Final Thoughts: Mariners Game 1 Defeat Leaves Steep Hill Ahead, Roster Construction Questions
SEATTLE, Wash. — Demoralizing. Gut-punching. That was the sense around the Mariners’ 11-inning, one-run loss in Game 1 of the ALDS. They had chances, they had more than enough chances—yet they couldn’t capitalize. Blame goes around in these situations: to the hitters, to the manager, to the pitchers, to the umpires, to the weather. Some are more blame-worthy than others.
There are a lot of things that weren’t blame-worthy. Andrés Muñoz, for example. Saturday night was the first time since July 19, 2019 that Muñoz had pitched two full innings, and he did so with relative ease, taking down the ninth and 10th on 25 total pitches, all while stealing a hit from Parker Meadows with a quick-reaction catch.
George Kirby was also pretty blameless. He gave up one home run, but it was on a fastball well up out of the zone that Kerry Carpenter happened to predict exactly. In poker terms, Carpenter called Kirby’s three jacks with a straight. Maybe rock-paper-scissors is a better analogy to pitching, but you get the idea.
“The heaters up were working all day, and he finally got to one,” Kirby said. “Just tip your cap. I executed the way I wanted to, I’m not going to go back and forth in my head if that’s the right pitch or not. I threw it, I was convicted in it, and he hit a homer.”
Julio Rodríguez, too, had little blame. He had half the Mariners’ hits, both RBIs, and was the only one to reach base in extras. The only real mark against him was an eighth inning strikeout with two outs and a man on first, but what more can you ask than 3-5 with a home run?
Cal Raleigh was in a similar category, putting Arozarena in scoring position in the sixth inning and knocking a couple more singles during his five trips to the plate. Raleigh made contact on five pitches, three of which were right down the middle and two off the plate away—and he went 2-2 hitting junk but 1-3 hitting cheese. That’s the strangeness of baseball.
The rest of the hitters, however, had quite a bit of blame to go around. Randy Arozarena and Josh Naylor worked a free pass one time out of five, but nobody from Jorge Polanco through J.P. Crawford got close to first base.
Nonproductive outs do fall into two categories of their own: difficult at-bats and easy at-bats. Jorge Polanco and Víctor Robles, at least, worked some three-ball counts, while J.P. Crawford gave an eighth-inning splitter a warning track ride that got about 20 feet of distance cut off by the SoDo marine layer. Those kinds of grueling appearances or deep fly balls at least have a mental effect on the opposing hurler.
“We had some good at-bats, we did grind … that’s how we run our offense is grind out some at-bats,” a clearly melancholy Dan Wilson said after the loss. “We just weren’t able to get enough back-to-back to put the damage that we wanted to put up.”
Eugenio Suárez, Dominic Canzone, and Luke Raley, however? There was not a lick of fear that touched any Tiger when they stepped up to the plate. When all the holes in a lineup are plugged, there is a mental exhaustion that saps incessantly at the opposing pitcher; with there are many struggling guys in a row, the hurler gets rejuvenation.
Are the lineups constructed properly? That’s the struggle with a roster like Seattle’s, where almost every hitter is streakier than the Milky Way: a roster that works perfectly one month can misuse everyone the next. After a rough spell at the end of July, Wilson shook up the lineup, moving J.P. Crawford towards the bottom and Randy Arozarena to the leadoff spot—and that worked for a couple of weeks! During the middle of September, when everything went right once more, the lineup construction didn’t present any issues despite some intermittent slumps from a player here and there.
But over a long stretch of time, patterns do emerge. Randy Arozarena, for example, has put up a .685 OPS in the leadoff spot in 2025, but an .820 OPS while batting fourth and an .805 OPS while batting fifth.
Personal patterns, however, do obscure the fact that a player can occupy one spot during a slump and another during a hot streak, making it seem like he performs better in some spots than others when no pattern exists. However, some basic principles can be used to guide lineup construction, and these also point to the idea that the M’s are ordered non-optimally.
Generally, the leadoff hitter should be the player with the highest on-base percentage, while the best overall hitter on the team should bat second, a priority that generally overrides the leadoff on-base priority. The best on-base percentage of anyone on the Mariners with more than 500 plate appearances in 2025 is Cal Raleigh (.359) followed by J.P. Crawford (.352). Given that Raleigh is also the best overall batter on the team and as such, would generally hit second (though fourth is also an option due to his power), it would make sense to return Crawford to the leadoff role—though that will likely not happen on Sunday against southpaw Tarik Skubal, since Crawford is noticeably less effective against lefties.
Jorge Polanco’s high isolated power numbers suggest that cleanup would be a solid fit for him. However, for whatever reason, he has always struggled in that role throughout his career, so if the M’s want to shake up the cleanup spot, they might be advised to look elsewhere. Perhaps Cal Raleigh could return to the four-hole, where he has performed better in 2025 than in second, in which case Josh Naylor would probably just swap places with Raleigh.
Any lineup shakeup, however, might be less about optimization and more about shaking things up for mental reasons. After all, what the players need most is to have a short memory after a loss like Saturday’s and get focused on the task ahead, and shaking things up could be a strong signal that something new is beginning.
The task will not be easy. The American League’s ace will take the mound for the Tigers in Game 2, and unless Seattle either knocks Skubal out of the game early enough to get ample time against Detroit’s bullpen or Luis Castillo is equally showstopping, the M’s will stare down elimination in Game 3 having failed to win a home playoff game since Oct. 15, 2001.
Given the unpredictability of this sport and especially this team, it’s perhaps equally as likely that Skubal gives up five runs to the Mariners as it is that he shuts them out.
“One of our strengths is bouncing back, and we have to do that,” Wilson said. “We gotta come out tomorrow and come right back at them.”
Perhaps one of Seattle’s biggest bounce-back efforts all year was against that selfsame Tarik Skubal, as Seattle returned from a heartbreaking New York defeat and handed Detroit’s ace his first loss in three months. Time—a very short amount of time—will tell whether they can do it again.
