Hello and welcome to the Road to Wire Fantasy Baseball podcast. Today is Sunday, March 17th. Happy thanks, Patrick Day for all who celebrate, which is pretty much everybody. My name is Chris Crawford. We're going to be talking about the Seattle Mariners today, and I have a very special guest. He's covered the Mariners for a long time. He currently does it for the Seattle Times. My personal opinion, he's the best bait writer out there. He is also my nemesis, but he's okay. Ryan Divish joins the show. Ryan, first of all, thanks so much for joining. We're both golf fans, and I wanted to ask you, do you prefer the majors like we saw this week, or do you prefer the, like, the like where the challenge and guys are playing like

plus one plus two something along those lines um i don't know i kind of like it when they look

like us a little bit everyone i i suck a lot so i'd rather have you know it's funny when they get

you know they miss some shots or mess up it's great too because

like i follow all the uh the golf twitter so when they when somebody drops an f bomb and stuff my buddy

so i like see he's just like us that's totally fair i think it's probably a little bit of a mix i think

it also wasn't helped by the fact that I

think the wind, you know, played a factor in this stuff as well. But I kind of like a mix, like that

minus seven, minus eight type stuff. But it's fun to see the Chambers Bay struggles as well. Let's talk

about those Mariners, though. And let's start with the big thing, Julio Rodriguez.

I think we saw him have a really good second season, but had some ups and downs when he was as hot as could be in August.

He was as good as it gets, but we also saw some downs.

Ryan, if there's anything preventing Julio Rodriguez from becoming that next face of baseball, what is it at this point?

I mean, like I could go like big picture and just say it's his overwhelming sense of responsibility to an organization and its success.

I mean, like he takes it personally when they don't win and when they don't hit.

And if he doesn't hit in a game that they lose by one run, he takes it personally.

And what we saw is a guy trying to remedy the situation of a bad offense and a bad roster all by himself last season and it just didn't

work you know and i think there was some external pressures too of the the the all-star game and the

just kind of the demands of that everybody wanting him to be the ambassador of the city and

and i think he got caught up in that too because like you know he's trying to build his brand

while he is a superstar on level you know he wants to get it to a big level sure you know and so

we saw lots of commercials last year team mobile tops you know all of them have we seen very many hulio commercials this year no T-Mobile, Tops, you know, all of them. Have we seen very many

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