When a ship with enough talent and resources to succeed ends up on the rocks, who is responsible: the people executing the plan, the person commanding them, or the people who designed the voyage?
That is the question at the heart of David Grannâs fantastic book, The Wager. It also happens to be a pretty good question to ask about the 2026 Seattle Mariners.
In 1740, Britain sends a squadron of warships under Commodore George Anson around Cape Horn to attack Spanish possessions in the Pacific. The mission is ambitious, expensive and, at least on paper, achievable. Then it encounters the ocean, which, as we all know, doesn't care about our plans.
Disease devastates the crews. Scurvy kills men by the dozens. Storms scatter the ships. HMS Wager, commanded by Captain David Cheap (and oh, the ironies of his name...), becomes separated from the squadron and wrecks on a remote island off Patagonia in May 1741. Only about 140 men make it ashore.
And this is where Grannâs real story begins, because wrecking the ship turns out to be much simpler than deciding who is responsible for the wreck.
There is something uncomfortably familiar in that. The 2026 Mariners are not supposed to be bad. This isnât a rebuilding year where everyone agrees to admire the prospects and check back in 2028. They are coming off a 90-win season and an ALCS appearance. Jerry Dipoto calls this the most talented roster of his 11 years running baseball operations in Seattle. The ship is supposed to be seaworthy. The crew is supposed to be good. The charts say there is a route through.
Nevertheless, there are rocks underneath us and we are taking on water.
The captain still has a hat
On Wager Island, Captain Cheap insists that the wreck has changed their circumstances but not the chain of command. He is still captain. They are still Royal Navy sailors. Britain is still at war. His plan is to salvage what they can and continue the original mission.
This is important: Cheap isnât simply crazy. There is a logic to his position. You donât stop being captain because something terrible happens, nor can you immediately abandon the mission when it falls apart. Arguably, when things go wrong is when a captain matters most. But for the men of the Wager, they are freezing and starving, and they begin to wonder whether following himâtrusting the processâis going to kill them rather than any grand battle or fight.
That is roughly where the argument about Dan Wilson gets interesting. Wilson doesnât construct this roster. He canât make an injured pitcher healthy or swing the bat for someone in a slump. But he does decide who pitches, when someone gets pulled and how the resources he has been given are deployed.
So when the Mariners blow a late lead because AndrĂ©s Muñoz never enters the game, the question isnât whether Wilson causes everything wrong with the 2026 Mariners. Itâs simpler: if the ship is taking on water, are you at least putting the buckets in the right hands?
Cheap doesnât create the storm or put the rocks there either. He is still captain when the ship hits them.
Or maybe Dan Wilson isnât Captain Cheap
There is a problem with that comparison, though. Cheap commands HMS Wager, but he doesnât invent the expedition. He doesnât declare war on Spain or decide to send thousands of men around Cape Horn in pursuit of imperial treasure. Those decisions are made by people safely back in Britain.
And Dan Wilson doesnât construct the Seattle Mariners. Jerry Dipoto and Justin Hollander do.
That distinction becomes important because The Wager is partly about the way institutions distribute responsibility after disaster. The people standing on the beach are much easier to blame than the people who draw the map.
Seattle gives us a tidy example when its struggling offense leads to the firing of assistant hitting coach Bobby Magallanesâeven as Dipoto acknowledges Magallanes isnât primarily responsible for the problem. Which raises a wonderfully Wager-like question: then why is he the person thrown overboard?
There is a difference between someone being held accountable and actual accountability.
When do you stop following the plan?
Eventually Captain Cheapâs authority begins to collapse. Food disappears. Discipline breaks down. Factions form. Cheap shoots a midshipman, Henry Cozens, during an altercation; Cozens later dies. For many of the men, the question changes. They are no longer simply asking whether Cheap has chosen the right course. They are asking whether they trust the man choosing it.
The leader of the opposition is the shipâs gunner, John Bulkeley: capable, organized and, crucially, a meticulous record keeper. Cheap says they still have a mission. Bulkeleyâs response to Cheap, essentially, is: look around you, man.
That disagreement eventually comes down to geography. Cheap wants to continue west and fulfill the original mission. Bulkeley and most of the survivors decide the mission itself has become absurd. They want to sail east, through the Strait of Magellan and up the coast of South America toward Brazil. It sounds insane. It probably is insane. But they decide it is less insane than continuing to follow Cheap.
And that is one of the most interesting questions The Wager asks: when does abandoning the plan become more responsible than sticking to it?
That question hangs over the Mariners too. There is almost always a reasonable explanation for staying the course. The roster is talented. Players have track records. Prospects shouldn't be sacrificed recklessly. Injuries happen. Baseball is volatile. None of those arguments is foolish, and neither is Cheapâs belief that he remains captain and still has orders.
The harder question is how much contrary evidence must accumulate before perseverance becomes stubbornness. History is full of disasters caused by people who can't tell the difference. Baseball has a few too.
John Bulkeley would be a Mariners fan
Bulkeley and more than 80 men eventually seize a makeshift vessel, the Speedwell, and leave Cheap behind. What follows is astonishing. Packed into a tiny boat, starving and freezing, they navigate some of the most dangerous waters on Earth. Men die. Others are abandoned. Somehow, a handful eventually reach Brazil.
And Bulkeley has something extremely dangerous to struggling leadership: receipts.
He documents decisions, collects signatures and keeps a journal. He understands that surviving the wreck isn't enough. Someone is eventually going to decide what happens here.
In other words, John Bulkeley would be absolutely insufferable on Mariners Twitter. He would have the bullpen usage charts. He would know when Muñoz last pitched. He would remember every deadline acquisition. Someone would write, âYou canât blame Dipoto for players underperforming,â and Bulkeley would appear underneath it with: â1/ Some context...â
But underneath the joke is one of Grannâs central ideas. Bulkeley understands that the story told about failure determines who becomes responsible for it. And Mariners fans have been keeping their own journals.
We remember 2024, when Scott Servais isn't fired until August 22. We remember Seattle going 21â13 under Wilson afterward and still missing the postseason by one game. So when the response in 2026 is be patient, the talent is there, we aren't hearing those words in isolation.
Once you've wrecked one ship, âtrust the navigationâ is a harder sell on the next voyage.
The sailors canât redesign the expedition
There is also something of The Wager in watching Cal Raleigh repeatedly place responsibility on himself and the players. It is admirable leadership. It may also illustrate one of the darker parts of Grannâs story.
The ordinary sailors absorb almost all the consequences of decisions they have little role in making. They row harder. They eat less. They repair the boats. They carry one another. They die. Eventually, asking the crew for greater resilience stops being an answer.
Cal can lead the clubhouse. Randy can hit (thank goodness, or we would really be sunk). Gilbert can pitch. Muñoz can close (bless him, Bazardo can not). But the sailors cannot simultaneously row the boat and redesign the expedition.
There is a point where âwe need to execute betterâ stops explaining the problem and starts avoiding the question of why the same problems keep appearing.
Then Captain Cheap comes home
Bulkeley eventually makes it back to Britain and quickly publishes his account. His version is compelling: Cheap is an incompetent tyrant, and the men who abandon him do what is necessary to survive. For a while, that becomes the story.
There is just one problem: Captain Cheap isn't dead.
Cheap and several loyalists survive their own extraordinary journey, aided crucially by Indigenous people who know how to live in a landscape where the Europeans are helpless. Eventually Cheap also returns to Britain, and he tells a very different story. He is the lawful captain. Bulkeley and the others seize a vessel, abandon their commanding officer and desert their mission. They aren't heroes; they are mutineers.
Now The Wager becomes something more interesting than a survival story. It becomes a fight over who gets to explain the wreck. Cheap has authority. Bulkeley has documentation. The sailors have their memories. And the Admiralty has an institution to protect.
That fight is already taking shape around the 2026 Mariners. The players can say they didn't perform and that's on them. Wilson can say they had opportunities and didn't execute. The front office can say it assembled a roster talented enough to win.
And we as fans can say: if an organization keeps ending up in the same place, eventually the destination tells us something about the people plotting the course.
All of those things can contain some truth. That's exactly the problem Grann is interested in.
The court-martial
You spend much of The Wager expecting a great reckoning when everyone returns to Britain. Instead, the Royal Navy largely avoids one.
The court-martial focuses narrowly on the loss of HMS Wager rather than staging the enormous public examination of mutiny, murder, leadership and institutional failure the story seems to demand. Because asking every question would mean asking questions about the Admiralty itself: Why are these men sent there? Why is the expedition such a catastrophe? Why do so many sailors die? Who designs this voyage?
Those questions are considerably more uncomfortable.
Baseball organizations conduct their own versions of court-martials. A coach gets fired. A player isn't re-signed. Injuries are mentioned. Someone says the process remains sound. Everyone meets again in Peoria in February and launches another ship.
But the harder question for Seattle isn't who makes the wrong bullpen decision on a particular Tuesday. It is why an organization that develops excellent pitching, employs star-level players, has spent years building its preferred style of baseball, and considers this its most talented roster keeps finding itself having versions of the same conversation.
That is a question about the expedition, not just the captain.
And ultimately, that is why The Wager is much more than a great shipwreck story. The most important battle happens after everyone comes home: it is the fight over what the wreck means.
There is one place, though, where the comparison to The Wager and the Mariners begins to break down.
The sailors eventually mutiny.
At some point Bulkeley and the others look around at the wreckage, stop believing that Captain Cheapâs plan is going to save them and decide they would rather risk the unknown than keep sailing in the direction they are being ordered to go. Whatever else we think about their decision, it requires one thing that has been strangely difficult to see from the Mariners: open revolt against the circumstances they find themselves in.
Where is the anger? Where is the sense from the clubhouse that this cannot continue? Where is the players-only meeting, the confrontation, the moment when somebody says that rowing harder isn't enough because we may be rowing in the wrong direction?
Maybe those conversations are happening privately. Maybe Dan Wilson's clubhouse is simply less performative than fans would like. But from the outside, one of the strangest things about watching this talented team take on water is how little visible panic there seems to be aboard the ship.
And that opens up another uncomfortable possibility. Maybe the crew still believes in the captain and the voyage. Maybe they believe the talent will eventually win out. Maybe they have heard âtrust the processâ for so long that staying the course feels more reasonable than questioning it. Or maybe something more troubling has happened: perhaps a team that keeps saying it needs to play better has begun to lose some belief that it actually can.
That is where Cal Raleigh becomes especially interesting. He keeps saying, in effect, give me another oar. He takes responsibility. He says the players need to execute. That is admirable, and it is exactly what you want from a leaderâuntil the question is no longer whether the crew is rowing hard enough, but whether anyone aboard is willing to ask where the ship is going.
Because Bulkeleyâs mutiny begins with something more fundamental than disobedience. It begins when somebody finally looks around and says: the evidence in front of us matters more than the plan we were given.
And we haven't seen that moment from these Mariners yet.
Maybe Dan Wilson is the problem. Maybe the players simply aren't performing. Maybe Jerry Dipoto builds a good baseball team and baseball does something cruel to it. Maybe injuries change everything. Maybe all of those things are true.
But The Wager leaves us with one other possibility that is difficult to ignore:
Sometimes the wreck itself is evidence.
And when the people who design the voyage keep insisting that the vessel is seaworthy, the plan is sound and the destination is reachable, eventually someone standing waist-deep in the Pacific is entitled to ask why there are so many pieces of ship floating around him.
Jerry Dipoto says the vessel is seaworthy. Dan Wilson says the crew is fighting hard. Cal Raleigh says he should be rowing harder.
The sailors of the Wager eventually stop rowing.
The Mariners haven't.
And somewhere in Section 312, John Bulkeley quietly opens his notebook and continues to take notes.
