What Has to Happen? (Also, Cactus League Game 4: Mariners at Diamondbacks)

Right now, the M’s are projected for 76 wins by Clay Davenport, 80 by Fangraphs, and 83 by Baseball Prospectus. Somewhere in that range that’s on the edge of the playoff hunt, now that each league gets six spots, but probably outside of it. There are too many teams that look a bit better, and of course the projections are looking at the M’s 2021 run differential a lot more than their 2021 record. The M’s seem done with major acquisitions, too. Sure, they’ve brought in an entire minor league team’s worth of depth pieces on minor league contracts – and just today, they added Billy Hamilton and Andrew Albers – but not much is going to change the math as far as the projections go. But the M’s, and probably many of you, can and probably should disagree with the assessment that’s shared by most of the projections, too. The projections last year never envisaged 90 wins, so it’s a fair point. What I’d like to do here is to try to sketch out what a team with wild card aspirations would look like given the M’s roster: where, specifically, would the improvements come from?

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