the last three months since the World Series ended.

"I share their disappointment — share and then some," Hollander said when asked about his message to the Mariners faithful. "I think nobody's more disappointed than our players, our coaches, our front office people, Jerry (Dipoto), myself, ownership. When we go to bed at night and realize we're one game short at the end of a 162-game season, that's a hard pill to swallow. It's really hard to accept because we feel we left a lot on the table in terms of front office stuff we could and should have done to make our team better and in terms of just basic execution and things that we didn't get done.

"We worked very hard this offseason to build ourselves a bigger safety net to make sure we weren't counting on just everything going right, and if it didn't, we would come up short again. I think it's really important that we honor the talent that existed on this club by making this team better and getting us back to where we belong, where we were in 2022, which is a playoff team."

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That statement says so much about Hollander's leadership, and when posted on social media, it was met with positive reviews by many Mariners fans. It's something they wanted to hear and it was confirmation of something they had hoped was happening behind the scenes.

The truth is, the front office really did endure the same heartbreak as the loyal fans. Hollander, for example, joined the franchise in 2018, rising to general manager in 2022. He and Dipoto, along with manager Scott Servais, have built something here. Taking a franchise that was down and out and turning it into a team that has the necessary talent in the right places to be a contender for years to come.

Now, that statement only goes so far if 2024 doesn't go as hoped, but the building of the roster with the rise of young stars having the Mariners on the cusp of something is why this offseason was so critical.

"There's a lot of gratification in watching those young players, those kids, grow up and become All-Stars, MVP candidates, and now we need to surround them with other players who match their talent level and can take us where we want to go, which is winning a World Series," Hollander said.

Hollander says the team needed to be more consistent offensively, instead of scoring a plethora of runs one night then seeing production dry up the next. The formula for that was no secret, they had to cut down on strikeouts and put the ball in play more consistently. To that end, the team traded Eugenio Suarez and did not re-sign Teoscar Hernández. In total, the Mariners have two new outfielders — one marks a homecoming after a season away in Mitch Haniger — a new second baseman, third baseman and designated hitter.

That's five new faces to the every-day lineup and perhaps even more depth at key positions.

Now you start to see the approach — overhaul, even.

The moves to surround those returning stars like the great Julio Rodriguez and Cal Raleigh, among others, were plenty, and genuinely did overhaul the lineup while keeping the young and talented pitching rotation intact. That's a huge part of this, considering just about every MLB team wanted to get their hands on the Mariners' World Series-caliber pitching staff.

"Whenever you make a call to someone else about any player, the immediate first question is, 'We'd like to talk to you about your rotation,'" Hollander said. "So you have to stiff arm them a lot. You have to break tackles, to use a football analogy, a lot. So it takes a while to wind through what you have that other people desire, which is really good, young pitching that's controllable for a long time.

"We just really believe in that group of players so much that — Jerry's talked about this, I've talked about this — leaning into our strength was important this offseason. We feel like we've done that while making our offense substantially better."

That was no easy task. Yet, the Mariners kept their rotation from 2023 in place. Yes, they traded Robbie Ray and Marco Gonzales, but they were injured during the season, leaving the rotation to eventually fill out with Bryce Miller and Bryan Woo behind the mainstays Luis Castillo, George Kirby and Logan Gilbert.

It's also no easy task to make any given trade. Hollander said it can take "hundreds" of calls and text messages depending on the deal. When the Mariners traded for second baseman Jorge Polanco, it was the culmination of a process the Mariners were working on the entire offseason. Hollander said it was "gratifying" when those efforts can finally get across the finish line.

We just kept asking over and over and over again, and we simply refused to relent on the idea that a simple no would suffice," Hollander said. "In terms of something that we're really excited about, or a series of moves we're really excited about, I feel like the last two things we've done, the Jorge Polanco trade and also the addition of Gregory Santos last week, two really gratifying moves for our front office. It's two things we sort of poked at all offseason.

So the 2024 MLB season is fewer than 50 days away. We'll find out soon enough how this story ends. But one undeniable fact is the effort by Hollander and Dipoto. The identification of what perhaps held this team back from a repeat playoff bid and directly tackling it, to use another football cliché.

There are always uncontrollable factors like injuries and perhaps there's another free agent signing or trade on the way. But as we gear up to watch again, it's hard not to be excited with so many new faces to potentially change fortunes.

After all, while it was utter disappointment, the team only missed the postseason by one game. It would appear on paper they've improved by a lot more than that.

So we appreciate the open and candid conversation with Hollander, and like the GM, we can't wait to see how the new-look team plays out with perhaps something special in store for 2024.