What are Mariners looking for in new manager? Here’s what Jerry Dipoto said.

Jerry Dipoto will return for a 12th season in charge of the Mariners’ baseball operations, and he will direct an “exhaustive” search for the club’s next manager.

“Full autonomy — that I can assure you,” Dipoto said Monday, a day after the team announced Dan Wilson’s departure. “I always have had full autonomy. I work for great people. They give us the resources that we need to do the thing we need to do. They trust our programs, and I feel like we failed them this year because this should have been the year that we did amazing things, and we just didn’t.”

In what has to be considered the most disappointing season in franchise history, the Mariners wilted to a 76-86 finish.

“Our culture needs a reset,” Dipoto said during Monday’s postmortem news conference.

He expects a new manager to offer that reset. Dipoto said his preference would be to hire someone with experience as a major-league manager — something neither of the first two managers he hired, Scott Servais nor Wilson, had when he hired them.

“We will go outside to hire our manager,” Dipoto said. “We need fresh thought. We need something new. It could be a shift in programming. It could be a shift in messaging. It could be a shift in language.”

Dipoto and general manager Justin Hollander will cast a wide net around the industry.

“There are a lot of good people out there, and most of what we’ve done in recent years, especially, has been insular,” Dipoto said. “And this year’s failure requires that we look outside to find someone who might be able to poke holes in what we’re doing and help us see something that perhaps we’re blind to.”

Diamondbacks manager Torey Lovullo, whose contract in Arizona expires at the end of this season, is known to be of interest to the Mariners.

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Given a blank canvas, the Mariners would almost certainly place Guardians manager Stephen Vogt at No. 1 on their wish list. Vogt, who lives with his wife and three children in Olympia in the offseason, was a popular figure as the Mariners’ bullpen coach in 2023; he was scheduled to take over as Seattle’s bench coach the next season, until Cleveland hired him as manager.

Vogt was especially close with star catcher Cal Raleigh and Mariners pitching coach Pete Woodworth.

Vogt, though, is believed to be under contract through at least 2027 in Cleveland, and any managerial trades are uncommon (though not unprecedented).

There is no set timeline to make the hire, Dipoto said. 

“Justin and I are both making phone calls around the league, starting to dig into who the best candidates are out there,” he said.

As Dipoto sees it, a new manager isn’t taking over a rebuilding team. The Mariners fully intend to compete for a postseason berth in 2027.

“We just had a 76-win season, which is usually associated with a team that’s not particularly exciting to be with,” Dipoto said. “There’s not a single candidate in baseball that wouldn’t be excited to take over this job, this ballpark, this city, the talent on that roster.”

The Mariners had the worst defense in the majors this season, and some metrics suggested it was one of the worst defenses across the sport in decades.

Dipoto intimated the defensive breakdowns were, at least in part, a result of lack of accountability from the coaching staff.

It’s notable that, in addition to Wilson, several other position-player coaches — bench coach Manny Acta, hitting coach Kevin Seitzer, infield coach Perry Hill and outfield coach Eric Young Jr. — have not been retained.

“You can’t be the worst defensive team in baseball,” Dipoto said. “You can’t make the mistakes that we made constantly throughout the year. You need to be better prepared and in line with a process that leads to winning.”