Blue Skies in SoDo: Weekend Sweep Puts M’s in Prime Championship Contention
Words can hardly capture the seeming strangeness of the moment. Summer has turned to fall, and yet the Seattle Mariners are sitting pretty in the AL West. The M’s are fresh off the biggest sweep of the season against none other than the Houston Astros, who now trail Seattle by three games with six games left to play for both teams. More than likely, for the first time since 2001, the divisional crown will belong to the Mariners.
There are still questions to be had. It is easy to point to the titanic injury plague that swept through Daikin Park, claiming such names as Yordan Alvarez and Josh Hader, as the real reason why the Mariners were able to overtake their long-triumphant nemesis. Indeed, Seattle has gone through inexplicably awful spells this year that brought them to the brink of irrelevance and forced them to seek near-perfection in the final weeks of the season.
Maybe the baseball world will contend with that question in 2026. But over a pivotal weekend, with all the chips in play, the Mariners cleared the board. Despite the fact that the Astros never truly fell out of it, even recovering some competitiveness in a third game that was on the cusp of becoming a blowout victory lap for the M’s, the final results don’t lie.
Seattle put themselves in such a good spot that, despite not having clinched anything, Fangraphs puts Seattle’s chances of making the playoffs so high that it rounds up to 100 percent. Their chances of winning the division aren’t much lower, sitting at 98.2 percent, and their shot at getting an automatic bye to the divisional round—a figure that stood as low as 1.6 percent on Sept. 5—is currently 93.6 percent.
A picture, perhaps, can tell a thousand words. Here is a Fangraphs chart that shows each AL West team’s chances of winning the division over time:
Game two, in particular, increased Seattle’s division title chances from 75.9 percent to 91.3 percent. That’s certainly one way to quantify the importance of Robles’ catch.
Maybe most encouragingly, Fangraphs projects the Mariners to have a 19 percent chance to win it all, higher than any other team in baseball. Such a number begets a forbidden thought in the Pacific Northwest: is this the year?
The weight of history, of course, says no. The Seattle Mariners’ pennant drought, extant since the team’s inception, has stretched from the rule of Leonid Brezhnev to the births of those who will live decades into the 22nd century. They are the only team in MLB to have never played an inning of World Series baseball.
Yet every dry spell must eventually be interrupted by long-awaited rain: this millennium has seen the Red Sox, White Sox, Giants, and Cubs finally taste the exalted waters after many decades of failure, while the Nationals, Astros, and Rangers all dipped their toes in for the very first time.
And Seattle, for their part, is on the cusp of conquering their most immediate devil. Each of the previous two years, despite solid albeit flawed teams, the M’s finished a sole game outside of the postseason. For much of 2025, it looked as if such a finish was once again in the cards.
“We’re just hungry to get going,” Mariners catcher Cal Raleigh said after the team’s weekend sweep. “We missed the playoffs by a game the last two years; you remember those things.”
Yet they turned it around as quickly as they had fallen into a rut, winning 14 of 15 and dramatically flipping their fortunes. This clubhouse, older and wiser than the 2022 team that first broke Seattle’s excruciating drought, evidently had many players who knew how to turn it around. Josh Naylor, the deadline addition at first, has three years of postseason experience, while left fielder Randy Arozarena’s playoff surges are well-renowned in the baseball world. Seattle stalwarts like shortstop J.P. Crawford and center fielder Julio Rodríguez have already seen the bright lights, and so these once-green warriors now stand far more unfazed.
“When stuff starts to hit the fan,” Crawford said, “we know that we’ve been through this before, we know what it takes, we got what it takes.”
And there are two men on the Mariners with a World Series ring in their possession: right fielder Víctor Robles and backup catcher Mitch Garver. While neither are the first names you think of when you picture Mariner excellence—well, until Robles made his shoestring dive to save Saturday’s game in this latest series—that experience will be a not insignificant X-factor as Seattle gears up for October.
The Mariners’ magic number to win the division over the Astros is three, which is equal to their magic number to clinch a Wild Card spot over the Guardians if they miss out on the division. Meanwhile, the magic number to clinch a first-round bye over Detroit is only slightly higher, standing at four.
Seattle’s six remaining games are all at home in T-Mobile Park, a building where the M’s have thrived all season long. The homestand opens with three games against the Rockies and closes with a set of three against the Dodgers, and although Los Angeles is one of the World Series favorites in the Senior Circuit, there is a distinct possibility that both teams will have clinched their spots by the time they face each other in the season’s final weekend.
That, more than anything, might be the most unusual feeling of them all.