> ## 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. # Eduard Bazardo Had Breakout Season in 2025; Can He Recover from Game 7 Disaster? - URL: https://www.emeraldcityspectrum.com/eduard-bazard-had-breakout-season-2025-can-he-recover-from-game-7-disaster/ - Published: 2025-11-06T23:43:18.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-08T05:48:10.000Z - Author: Callaghan Bluechel - Tags: Analysis, Mariners, Eduard Bazardo, Dan Wilson [Embed from Getty Images](https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/2240342580?ref=emeraldcityspectrum.com) On Sept. 29, 2024, Eduard Bazardo finished off the only good month of his season. The first five months of the year saw Bazardo flip between blowup outings with the Seattle Mariners and some solid work with the Triple-A Tacoma Rainiers. By the time he returned to the big-league team during September roster expansions, his 6.62 ERA meant that few expected him to become a big player in the bullpen. Bazardo pitched 10 innings over the month of September and gave up just two runs, finally earning some high-leverage appearances late in the season, including a 10th-inning win on Sept. 28\. His final appearance of the year came the very next day as he got Athletics center fielder JJ Bleday to ground out to end the sixth inning. Seattle won 6-4 that day, though the victory was unremarkable in the end as the team missed out on the playoffs by a hair. Bazardo’s ERA had dropped to 4.88 by the conclusion of the season, but a 2.70 FIP and 1.048 WHIP offered a vision of a potential breakout in 2025. That breakout happened. Bazardo pitched 78 ⅔ innings in 2025, most of any Mariners reliever over the regular season, and sported a 2.52 ERA, 3.64 FIP, and 1.017 WHIP. He would often come into games as a high-leverage stopper in the sixth or seventh innings, and the 25 percent of inherited runners that scored against Bazardo was noticeably lower than the 32 percent league average. Opposing hitters had a .450 OPS against Bazardo in high leverage situations, a result of a sinker that was one of the best in baseball. By run value per 100 pitches, Bazardo’s sinker was the 16th best pitch in baseball, and among just sinkers and two-seamers, it was fifth best. Opposing batters had a .158 batting average, .233 slugging percentage, and .231 weighted on base average (wOBA) against Bazardo’s sinker, all either lowest or second lowest among MLB sinkers and two-seamers in 2025\. The StatCast expected figures are similarly low, a good sign for the sustainability of Bazardo’s best pitch. Despite a relatively unremarkable whiff rate, the pitch had the highest strikeout rate (32.6 percent) of any sinker or two-seamer. Why was this pitch so incredible? Sure, it had above average movement and velocity, but plenty of sinkers in the game had that combination without having very good results. The answer was in his slider. Unlike in 2024, when he mixed four pitches, Bazardo focused mainly on just his sinker and slider in 2025\. Bazardo’s slider had the 13th best run value per 100 pitches of any slider in baseball and was third highest in horizontal movement versus comparable sliders, behind only Matt Brash and Lance McCullers Jr. The incredible break on Bazardo’s slider and the above-average run on his hard sinker reinforced both pitches’ effectiveness, and given that he threw each pitch about equally as often as the other, he was able to stay ahead of batters league-wide. But the workhorse Bazardo was not only reserved for high-leverage spots; he also showed up in games as a general middle reliever capable of doing mop-up duty, and his 1.054 average leverage index reflects this versatile usage. But at the very end of the Mariners’ season, this day-in, day-out usability worked against Seattle. The Mariners never really got going in Game 6 of the 2025 ALCS and entered the bottom of the fifth down 4-0\. After starter Logan Gilbert gave up a leadoff home run to Vladimir Guerrero Jr. to make the deficit 5-0, Eduard Bazardo showed up for two innings to try and give the M’s a bit of a chance to put the series away in Game 6\. Bazardo worked through six outs without giving up a run, and a George Springer groundout to end the sixth inning seemed unremarkable at the time. Seattle lost Game 6 but went out to a 3-1 lead in Game 7\. George Kirby was taken out relatively early for Bryan Woo, but by the time the seventh inning rolled around, Woo was beginning to show signs of tiring. The first two men reached base and a sacrifice bunt brought them both into scoring position. Manager Dan Wilson went to Bazardo as the Blue Jays lineup rolled around to the top. George Springer, who had faced Bazardo twice already in that series, went up to the dish. While Andrés Muñoz, Seattle’s closer and the best reliever, stood beyond the fence in the Mariners bullpen, Bazardo had been given the biggest task of the season. The rest is history. Bazardo missed his spot on a sinker intended for the upper corner and Springer drilled a thunderous homer into left center field, giving Toronto a lead that would hold until the end of the game. That moment offers a wrinkle in trying to project Bazardo’s breakout story onto following years. Other than truly elite bullpen arms such as Muñoz, relievers are notoriously fickle year-to-year; such backbreaking moments can deliver career-derailing blows to a hurler’s confidence. Of Mitch Williams, Sam Dyson, and Ubaldo Jiménez—every other pitcher to give up season-ending three-run jacks to the Blue Jays in the Rogers Centre—only Dyson had been able to return to form in the following year. Williams, who had been a strong closer for the 1993 Phillies, had a 7.96 ERA for the rest of his career, while Jiménez (who hadn’t been great in 2016 to begin with) fell out of MLB after just one more season. Outside of Toronto, Brad Lidge followed up two top-of-the-NL closing seasons in 2004 and 2005 with a 5.28-ERA clunker in 2006 all thanks to the mental effects of a save-blowing Albert Pujols home run in Game 5 of the 2005 NLCS. All to say that the jury’s still out on whether Bazardo can remain a key piece of Seattle’s bullpen come 2026\. He clearly has the stuff to do so; all that’s left to see is whether he keeps his head in the game despite the crushing Game 7 blow. For what it’s worth, Williams and Jiménez had both given up walk-off homers, while Dyson (the one who recovered) slipped in the seventh inning as Bazardo did. Seattle wouldn’t have been in a position to win Game 7 without Eduard Bazardo’s efforts during the 2025 season, but the M’s would have made the World Series had Bazardo made a better pitch to George Springer. Perhaps that’s why the heartbreak is so sharp, both for Seattle and for one of the best relievers on one of the best Mariners teams. “Resilience” was the thematic word for the 2025 baseball in Seattle, and if the team is going to pick up where they left off come 2026, Bazardo and the Mariners will need a whole lot more of it.