The Mariners surprised the baseball world today with the news of a record-breaking extension for prospect Colt Emerson. While much of the extension chatter has focused on the Mariners’ pitching core, the Mariners instead locked down the 20-year-old shortstop who has steadily climbed prospect lists since his draft year in 2022, when the Mariners took him 22nd overall out of John Glenn High School in East Concord, Ohio.
“[Colt] has run up the food chain so quickly because of his performance, maturity, work habits, etc.,” said Mariners President of Baseball Operations Jerry Dipoto. “He is going to be a very young major league debut player and as such was trending toward being a very young major league free agent, and it was a priority for us to make sure that we kept him here as a part of this for longer.”
Emerson had a strong spring, but it wasn’t necessarily his performance on the field that impressed Dipoto the most. “The way he integrated with the other players and just how easily he fits,” is what Dipoto described as Emerson’s standout quality from the spring. “Listening to him talk in the cage with Rob Refsnyder, Brendan Donovan, the ease with which he was operating with guys who have been in the league a long time.”
This is something I saw firsthand at spring training; Emerson was hard to pin down to talk to, simply because he was always either participating in a drill, or deep in conversation with one of his teammates. He, Donovan, Naylor and Refsnyder were regular fixtures in the team’s newly-revamped batting cages.
Even more impressive is Colt Emerson the person: watching him do everything from encouraging a teammate to picking up an errant piece of trash in the batting cage and tossing it in the proper receptacle to the way he treated everyone, from teammates to media to complex staff, with equal measures of respect.
“You have to be a good player to garner this type of interest, this type of contract, but you also have to be the person at at 20 years old, you can say, over the course of the next nine years, we trust you to go do this. And if you’ve spent any time around Colt, you know that he checks every one of those boxes. He’s such a humble, mature, well-thought-out human being…Just as much as we think he’s an impact player, we think he’s an impact person.”
From the team’s perspective, locking down Emerson to an extension was a no-brainer. From a roster construction perspective, it’s a little trickier.
“We have no hard date [for his debut],” said Dipoto. “But I suspect he will be a big leaguer sooner than later, and he will contribute heavily to this season. And I thought that was the case before we signed him – this signing was more about the long term, than it is about the season, how it all fits, especially with Leo [Rivas] being the only one who hits from the right side.”
J.P. Crawford, Brendan Donovan, Colt Emerson, Cole Young – all hit from the left side. Leo Rivas is a switch hitter, meaning there’s no true righty in the infield mix other than Ryan Bliss. Dipoto says the team has an advantage, though, in the positional versatility for Brendan Donovan, as well as Colt Emerson, who is equally comfortable at either shortstop or third base; they just have to be “creative” in figuring out how to leverage it.
“We’re in no rush. We’re going to let Colt to continue to get his feet on the ground and do the things he’s been doing in his development. He’ll play in Tacoma…he’ll continue to get reps at third base, and we will continue to develop him the same way we always have, which is to give him exposure. Because when he gets to the big leagues, it’s no slam-dunk where he’ll be playing.”
It does sound like, for now, third base is the likelier option, at least as long as J.P. Crawford is healthy. Dipoto reasserted that after J.P. Crawford plays tonight and tomorrow in Tacoma “he’s our shortstop” [LL community, drink the beverage of your choice] when the team gets to Anaheim.
“That was always our plan,” affirmed Dipoto. “That’s why you saw Colt so frequently at third base in the spring. We were preparing for that. And third base came pretty easily for Colt.”
The left-handedness, unfortunately, is non-negotiable. It’s not the defense that will keep Emerson in Triple-A; the thing that Dipoto and the Mariners are looking for from Emerson in Tacoma is reps in the box.
“Upper-level pitching in general is something he hasn’t had…not a huge volume for him,” said Dipoto. “He’s played fifty-ish games above A-ball. But it’s the left-handed pitching and the exposure to it, you don’t get a lot of exposure to lefties with breaking balls that move away from you in rural Ohio as a high schooler.”
Emerson had mostly neutral splits against lefties and righties last year, but he did struggle with the more advanced lefties this spring, with an OPS of just .489 – under half of his OPS against righties. His challenge in Tacoma will be to maintain his positional flexibility while gaining experience against more seasoned pitching. It doesn’t sound like it will be a particularly difficult thing for the uber-learner Emerson to check off, especially after a self-directed swing change that’s helped him unlock more power while not sacrificing any of this plate discipline.
Getting this deal done required trust on both sides: the Mariners’ trust in their scouting and development of Emerson has been evident from the jump, and his steady progress up the minor-league ladder and into the lists of top prospects in the game has rewarded the team’s early faith in him. But Emerson, too, had to trust the organization that he was essentially signing away his 20s to, as a place where the ultra-competitive Emerson can win and be supported by a core built for sustained success.
“I think Colt always envisioned himself as a Mariner,” said Dipoto. “From the day he entered the organization, he has a vision for what it’s going to look like here. He is a championship type player with a championship mentality, and when we talk about our team, he always sees himself in it…
He finishes every conversation, ‘we’re gonna win a lot of games’. ”
