Bryan Woo Exits Houston Outing with Pectoral Tightness, Bullpen Locks Down M’s 4-0 Shutout
HOUSTON, Texas — There are few things a ball club wants to see less. The ace of the rotation is pitching a gem, well on track to breeze through seven or even eight innings. He goes out for the sixth, but he seems to be in discomfort every time he throws a warm-up pitch. It becomes clear that, whatever it is, he can’t go out for another inning of work.
With a 2-0 lead going into the bottom of the sixth, the Mariner bullpen needed to shut Houston down for four consecutive innings and hope the offense could pick up a bit of the slack. But with Gabe Speier unavailable after having pitched each of the previous three days, all while Seattle’s other lefty specialist in Caleb Ferguson was an unadvisable pick against the righty-heavy Houston lineup.
Dan Wilson passed the buck to three men he has relied on all season: Eduard Bazardo, Matt Brash, and Andrés Muñoz. The three high-leverage arms entered Friday having worked a combined 177 innings with a 2.19 combined ERA, but with three men needing to cover four innings, someone had to get an extended outing.
Bazardo Crushes Two Inning Hold
The breakout of Seattle’s ‘pen in 2025 has without a doubt been Eduard Bazardo. He had shown promise in parts of several seasons, but this year has been the one to bring everything together, and he has been Mariners manager Dan Wilson’s go-to guy in the middle innings or whenever he needs an opposing rally to stop as soon as possible. With a 2.42 ERA and 0.969 WHIP, he has been more than up for the tasks on his plate this season.
But Bazardo hadn’t pitched two innings since before the All-Star Break, and the last time he had done it during a close game was all the way back in June. Still, Wilson knew he could trust his man, and he put him out for both innings.
It looked like it would end up being a breeze early on in the bottom of the sixth as Bazardo got an out on his first pitch and Jeremy Peña hit a routine grounder over to shortstop. But his counterpart, J.P. Crawford, muffed the throw to first, and Peña got to second with just one away.
Despite the scare, however, Bazardo calmly got the next two men out and kept Seattle’s shutout intact into the seventh. He went back out there with Víctor Robles having given him an extra run of cushion, and although he began to show the signs of his elevated pitch count, he seemingly found a second wind. His best moment in the entire game was his final batter, as he dotted the top and inside edges with front-door sliders to strike out Christian Walker.
Brash Bounces Back in Solid Eighth
Although he had been a true stalwart of the Mariners bullpen all year, Matt Brash entered Friday looking to avenge an eighth inning blown save that had led to the only loss in Seattle’s previous 12 games. He had the advantage of an extra Mariners run due to Josh Naylor’s blast in the top of the eighth, but he was subject to the whims of the defense behind him during his inning of work.
Brash worked ahead of Yainer Diaz and got a soft ground ball to the left side, but Suárez dropped the pickup, and the Astros had a leadoff man on. If Houston was going to come back, this was the moment to do it. Brash, clearly frustrated, got locked in a tense battle with Jesús Sánchez. The first pitch was a fastball a couple inches high, the second a slider that Sánchez fouled off. Another ball followed before Brash dotted a second strike.
All tension left the ballpark on the next pitch. Baseball’s biggest rally killer is the double play, and Friday offered a prime example, Sánchez chopped the ball right to Suárez. Seattle’s third baseman redeemed himself by turning the tailor-made double play. Brash worked around a two-out single from Jake Meyers to turn it over to the ninth.
Muñoz Locks Down Non-Save
Now, it wasn’t a true save situation, as the M’s were up by more than three runs, but with Houston always a threat and the weekend’s series essentially a playoff series before the playoffs, Dan Wilson brought in the closer. Although Muñoz didn’t have the chance to improve upon his 36 saves in 43 opportunities, the performance he put up was certainly good enough to have achieved it had he needed to.
Muñoz’ first out was a masterclass in mixing pitches. He started off with a slider on the outside corner, switched to a heater for strike two, tossed another slider under the zone to change Carlos Correa’s eye level, and then dotted the outside corner with a two-seamer that ran back onto the outer corner of the plate—and all Correa could do was watch it fly through for strike three.
Isaac Paredes singled to give the Astros one last sliver of hope, but Jose Altuve’s flyout took the wind out of their sails as quickly as it had appeared. Zach Cole’s at-bat showed another advantage of mixing pitches: making hitters think you’ll mix pitches. Everything Cole saw was a slider down and away. The first two were called strikes, and so the rookie Cole expected a fastball in. Muñoz on the mound and Cal Raleigh behind the dish intuited this expectation, and so the third pitch was a slider under the zone that Cole haplessly swung over to end the game.
Pec Tightness Ailed Bryan Woo, MRI to Come
A full timeline of events quickly emerged in the postgame interviews down in Houston. After the final pitches of the fifth inning, Bryan Woo had notified the dugout that he was experiencing tightness in his pectoral muscles. Eduard Bazardo subsequently got loose in the Mariners bullpen in case Woo would need to leave, and although Woo went out to the mound to see if he had regained enough comfort to work through the sixth, he and the rest of the team quickly decided against that. It was something that snuck up quickly on Woo, who hadn’t felt any discomfort through the first four frames of the game.
“It just happened at the fifth,” Woo explained. “I had felt great all game, just felt [discomfort] at the end, and I thought that it was just smart to not try to push it.”
Both Woo and Dan Wilson expressed caution over drawing too many conclusions about Woo’s injury, and the Mariners starter will evidently be receiving an MRI that will come back with further details.
There is no question, however, that Woo is one of the Mariners’ biggest pieces, and if he falls to injury, it will make Seattle’s road a whole lot rockier going into October.