The Seattle Mariners inked outfielder Victor Robles to a two-year contract extension on Monday. This was not huge news, except possibly for Robles. The deal covers the 2025 and 2026 seasons, and gives the Mariners an option for a third season. The framework of the deal entirely suits the preferences of—and the cheapo team-building limitations imposed upon—compulsive dealsmith and meandering moneyballer Jerry Dipoto: Robles, pulled off the scrap heap back in June, has been productive for Seattle at a position of need, and is entering his athletic prime, and will make only a little bit more in total salary over the next two seasons than retired Oriole Chris Davis made in deferred money for this one.
However loath I am to enjoy any of Dipoto's handiwork, as a recently heartbroken Robles sentimentalist I'm going to choose to consider his unexpected landfall a happy development. Before he bombed out of the Nationals organization, Robles was once a top prospect in baseball, and a very, very cool one. Not some four-year LSU guy with an annoying mustache-haircut combo with a swing straight out of a Tom Emanski ad and a drearily optimized relationship to balls and strikes, but a zany, free-styling teenager with a big imagination for baseball and for his own capabilities. As a raw and scrawny 17-year-old playing in the low minors, he developed a reputation for believing perhaps too much in his own speed, for insisting upon grabbing an extra base out of every ball in play, and for swiping bases with hysterical abandon. He made appearances with the big club as a 20-year-old and then again as a 21-year-old, and then stuck in center the following year, which happened to be 2019, the year the Nationals finally won the whole shit.
The stuff that Robles did well in Washington was also, weirdly, the stuff that he did very poorly. He was fast and daring, and so he ran into lots of outs on the base-paths and took wacky routes in the outfield. He developed an infuriating obsession with bunting, in all of its forms, related to his persistent belief that he can outrun anything. In 2022 Robles finished second in the National League in sacrifice hits, which is very much not what you want from a starting outfielder. He was, very often, an infuriating player to have on a team you care about. None of this was helped by a suite of garden-variety soft spots common in a replacement-level major-league player: Robles was vulnerable both to high fastballs and to low breaking pitches, and had trouble distinguishing one from the other. Like a lot of young players, his swing decisions could be baffling: He'd work ahead in the count but then his brain would go See Pitch Hit Pitch mode on some piece-of-crap get-me-over curveball and before anyone knew what had happened he'd thrown a miserable contact swing at a pitcher's pitch and popped out to second base, for the fourth time in a game.
This habit of compulsively putting the ball in play was not aided by a particular and confounding physical limitation: Even today, in his renaissance season, Robles's average bat speed is a grandfatherly, Jeff McNeil-like 69 miles per hour, per Statcast. This surprising deficit in such an explosively athletic player, plus the compulsive bunting, goes some way toward explaining why Robles has never ranked above the first percentile in MLB in average exit velocity in any full or near-full season of his career.
The Nationals, who finally gave up on Robles at the point when injuries made it impossible for him to win a position and keep it, bear some responsibility for all of this. For one thing, notwithstanding a notable run of MVP-caliber position players who've cycled through town, they've been regarded as shitty and backward in their developmental program for most of the last decade. Related: Nationals hitting coach Darnell Coles noticed in 2022 that Robles's batting stance had changed over time, coincidental to Robles going from a guy with doubles power who could sock the occasional dinger to a guy who sincerely struggled to get the ball out of the infield. What kind of time frame are we talking about? How about nine entire damn years. Robles had risen through Washington's farm system and made the big club and started at a premier position in a World Series and then had his career start to erode out from under him, all under the eyes of an organization that considered him its future, and it was in year nine of this progression, under the tutelage of a third hitting coach, before anyone noticed that Robles's hands were in a markedly different position in his batting stance. I am not bitter about this at all!
Perhaps not coincidentally, Robles started the following year batting .299 with a 112 OPS+, before a back injury wiped out three-fourths of his season. He opened the 2024 campaign healthy but in a competition with Jacob Young, a light-hitting Gold Glove-caliber center fielder whose average exit velocity, hilariously, is in the league's second percentile. Robles was obviously already on the back foot—two after all is 100 percent greater than one—and then he was injured again. Things were going pretty poorly, but some of what had been encouraging about Robles's aborted 2023—pitch recognition and plate discipline being the important ones—seemed to have survived into 2024. Robles had two hits and a pair of highlight defensive plays in a win on May 10, and after the game gave his first ever live interview in English. It seemed like things were going to be good, but they super duper were not: Robles was caught stealing the next game, had a sloppy error in the following one, did not register another hit until May 26, was injured in that same game, and five days later was designated for assignment, effectively ending his time in Washington.
I will admit that I had no belief that things would work any better in Seattle. But they have! Robles is hitting .303 with an .850 OPS for the Mariners, and has played reasonably well at all three outfield positions. He's doing good Victor Robles things—he's swiped 12 bags in 12 tries—and he's even shown some power, socking three dingers in 42 games, half as many as he hit in 132 games in his last almost-full season in Washington. On a Mariners team with a dominant pitching staff and a shockingly underpowered offense, even the bad, tragic, comprehensively brain-boomed version of Robles would've been something, a hard-driven used pocket-rocket with tires worth kicking; instead, what Dipoto hauled out of the dumpster out back of Nationals Park is something like what Nats fans spent the better part of a decade imagining, and then mourning. The Mariners have largely arrested their slide down the standings, and today have won four in a row to stay a half-game back of the Astros in the American League West. After an active trade deadline, they've got Robles, Julio Rodríguez, and Randy Arozarena in their outfield; if it's an erratic trio, it is also about as stocked up on coolness as is possible in the sport.
There are probably disillusioned and scoldy Nats fans—blameless, defensible, but also annoying—who will want to say that what finally worked for Robles was the brush with oblivion, something superficially near enough to meritocratic accountability that ultimately saw him out on his ass after years of underperformance. But Robles is a sweetie and baseball is famously hard as hell; you can be better at this sport than most people are or ever will be at anything they ever try for as long as they live, and still be made to look like an absolute clown on a major-league field. Robles was good enough to play up the middle on a World Series-winner, and then lots of things went wrong, several of them entirely out of his control, and now he's someplace else, getting another shot, and making the best of it. This is something to feel good about, even to the extent of ignoring Dipoto's fingerprints all over it.
