Things did not go as planned for Jesse Winker in his first season with the Seattle Mariners.
An All-Star with Cincinnati in 2021, Winker was supposed to be the marquee addition to a Mariners lineup that needed middle-of-the-order thump coming in 2022.
It didn’t work out that way: Winker slumped to a career-worst season with a .219 batting average, 14 home runs, a .688 on-base-plus-slugging percentage and a minus-0.3 Wins Above Replacement (via Baseball Reference).
The Mariners, however, say injuries were partly to blame for Winker’s struggles, and they’re hopeful he will be able to return to his All-Star form after two surgeries this offseason.
Winker had surgery on his left knee earlier this month in New York, Mariners president of baseball operations Jerry Dipoto revealed Wednesday afternoon.
Winker, 29, is also expected to have surgery on his neck soon, Dipoto said.
Winker ended the season on the injured list with what the team called a cervical disc bulge. He was not with the team during the playoffs, leading to some speculation about his future with the organization.
“The injuries he was dealing with at the end were very real,” Dipoto said in an end-of-year news conference at T-Mobile Park. “Obviously enough so that he was not traveling with us during the postseason and was rather spending seven days of his time in New York, getting that resolved.”
The Mariners say they have not given up on Winker being a key contributor to the team in 2023. Winker is owed $8.25 million in the final year of a two-year contract he signed with the Mariners earlier this year.
“Early on, ‘Wink’ had a lot of bad luck,” manager Scott Servais said Wednesday. “He hit some balls that were typically maybe in the park he was used to playing in (in Cincinnati), maybe they would’ve went over the fence. Here, they got caught right at the fence. Like any player, you’re gonna grind. ‘Why isn’t this happening? Do I gotta get maybe swing a little harder or do something a little bit different?’
“You know, (they had) a number of meetings throughout the course of the year with him to try to get him going, pump him up. And there’d be signs that he looked like he was coming out, and then I thought he had some big moments for us.”
This story will be updated.