It isn’t as easy to rag on Jerry Dipoto as it used to be. The Seattle Mariners president of baseball operations is indeed in the middle of a victory lap after being named by Baseball America as the Executive of the Year for 2025, and nobody can say he didn’t earn it.

However, the only question that ever matters for any front office head is, “What’s next?” And Mariners fans have never felt more urgent in asking it than right now, in the wake of a season that ended eight outs short of the franchise’s first World Series. The gloves should be off, and it seemed not too long ago like they were.

Jerry Dipoto tells Mariners fans exactly what they don’t want to hear at Winter Meetings

On the second day of the Winter Meetings, though, Dipoto sounded more like a guy who’s calm, cool, collected and certainly in no rush. As per Ryan Divish and Adam Jude of The Seattle Times, he did speak of wanting another bat and another arm for the bullpen, but also preached patience:

“Things will start to move. It always does And I think the good thing for us is we just have fewer needs than we’ve had in recent years. And the fact that we were able to fill what was our biggest hole [re-signing Josh Naylor] and then a need that we thought was pretty crucial in the bullpen [trading for Jose Ferrer]. We filled those roles. Now we can be a little bit more patient. Let it come to us.”

Jerry Dipoto

The part about having fewer needs to fill rings true, particularly after the club’s $92.5 million deal with Josh Naylor and controversial, yet promising trade for Jose A. Ferrer. And if the part about being patient is only meant to put pressure on Jorge Polanco amid his free agency, we wouldn’t be surprised.

More broadly, though, this feels like exactly the wrong time to be patient. Nobody is waiting on the market to move anymore. It’s gone 0-to-60, with back-to-back deals for Kyle Schwarber and Edwin Díaz on Tuesday promising to open the floodgates for further action on both the free-agent and trade markets.

Polanco in particular has plenty of suitors, including a couple of big-market clubs (i.e., Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees) and a small-market club (i.e., Pittsburgh Pirates) that could be uniquely desperate for him. Ketel Marte remains the best possible fallback option, and Jon Heyman of the New York Post says his market is also heating up:

Because a crowd also seems to be gathering around Brandon Lowe, he may be another candidate to come off the board soon. And as such, the Mariners sticking to a patient approach could have the disastrous result of going 0-for-3 in pursuits of power bats that could fill holes at second base and DH.

We’re catastrophizing, of course, and the good news in the backdrop of all this is that Brendan Donovan could be available for a while. As Divish and Jude note in their report, the St. Louis Cardinals are “methodically evaluating” other teams’ farm systems as they seek a fair offer for the All-Star.

Even still, impatience is a perfectly valid emotion for Mariners fans to have right now. And that’s just in the context of the moment, with the other reality being that the Mariners shouldn’t feel like they need to wait for great deals to come to them.

They have a deep farm system and more financial flexibility than in years past, so ESPN’s Jeff Passan is absolutely right that “big game hunting” for the purpose of supercharging a 2026 World Series run should be the goal. Marte should be in play, and we just can’t quit the Tarik Skubal idea either.

If Dipoto delivers, then all this whining will age terribly and he’ll have put a fresh shine on what has been a remarkable 12 months. If he doesn’t, the fact that he warned everyone won’t make it hurt less.