With seven games left remaining in the regular season, the Seattle Mariners (72-83), rank near the bottom in most key offensive categories.

The Mariners are 28th in runs scored, 28th in overall hits recorded, tied for last in doubles, by a rather wide margin, 29th in batting average and 27th in OPS.

To their credit, they are in the top half of the league in both walks and home runs, so their philosophy of drawing walks and hitting home run has actually worked. They just haven't really done enough of it to overcome all the other limitations of this group.

Manager Dan Wilson is not expected back in 2027, and with that, there are likely to be more changes to the coaching staff. With Wilson gone, longtime friend Edgar Martinez will probably depart his "Director of Hitting" position, and the future is unclear for current hitting coach Kevin Seitzer.

The Mariners already moved on from assistant hitting coach Bobby Magallenes in July.

Whether Seitzer stays or goes, the following discussion remains true: How hard is it to be a modern hitting coach? Each player has their own individual swing coach and their own individual belief system. Do you, as a hitting coach, try to undo any of that individual work? That doesn't seem prudent, so how do you mesh those voices together? How does a player handle all the voices?

I asked former Mariners infielder Ryon Healy about the difficulty of being a hitting coach in a recent episode of the 'Refuse to Lose Territory' podcast:

"Yeah, you're not wrong by any stretch.

I don't envy the job of a major league hitting coach. I have so much respect for what those guys do on a day-to-day basis because their jobs don't just start when they show up to the yard. Like, they're watching video of their own players or the opposing pitchers, the bullpen, all these things before they ever get to the field. That work is endless and unfortunately, it doesn't really get rewarded because if the team does really well, then it's all the players. They get the big contracts, they get the extensions, they do all the things, get the accolades, and if the players stink, then it's all the hitting coach's fault...

But the issue here is finding the problem in the major leagues is not the most important thing because it's really easy to find problems. If you grab 10 hitting coaches and grabbed one player, you would get 10 different opinions about what that player is doing wrong.

Who does that player believe, though? What does he believe in? What's the easiest thing that he can solve right here, right now, to just create a little bit of forward momentum to get the ball rolling in the right direction?

And then from there it's, you hope the snowball effect takes over..."

The Mariners will finish out the series with the Rockies on Sunday afternoon at 1:10 p.m. PT. After that? We'll head into the final week of the season. At that point, we're just one week away from seeing how changes manifest themselves for the 2027 season.

The latest episode, featuring Buster Olney of ESPN, is out! You can listen here, or you can watch in the YouTube player below. There will be three new episodes next week.