Will Teo return to Mariners next year?

This story was excerpted from Daniel Kramer’s Mariners Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

SEATTLE — Teoscar Hernández and the Mariners showed each other some love last week on social media, with the slugging outfielder sending out a “thank you” message to Seattle and its fans on Instagram last Thursday and the club wishing him a happy 31st birthday on Sunday.

It’s too early to decipher if a reunion is in the cards — he won’t officially become a free agent until after the World Series, and the Mariners can’t negotiate with him until then anyway — but those messages still represented gestures of appreciation for one another.

“This is a special group that I love here,” Hernández said on the final day of the season. “I love everybody here. I love the fans, the city and everything. But I think right now, it’s not in my hands.”

Hernández is as likely a candidate as any big leaguer to receive a qualifying offer this winter, but given the dearth of available hitters on this year’s free-agent market, it seems unlikely that he’d accept it. That said, here’s a look at his potential fit in Seattle in 2024.

If September’s final stretch showed, the Mariners needed significant offensive reinforcements — and that was with Hernández in the lineup. Subtracting a run producer that ranked third on the team with 26 homers would create even more needs to bolster a group whose .413 slugging percentage ranked 16th.

From a consistency standpoint, Hernández maybe didn’t live up to the lofty expectations coming over from Toronto last offseason. He had a .665 OPS through May but was among MLB’s hottest hitters in June (.949 OPS) and August (1.050 OPS). When Mariners GM Justin Hollander said his goodbye to Hernández, he told the right fielder, “you carried us for a six-week stretch this summer.”

“For me, I learned through my career that it’s not always going to be up,” Hernández said. “There are going to be some ups and downs. As a player, you try to minimize the downs and try to keep the good times [going].”

His susceptibility to streaky stretches is actually a trait that the front office might prefer to avoid, especially with a lineup that had four players among MLB’s 30 highest strikeout rates in 2023 — Hernández highest among them. Moreover, Hernández ranked in the 13th percentile in chase rate and third in whiff rate, per Statcast, which would counteract what seems to be a pointed objective in 2024 to put more balls in play.

Moreover, his home and road splits were stark, with a slash line of .217/.263/.380 (.643 OPS) at T-Mobile Park and .295/.344/.486 (.830 OPS) in away games. Overall, the Mariners scored more runs on the road (4.95 per game) than at home (4.68), but still, investing a long-term deal in a player who struggled mightily in his home environment is a risk. 

“Unfortunately for me, in the beginning it was nothing close [to] what I wanted it to be,” Hernández said. “But like I say, it’s baseball. I trust myself, and I know at some point it was going to change, and thankfully it [did] after the All-Star break and I helped the team during that time.”

The Mariners will likely make Hernández a qualifying offer — a one-year deal worth an expected $20.5 million — which he will likely decline, given his value on the open market. If so, the Mariners would receive Draft pick compensation if he signs elsewhere, a commodity this front office covets greatly. Even so, that wouldn’t preclude the Mariners and Hernández from exploring a longer-term deal. 

The path to a reunion is complicated, but not out of the picture.

“It’s something new. I don’t know what to expect,” Hernández said of free agency. “But I’m going to try and enjoy it. … Now that I’m a free agent, I’m trying to go somewhere where I feel comfortable and where my family feels comfortable. I’m the player, but this is not only about me. I have to think about my family, my kids.”