Josh Naylor had surgery on his right wrist to repair the triangular fibrocartilage complex. He had been dealing with the problem since roughly June. He played 152 games and never spent a day on the injured list.
Seattle announced the procedure two days after it happened, which is how teams handle news they would rather not lead with.
The Numbers Collapsed and Now There Is an Explanation
Naylor’s WAR fell from 3.2 to 0.6. His wRC+ dropped from 128 to 95. He slugged .350, a career low and 112 points off his previous mark. He hit 10 home runs, also a career low, and none after August 8.
His RBI total went from 108 in 2024 to 57 this year. With runners in scoring position he posted a .616 OPS, which for a middle-of-the-order first baseman is close to unusable.
A wrist injury explains all of it. Wrist problems do not take away a hitter’s eye or his legs, they take away his ability to drive the ball, which is precisely the pattern in that stat line.
He Refused to Use It as an Excuse
“I don’t really like using that as an excuse because I love to play baseball, whether I’m hurt or not,” Naylor said. He went further: “I’ll take full blame for it.”
That is admirable and it is also the problem. He had played through shoulder discomfort in the 2025 postseason too. A player who never asks out is valuable right up until the point where he costs his team four months of production that a two-week IL stint might have salvaged.
Somebody in that organization should have taken the decision out of his hands in July. Instead Seattle got 152 games of a compromised hitter in a lineup that needed him.
What He Still Did
Here is the strange part of the season. Naylor stole 30 bases. He is the first first baseman to reach 30 in consecutive seasons since George Sisler did it from 1920 to 1922.
So the legs were fine. The wrist was not. That is a player contributing the only way his body allowed.
Naylor has four years left on the richest free-agent contract Jerry Dipoto has given a position player, and he was acquired from Arizona at the 2025 deadline. Seattle needs the 2024 version of him back.
The encouraging read is that this was fixable and now it is fixed. A healthy wrist and a normal spring should return a hitter who was 28 percent better than league average two years ago. The Mariners are counting on it.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.