Are the Mariners Vindicating Jerry Dipoto's "54 Percent" Strategy?

A year after I dinged Seattle for not aiming higher, the Mariners are up 2-0 in the ALCS — a real-life case study in how seemingly modest goals can become something more in an expanded-playoff era.

Cal Raleigh and Julio Rodriguez of the Seattle Mariners celebrate after Raleigh’s solo home run in the sixth inning of Game 1 of the American League Championship Series against the Toronto Blue Jays on October 12, 2025. (Daniel Shirey/MLB Photos via Getty Images)

Up 2-0 on the Toronto Blue Jays in the American League Championship Series, the Seattle Mariners are currently closer than they’ve ever come before to making a World Series. Literally so — here are all of their ALCS appearances in franchise history, ordered by their peak series win probability according to Baseball-Reference’s charts:

While this team has found plenty of ways to not visit the Fall Classic — even when they had Ken Griffey Jr., Randy Johnson and Alex Rodriguez (among other Hall of Famers) in the ‘90s, or when Ichiro led them to the winningest season in MLB history in 2001 — it would take an impressive Toronto comeback to now avert Seattle from making its first-ever World Series trip.

This, in turn, had me thinking about just what the Mariners are doing here, likely playing for a championship next week. It was only a year ago when they had opened the season below .500 through their first 139 games before a too-little, too-late 16-10 September record brought them to 85 wins on the year, but left them 1 game short of the playoffs. That type of season has been kind of a Seattle specialty, as no team since the 1994 strike has more seasons with 85+ wins while also missing the playoffs than the Mariners’ 11 — and it’s not even close:

A lot of that was bad luck, to be sure. Back in 2016, I edited this Rob Arthur story at FiveThirtyEight comparing each team’s actual playoff appearances since the last expansion (1998) to what we would expect from their yearly win totals — and, no surprise, the Mariners were the unluckiest team in baseball during that span at catching the breaks needed to turn borderline playoff bids into sure things.

(And just to put a fine point on it, they would go on to rack up five more 85+ win/playoff-less seasons after that article ran, which by itself would have ranked Top 5 in our chart above.)

After all, you don’t run up a two-decade playoff drought without a ton of bad fortune. But the thing that seemed particularly vexing about the Mariners’ plight is that some of it seemed to come by design.