Heartbreak: George Springer Ends Mariners Season in Game 7 of the ALCS
TORONTO, Canada — You can do 99 things right on the road to winning a championship. But if you do the 100th thing wrong, you will lose the last game of the season.
Every time the 2025 Mariners found their backs to the wall, they had roared back to life. After getting swept in Arizona to fall under .500, Cal Raleigh whacked one home run after another to resuscitate the team. After getting swept in New York despite bringing a no-hitter into the late innings, Julio Rodríguez bashed the Tigers and ended the first half on a high note. After nearly tumbling from the playoff picture in early September, Luis Castillo pitched a gem in Atlanta to kickstart a breakneck run for the division. When the team was on the verge of letting the Astros back into the picture, Victor Robles made an impossible catch to put them away.
Down 2-1 in the seventh inning of ALDS Game 5, Leo Rivas tied it up with the biggest hit of his career. In the 15th inning of the same game, Jorge Polanco drove them to the ALCS with walk-off heroics. And needing a victory in ALCS Game 5, Eugenio Suárez hit a late grand slam that quite literally caused an earthquake in the Emerald City.
Every time except one.
Despite all the hope that permeated the Emerald City and electrified the land from Anchorage to Ashland, the M’s simply couldn’t get it done. Over the first six games of the ALCS, the Blue Jays appeared as the better team, but the question still remained as to which squad could squeeze out the all-important Game 7.
Recurring issues were the ones that sunk the Mariners in the last game of the season. Men on base seemed to psych the hitters out of their best form, as both home runs were solo shots and the team went 1-7 with runners in scoring position. Infield defenders played too far inwards to reach some key ground balls, a habit that had cost them games in the regular season and resulted in a couple of key hits for Toronto.
Even still, they went into the bottom of the seventh nursing a 3-1 lead. Both Julio Rodríguez and Cal Raleigh had both gone deep while George Kirby held Toronto to a run through four innings. Bryan Woo pitched cleanly in the fifth and sixth, but walked the leadoff man in the seventh and Isiah Kiner-Falefa put the tying run on with a single. Andrés Giménez bunted the runners over, setting up George Springer with a chance to make history.
You could say that the 1995 team, with all its magic, didn’t deserve to go down with a whimper in the ALCS. You could say that the 2001 team, maybe, didn’t deserve to be unceremoniously crushed by the Yankees (though it was the one year the world was rooting for New York). You could say that the 2002 and 2003 teams, both 93-game winners, did not deserve to miss out entirely on the postseason. You could say that the 2016 team, with a far better run differential than the Rangers, didn’t deserve to miss out on the playoffs while the Rangers won the division. You could say that rookie Seattle pitchers did not deserve to face a 2017 Houston Astros team that illegally recorded catchers’ signs to tell their hitters what pitch was coming.
And Seattle’s fans, some of the most electric in sports, did not deserve to see their team become the laughingstock of the league for 48 years, the only team to have never made the World Series.
The fans sure deserved some of those wins, what with the endurance they had shown. They deserved to have their team remain in their city, as Edgar Martinez provided in 1995. They deserved to see a perfect game by one of the best pitchers to ever do it, as Felix Hernandez provided in 2012. They deserved to see their drought broken, as Cal Raleigh provided in 2022. And they deserved to see their team win the AL West, win the long-sought ALDS victory, and win a game at home in the ALCS.
Dan Wilson, perhaps, has not deserved all of the losses his team has suffered. He was bound with guys on the starting lineup early in the year who should not have been there, his team suffered injuries, and players failed to come up in more than a few opportunities.
And he deserved a lot of those wins. In just his second year as manager, he made adjustments throughout the year. A bad loss due to one thing would not come to pass the next evening when he did something else, time and time again.
In the end, no number of successes will offset a failure that happens when it’s all on the line.
Bryan Woo, pitching in relief on short rest, was clearly losing steam. The M’s needed someone to come out of the bullpen to put out the fire, Andrés Muñoz was that firefighter. The Jays had only faced Seattle’s best reliever twice during the series and had never gotten any production against him.
It was Eduard Bazardo tasked with the biggest moment of the season instead.
Dan “the Man” Wilson, who had been more successful than any Mariners manager in history, made a fatal error. Bazardo had a good season and a solid postseason, sure, but he had pitched two full innings in the previous game. He gave Springer ball one and then left a big juicy meatball right down the middle.
The smackdown that José Bautista had given the Rangers and that Edwin Encarnación had dealt to the Orioles was felt by all of the Northwest as the ground violently quaked beneath Rogers Centre. The Mariners’ 3-1 lead became a 4-3 deficit with one swing of the bat.
Other than that previous Friday, Seattle hadn’t come back when trailing in the eighth inning or later since Sept. 23 and hadn’t done so against a team that finished over .500 since Aug. 1. Comebacks remained few and far between on Monday night, as the M’s all but rolled over and died.
Julio Rodríguez struck out to end the Mariners’ season on a slider down and away, completing the 49th straight to end in heartbreak for the Pacific Northwest.
To see Springer do the honors was especially painful. Much of the baseball world has chosen to forget 2017, but many corners of Seattle—rightly or wrongly—will never forgive what Springer and that Astros team did.
For Dan Wilson, it was a reminder that one bad decision can end a season. He had guided and led his team to Game 7 of the ALCS, yet it was not enough.
For the players, it was utter heartbreak. They had given their all to go to the promised land, and due to just a few mistakes in just a few moments, it wasn’t enough—by the slimmest of margins. For Eduard Bazardo, it was a moment that will haunt him until his last breath.
For the beleaguered people of Seattle, the people who just wanted to see the magic happen like it had never done before, it marked the continuation of all it has known when it comes to the Mariners: pain, desolation, loss, inability, and the dashing of hope, again and again. Some in the city who are young have seen another mark in the lesson of endurance that forever follows the act of forming an emotional bond with Mariners baseball. Elder statesmen in the streets of Seattle fear that the final catharsis will come only after they have departed.
So close and yet so far.
“All of us, now, have had a taste of how close we can get and how good this team can be,” a somber Dan Wilson said after the gut-punching loss. “This year, we were one game short.”
No one but the brightest of optimists in the Emerald City is at all sure that they will be back. For the have-nots of sports, there are only so many opportunities. Some, like the Marlins and New York Football Giants, have taken advantage of those scant chances to taste championship glory. Others, like the Cincinnati Bengals of the 2020s and the Mariners of the 1990s and early 2000s, lost their chances and never recovered.
“That,” Bryan Woo said on the heels of a cry of anguish coming from somewhere else in the visitors’ clubhouse right after a reporter asked him about the legacy of 2025. “The legacy is that no-one is really happy or satisfied with this.”
