The Mariners learned a valuable lesson with their disastrous dice-roll on Evan White’s contract
Last Week Tuesday quietly marked a milestone that might sting a little for Seattle Mariners fans: six years have passed since the club signed Evan White to a six-year, $24 million extension before he ever appeared in a major league game. What seemed like an ambitious investment on November 25, 2019 has since aged into one of the most notorious gambles in franchise history.
Seattle had just wrapped up a 94-loss slog, so the early extension was both a bold bet on White and a signal to the fanbase that the front office was committed to the future. White was only the fourth player in MLB history to receive a long-term deal before his debut, and the Mariners framed it as a cornerstone move — an early peek at what their emergent pipeline would eventually produce.
He was one of several high-profile prospects at the time, grouped alongside the likes of Jarred Kelenic, Julio Rodríguez, Logan Gilbert, George Kirby, and Cal Raleigh. If anything, the Mariners may have viewed White as the safest of the bunch. His glove projected to be elite from day one, and he had just finished a solid year at Double-A Arkansas, reaching base at a .350 clip with 18 home runs across 92 games.
What happened after that, however, could not be glossed over. White did win a Gold Glove in his rookie season, but it came during the shortened 2020 campaign — and the defensive hardware couldn’t distract from his offensive struggles. He hit just .176/.252/.346 with a staggering strikeout rate north of 40 percent. Injuries completely derailed whatever momentum he might have recaptured. Hip and core problems required multiple surgeries and limited him to only 66 total games across the four seasons that followed. After a brief stint in the Angels’ system in 2024, he did not play at all in 2025, the final year of that original extension.
In the end, the contract proved to be a total miss, falling in line with the track record of early-career extensions given to players who haven’t debuted. Across similar pre-debut deals — including those for Jackson Chourio, Luis Robert Jr., Eloy Jiménez, Colt Keith, Scott Kingery, and Jon Singleton — only Chourio’s contract has looked like a true win. His 20-20 seasons and strong rWAR returns have made him the lone success story in what is otherwise a long list of clubs regretting the gamble. White’s deal simply blended into the pattern.
It nearly became worse for Seattle. Even after White’s early struggles, the Mariners tried to strike a pre-debut deal with Kelenic, an effort that collapsed publicly and eventually looked like a blessing in disguise. The team ultimately cut its losses with both players in December 2023, offloading White and Kelenic to the Braves in what amounted to a salary-shedding move. From that standpoint, the Mariners avoided sinking even more resources into extensions that would not have paid off.
While the saga paints an easy picture of organizational missteps — the kind that would make for compelling sports-drama television — it also underscores a point the Mariners appear to have genuinely absorbed: there is no need to pay players like stars before they’ve proven they are stars. The club accelerated Julio Rodríguez to the big leagues in 2022 but waited until he produced at an elite level before giving him a massive yet performance-friendly contract. They waited even longer with Raleigh, whose $105 million extension looks incredibly team-friendly after his 60-homer explosion.
Still, the Mariners will soon need to apply that lesson again. A wave of top prospects is approaching the majors, many projected to debut in 2026. Among them is Colt Emerson, a rising star who could push for a roster spot as soon as Opening Day. Players of that caliber are precisely the types who attract early-contract consideration. And while no one in the organization is rooting against Emerson or any other prospect, Seattle would be wise to remember what went wrong last time: patience is more valuable than premature optimism. The Mariners have learned this the hard way, and if they want to keep avoiding expensive mistakes, holding off on early extensions may be the best strategy of all.
