External article · KIRO 7 MLB
MLB
The Seattle Mariners have a new manager, turning to 36-year-old Jason Kanzler to lead the club into the 2027 season.
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External article · KIRO 7 MLB
MLB
The Seattle Mariners officially have a new field manager. Mariners President of Baseball Operations Jerry Dipoto announced today that they’ve hired Jason Kanzler.
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External article · KIRO 7 MLB
MLB
Former Seattle Mariners manager Lou Piniella is one of eight finalists on the Baseball Hall of Fame 2027 Contemporary Era Ballot.
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External article · KIRO 7 MLB
MLB
A month after former Mariners manager Dan Wilson announced his decision to step away from the team, the team might be closing in on two finalists for his job.
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External article · KIRO 7 MLB
MLB
Despite a rather disappointing season, there could be some good to come from the Mariners’ 2025-2026 campaign.
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About MLB
How the league is built
Major League Baseball comprises thirty clubs across two leagues, the American and the National, each with three divisions, feeding a playoff bracket that ends in the World Series. The regular season is the longest in major North American sport at well over a hundred and fifty games, played nearly daily, which changes how results should be read: single games carry little information and long stretches carry a great deal. Baseball's structure also produces the largest gap between the best and worst teams' win totals being relatively narrow while the standings still separate cleanly, because the schedule is long enough for small edges to accumulate.
The farm system
Uniquely among the major leagues, each club owns or is affiliated with a chain of minor league teams where players develop for years before reaching the top level. Prospects are ranked, traded and tracked publicly, and a club's minor league depth is treated as an asset comparable to its major league roster. Service time, the accumulated period a player spends on a major league roster, governs when a player becomes eligible for arbitration and free agency, and decisions about when to promote a young player are frequently read as service time management as much as baseball judgment.
No salary cap, and what replaces it
Baseball has no salary cap. Instead a competitive balance tax charges clubs that exceed defined payroll thresholds, with penalties escalating for repeat offenders. The practical result is a far wider spread in team payrolls than in capped leagues, and a persistent argument about competitive balance between large and small market clubs. Revenue sharing redistributes some money between clubs, and how recipients spend it is itself contested. Labor relations in this sport have a long and confrontational history, which is why collective bargaining deadlines are covered closely.
The most measured sport there is
Baseball is built from discrete, repeated confrontations between a pitcher and a batter, which makes it far easier to quantify than continuous sports. It has kept detailed records for longer than any other major sport, and an analytical tradition grew up around those records and eventually moved from outside the game into front offices. Tracking technology now measures pitch movement, batted ball speed and fielder positioning directly. The practical effect is that arguments in baseball tend to be conducted with numbers, and that changes in strategy are visible in the data well before they are visible to a casual viewer.