The Seattle Mariners got the MLB offseason rolling on Sunday.
The first big salvo has been fired out of the Pacific Northwest with a star signed to a new five-year deal.
That’s Josh Naylor, of course, the slugging and surprisingly base-stealing first baseman.
The Mariners got Naylor before the trade deadline from the Arizona Diamondbacks. He quickly endeared himself to Seattle. And now he’s coming back.
ESPN gave the signing an A-minus grade.
“He’s not a star — 3.1 WAR in 2025 was a career high — but he’s a safe, predictable player to bank on for the next few years,” ESPN’s David Schoenfield wrote on Monday. “This deal runs through his age-33 season, so maybe there’s some risk at the end of the contract, but for a team with World Series aspirations in 2026, the Mariners needed to bring Naylor back. The front office will be happy with this signing and so will Mariners fans.”
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Naylor is the rare high-contact slugger. He hits pitches in and out of the strike zone and hits them hard.
There’s no telling if he’ll keep his high-IQ stolen bases going in the years to come, but if he does, it’s a nice bonus.
The salary doesn’t appear to have been reported yet, but the Mariners likely got a deal done that will make both sides quite happy.
Now it’s up to Seattle to figure out what to do with its other major free agents, Eugenio Suarez and Jorge Polanco.
But securing Naylor for the next half-decade is a major win.
Billy Heyen is a freelance writer with The Sporting News. He is a 2019 graduate of Syracuse University who has written about many sports and fantasy sports for The Sporting News. Sports reporting work has also appeared in a number of newspapers, including the Sandusky Register and Rochester Democrat & Chronicle