For all the talk about the Seattle Mariners needing to find at least one person to fill openings at second base, third base and designated hitter, right field shouldn’t flat-out be ignored. The position produced just 0.5 rWAR in 2025, and is thus crying out for an upgrade.

Which brings us to a fun game: How far will you let us get in saying “You know, word is that Teoscar Hernández is available” before you shout, “Pass!”

According to Ken Rosenthal and Patrick Mooney of The Athletic, Hernández’s name has come up in trade conversations. The Los Angeles Dodgers view a deal as “unlikely,” but the idea would be to offload some money and subsequently upgrade what was a lousy outfield defense in 2025 — with all respect to Andy Pages, of course.

Mariners must resist the urge to try for a do-over on Teoscar Hernández

If we could somehow blot out 2023 from the collective memory of the Pacific Northwest, then a trade for Hernández would feel like a compelling possibility for the Mariners.

Right field was a major problem this year precisely because it didn’t produce any offense. Its .618 OPS was the third-worst in the league, whereas Hernández had a .738 OPS even in a down year. Overall, he’s averaged a 121 OPS+ and 31 homers over the last five seasons.

Of course, 2023 did happen. Hernández was on the Mariners and everything, and he was supposed to be a missing link in their offense after coming over in a trade from Toronto. Instead, he was middling to the tune of a 108 OPS+ and 26 homers, and his OPS fellow below .700 in four of his six months with the team.

The silver lining the whole way through was that Hernández was actually crushing the ball, including via a hard-hit rate in the 90th percentile. The Dodgers put some faith in that in the form of a one-year, $23.5 million deal, and benefited so greatly (i.e., a 135 OPS+ and 33 homers just in the regular season) that they brought him back on a three-year, $66 million deal in January.

This time, though, there’s not a whole lot underneath Hernández’s hood to justify any team taking a chance on him. His batted ball metrics were down across the board, and he further dug himself a hole by walking in only 4.8 percent of his plate appearances. Combined with his poor defense, he was only a 1.5-rWAR player.

The Mariners have another reason to steer clear of Hernández that is specific to them. He just didn’t hit at T-Mobile Park in 2023, posting a .643 OPS there compared to a .830 OPS on the road. That was no accident, as he spoke in 2024 about feeling like his sight line was off when batting in Seattle.

“It was a little crooked,” he said of his perspective on the mound, as per Adam Jude of The Seattle Times. “I didn’t feel really straight with the pitcher, for some reason. I moved everywhere in the batter’s box and tried to fix it, but I couldn’t figure it out.”

In Hernández’s defense, not everyone loves hitting at T-Mobile Park as much as Josh Naylor. It’s an extreme pitchers’ park, and he’s not alone in thinking that something about the perspective from the batter’s box is just… off.

Because Hernández doesn’t have no-trade protection, he’d be powerless to say no if the Mariners were to work something out with the Dodgers. But the chances of this happening are surely toward the “none” side of the slim-to-none spectrum. Even if there wasn’t history here, Hernández’s remaining contract is big and complicated (in true Dodgers fashion, it’s loaded with deferrals) enough to leave the Mariners spooked.

In other words, all this has been part rumor mill check-in, part stroll down memory lane. Please go about the rest of your day in peace, and think no more of Teoscar Hernández as a Mariner.