> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.emeraldcityspectrum.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Decisions Behind Disaster: Managerial Tendencies Sunk Mariners in Game 7 - URL: https://www.emeraldcityspectrum.com/decisions-behind-disaster-managerial-tendencies-sunk-mariners-game-7/ - Published: 2025-10-22T05:31:59.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-08T05:48:13.000Z - Author: Callaghan Bluechel - Tags: Analysis, Mariners, Dan Wilson, Eduard Bazardo, Andres Munoz, Bryan Woo, J.P. Crawford, Leo Rivas, Dominic Canzone, Victor Robles [Embed from Getty Images](https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/2242082899?ref=emeraldcityspectrum.com) Seattle’s Game 7 defeat was nothing short of the most gut-wrenching game of the millennium. Had it been a blowout from the start or had the M’s failed even to make it to Monday night, the pain would have been lesser—but the very fact that the team was so close and could very well have made it to the Fall Classic is what completes the heartbreak. Mariners manager Dan Wilson, undoubtedly, will never be able to forget the loss. The Game 7 situation offers excitement and dread for players and managers alike, but for the managers, there will be little remembrance if they make the right decision and all the ire of the world if they make the wrong one. Case in point: the name George Springer was sung in high praise throughout the Great White North for his seventh inning heroics and not that of John Schneider, who used the correct relievers in the eighth and ninth innings to prevent any counter-comeback by Seattle. Perhaps it reflects a greater truth about a manager, that a team can lose more games due to a bad skipper than they can gain by having a good one. There is more to management than in-game decisions; indeed, it’s impossible to measure the psychological effect a good manager can have. Many managers around baseball have a tendency to get too cute in the postseason, trying overcomplicated strategies that only serve to break the team’s rhythm while offering no real benefit on the field. Dan Wilson mostly avoided that issue for the first six games, and even though he had a few moments during Game 7 that veered into over-management territory, the fatal seventh-inning decision was all about a less-than-ideal (though understandable) regular season tendency being completely unfit for the postseason. ### Lightning strikes four times: a game-winning three-run homer in a Rogers Centre elimination game. Before we return to Game 7 of the 2025 ALCS, it’s worth taking note of the interestingly extensive history of Toronto Blue Jays benefitting from three-run homers when their opponents are facing elimination at Rogers Centre. On Oct. 23, 1993, Joe Carter hit a three-run blast off Mitch Williams in the bottom of the ninth of Game 6 of the World Series, flipping the score from 6-5 Phillies to 8-6 Blue Jays and keeping the Commissioner’s Trophy in Toronto for another year. On Oct. 14, 2015, José Bautista walloped a three-run bomb off Rangers reliever Sam Dyson in the bottom of the seventh of Game 5 of the ALDS to give the Jays a 6-3 lead, where the score would remain until the conclusion of the game. On Oct. 4, 2016, Edwin Encarnación walked Ubaldo Jiménez and the Orioles off with a three-run homer in the bottom of the 11th of the AL Wild Card Game, turning a 2-2 tie into a 5-2 victory for Toronto. Mariners ace Bryan Woo, coming out of relief on short rest from another relief stint (that itself followed about a month spent nursing injury), was given the ball in the fifth inning of Game 7\. Woo worked two clean innings, but the seventh did not begin well for Seattle. Trying to paint the inside corner against Addison Barger, Woo missed badly, walking him on five pitches, and although he got two strikes against Isiah Kiner-Falefa, his sweeper backed up right into the middle of the plate and got shot through the infield to put two on. Andrés Giménez bunted the runners over, bringing up George Springer. When it comes to relievers, Dan Wilson is a manager who tends to utilize them based on inning and role. Whenever he needed a stopper in a tight situation during the late innings in 2025, he would go to Gabe Speier against lefties and Eduard Bazardo against righties. With the right-handed Springer stepping into the box, he went with Bazardo, who held opponents to a .133/.250/.200 slash line in 72 high leverage plate appearances during the regular season. “Bazardo’s been the guy that’s gotten us through those situations, those tight ones, especially in that pivot role,” Wilson said. “We felt really comfortable with him out there, the way he’s been throwing the ball, especially in this series.” But there were several reasons why Andrés Muñoz would have been a better option. Although both relievers held their opponents to similarly low slash lines, Muñoz did it over 168 high leverage plate appearances, showing more consistency over a long period of time. Muñoz had more strikeouts compared to walks in high leverage, too, and had not given up any home runs in such situations in 2025. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1d/f2/1df2f77b-83dd-4bc0-a6d2-6d1bb5df89a3/content/images/2026/10/munozvsbazardo-format-original.png) The biggest reason to go to Muñoz in that situation, however, was about familiarity and exhaustion. Muñoz had pitched just twice in that series and never to Springer, while Bazardo had pitched three times in the ALCS, twice to Springer, and was coming off two innings of work the previous night. 2025 was the fourth straight year where Muñoz had been one of the best relievers in the game while it was the first consistent season for Bazardo, and that element of experience is an intangible that helps in do-or-die situations like the M’s faced in Game 7\. Wilson, simply, went to his innings-based approach, hoping to save his closer for the eighth and ninth innings, and as such proved the fatal flaw in holding too closely to that model: sometimes, you can’t afford to have anyone but your best pitcher in a sixth or seventh inning situation. Or, as Kenny Rogers would put it: *don’t ever count your money while you’re sitting at the table.* Buck Showalter learned that lesson in 2016. There were games during the regular season where trying to save the closer for later came back to bite the Mariners, and the tendency sunk the entire season in Game 7. ### The question of bunting: do the M’s score in the second if J.P. Crawford swings away? There’s a pretty simple reason the sacrifice bunt isn’t in very much vogue in the league these days: it lowers how many runs you’re likely to produce (I worded this carefully for a reason). This is even more true now that batters tend to focus less of their development on bat-to-ball, directing their hits, and situational adjustment, but this was true even back when contact was king. \[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="1270"\] ![ This “run expectancy matrix” shows the average number of runs scored during each combination of bases occupied and outs recorded in 2025, and that a successful sacrifice bunt lowers that number in each instance. Note that this is not a graph of how often (as a percentage of one) any runs are scored during an inning during each base-out state. ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1d/f2/1df2f77b-83dd-4bc0-a6d2-6d1bb5df89a3/content/images/2026/10/rematrix-sac-bunts-format-original.png) This “run expectancy matrix” shows the average number of runs scored during each combination of bases occupied and outs recorded in 2025, and that a successful sacrifice bunt lowers that number in each instance. Note that this is not a graph of how often (as a percentage of one) any runs are scored during an inning during each base-out state. \[/caption\] Now, if the goal is to score one *single* run, bunting has historically offered a marginal benefit to whether or not any run will score. In some situations, it can be worthwhile, especially if a weaker hitter is bunting in order to turn the bat over to a set of stronger hitters, *especially* if those hitters happen to be high-contact guys. But in the top of the second inning with runners on first and second and J.P. Crawford—himself a high-contact hitter—at the plate, the bunt was quite a bit more arguable. They certainly didn’t hand the bat to Leo Rivas expecting him to go down on three pitches, but Rivas’ postseason OPS to that point was .507 and he had struck out in 35 percent of all his plate appearances (his final game worsened those figures to a .403 OPS and a 43 percent strikeout rate). Crawford hadn’t produced all that much up to that point, with a .526 OPS in the 2025 postseason by that point, but his 16 percent strikeout rate indicated a greater ability to put the ball in play and his .194 batting average on balls in play (BABIP) indicated that he had been getting unlucky with his contact. Indeed, Crawford rocked a double in his very next appearance, but with nothing going on after him, the M’s weren’t able to score in that inning, either. It’s impossible to tell what would have happened in the top of the second had Crawford swung away—perhaps it would have been a double play—but giving up an out and bringing a worse hitter up to the plate lowered their scoring chances in a game that ended up decided by one run. Bunting in the second was certainly some overcomplication generated by playoff jitteriness, but the tendency to go to the bunt had been there all year. Seattle dropped multiple extra-inning games during the regular season because they squandered runs away with bunts that were either botched for popouts or gave the opposing team a key out. While Crawford got the bunt down perfectly in the second inning of Game 7, that extra out proved to be the difference between scoring and not. ### Settling accounts: what was up with the end-of-game decisions? Once Springer hit the go-ahead home run, it actually wasn’t all over. Sure, the Mariners were so absent at the plate that it very well seemed like it, but it was a one-run deficit with six outs to work with: something the M’s had done just two games earlier. Still, Friday afternoon’s thriller had been the first eighth-inning comeback against an above .500 ballclub in over two and a half *months*, and the Mariners clearly didn’t have what it took to put together another one. Wilson’s decision to pinch-hit Dominic Canzone for Victor Robles (one of the few Mariners who had reached base twice on Monday) was certainly bizarre and didn’t fit super well into his general patterns, unlike bunting or keeping relievers held in their inning roles. Perhaps he, like the team he commanded, panicked under the immense pressure. Perhaps he thought that Canzone would be able to knock out a longball—but that’s the exact *opposite* message to send the players in that situation. If no one at all in that clubhouse could remember in that moment to think small and slow it down, that’s a bad sign. The results certainly agreed. ### How should we evaluate Dan Wilson’s performance as Mariners manager? Including the postseason and the back half of 2024, Dan Wilson ends his first full season as a manager with a 117-91 record, and his .563 winning percentage (.566 in the regular season) is the best of any manager in Mariners history. But just how much of that was thanks to the players and how much of that was thanks to Wilson? Today’s analytics-driven decision-making means that the primary role of a lot of managers is to keep the gears turning in the clubhouse. Wilson did well in that aspect of management in 2025—but then again, so did Scott Servais, until he didn’t. Clearly, however, managers still impact some aspects of strategy, as Seattle’s bunts became more plentiful and their bullpen use more innings-oriented the moment Wilson took command over the team. There are aspects where Wilson clearly developed and learned as a manager, as he slowly crawled away from his habit of over-relying on lefty-righty matchups as the season progressed. Ultimately, a bad decision can end the season. The good news regarding Wilson is that, up until a few Game 7 moments, he kept with what had gotten him to the stage to begin with, not descending into the kind of overly-cutesy (think Milwaukee using openers in the NLCS when they never had in the regular season) decision-making that took many clubs out of the dance. The bad news regarding Wilson is that the decision that cost Seattle a trip to the World Series was one that he had been making all year, and if the M’s want to reach the Fall Classic during his tenure, he will have to adjust. 2026 will tell whether the lessons of Game 7 and the 2025 season will stick. Wilson’s seat is noticeably hotter after the decision to go with Bazardo in the seventh inning on Monday night, but the magical run in the 40 days prior puts an icepack or two on the chair.