50 in 50: Mariners’ Self-Inflicted 2026 Disaster Most Disappointing in Team History
There have been many bad seasons in Mariners history, far more in fact than there have been good years. It took Seattle 15 seasons to have a winning record, after all, and this is the team that won 116 games in a season and didn’t make the World Series. The Mariners, of course, have never made the World Series, the only team in baseball with that dishonorable feat on its name.
The 50-year history of the Mariners has been defined, more than that of any sporting club this side of the Buffalo Sabres, by unceasing failure. And yet the game has cultivated an unyielding nostalgia in Rain City for days that did not end in glory.
And yet out of all the seasons the team of failure has played, 2026 found a way to be the most singularly disappointing. What happened was laughably preventable and cartoonishly immense, at once utterly unforeseen and perfectly predictable, and until baseball starts again - an unknown date courtesy of the coming labor war - it will be all that the M’s can think about.
Last year, the Mariners came closer than ever to their first world series berth, only stayed by a former Astro’s gut-punching home run to send the Blue Jays to the Fall Classic. One rival, it seemed, was replaced by another, and a not insignificant portion of the Emerald City found themselves rooting for the hegemonic Dodgers’ eventual repeat.
When the 2026 season began, the message from the clubhouse and the organization was clear: World Series or bust. The Mariners set out for a mandate, to take their place in the sun, to become baseball’s next dynasty. More resonant with the long-beleaguered fans was the simple idea of finally going to the mountaintop.
And when the season began, it was clear that the bar for entry for Seattle was eminently reachable. Nearly the entirety of the Astros’ pitching staff got injured and that team opened the year in a disastrous rut. The Rangers had resurgent years from Joc Pederson and Jake Burger, sure, but they remained somewhere beneath mediocre for the whole year.
There had never been such expectations laid at the Mariners’ feet since 2002. That year, the M’s won 93 games - but they were kept out of the dance by the Moneyball A’s for the division crown and the eventual World Series-winning Angels for the sole Wild Card. That was a time when a team had to be legitimately great to taste the October nectar; the Athletics won 103 games that year and the Angels 99. The worst postseason team that year was the 94-win Twins.
Had the M’s won 93 times in 2026, they would have easily secured the first-round bye they had last year and won the West by 12 games.
The projections for the talent were as bullish as could be. The Szymborski projection system (ZiPS) had Cal Raleigh and Julio Rodríguez combining for 12.3 FanGraphs wins above replacement (fWAR), with Josh Naylor, J.P. Crawford, Randy Arozarena, Cole Young, and Brendan Donovan providing another 13.1 fWAR.
That 25.4 fWAR would have been more than the 24.8 actually provided by the top seven Mariners position players - Mike Cameron, Ichiro, John Olerud, Bret Boone, Edgar Martinez, Dan Wilson, and Desi Relaford - in 2002. The ‘02 M’s got 12.3 fWAR from their starting pitchers, matched by the 12.9 fWAR projected for Bryan Woo, George Kirby, Logan Gilbert, Bryce Miller, and Luis Castillo.
Pretty much any projection system said something similar. On a wins level, both FanGraphs and Baseball Prospectus had Seattle as the best team in the American League, and FanGraphs’ model estimated that 84 wins would be the 25th percentile result. In other words, if you ran the 2026 season 100 times over, the Mariners would do better than that 75% of the time according to that model.
Maybe that’s still true in some metaphysical and extratemporal sense. But in the real world, we don’t get 99 mulligans.
Going into the year, there was precious little attention paid to the fact that it was almost certainly the last Mariners season for Arozarena, or that it was the last year before Naylor, Raleigh, and Donovan all turn 30, or that the team still hadn’t sorted out an extension for Gilbert as he entered the second-to-last year of his arbitration. That didn’t matter; this was the year they were going for it all.
It would have been disappointing and heartbreaking if they lost in the ALCS again. It would have been disappointing if they lost in the ALDS or the Wild Card round.
It would have been even more disappointing if the M’s had won, say, 87 games (winning 93 and missing the dance isn’t feasible in the modern game) without making it to October. That would have been an ugly re-hash of 2023 and 2024 for a team that looked to have exorcised those demons with their thunder run to Game 7.
That such a season would have easily cleared them into the playoffs and yet they still didn’t make it? That they won 76 games in a year the expectations ranged between 86 and 96? That they waited around and didn’t take any initiative in a year where just a modicum of grit would have gotten them the playoff berth they needed?
2026 was the most disappointing year in Mariners history, at least relative to expectations. It was even worse than 1996, when they finished second in the West the year after their “Refuse to Lose” marathon. It was worse than 2002. It was worse than 2023.
They shot for the moon and, instead of even flying, all the rivets shot off the rocket every which way like a Bugs Bunny cartoon. They weren’t even close. They were an outright bad team.
Sure, the roster construction was pretty flawed, especially in hindsight. There weren’t enough quality depth pieces as relievers or utilitymen. They gave 125 at-bats to Weston Wilson and 124 to Leo Rivas. Michael Rucker, Josh Simpson, Cole Wilcox, and Nick Davila pitched in far too many important moments.
But it was the stamina and skill of their stalwarts that faltered. The pitching had a 5.09 ERA in the second half and gave up 104 homers, the most long balls given up by any second half team this year. Naylor, Crawford, and Raleigh all had an OPS below .700, with Raleigh on track for the worst qualified batting average in history until finally arresting his decline in August. Rodríguez’ defense took a precipitous dive while his long-awaited second half surge was a two-week ripple in late September that brought his OPS to .708. The defense, which was already bad in 2025, became one of the worst in recent baseball history.
This was even with Randy Arozarena putting together the best season of his career, with an .865 OPS, 26 homers, 34 doubles, 26 stolen bases, a league-leading 113 runs scored, and a 5.6 fWAR that was seventh-best among all hitters in baseball. This was even with Dominic Canzone becoming an everyday producer with an .820 OPS and 55 extra-base hits.
When the season was over and the record was 76-86 - and when that same Dan Wilson had left his managerial role after being overmatched in the modern game - the front office wisely didn’t even attempt any spin artistry. President of baseball operations Jerry Dipoto, whose last official end-of-season press conference after the 2023 disappointment had been host to the infamous “54%” gaffe, went out of his way to own up to it.
“If I didn’t have a job today,” Dipoto said, “It’d be justified.”
“Our culture needs a reset,” said Dipoto a few minutes after that.
And so on. Dipoto talked about how standards hadn’t been set and how the team hadn’t taken accountability. General manager Justin Hollander talked about a “lack of focus, and sometimes a lack of effort” on the radio on Tuesday, echoing almost exactly words said by Cal Raleigh on the final day of the season.
They said all the right things and saw a lot of the problems. Whether it was performative or genuine - or some mix of both - anything less than that would have demonstrated profound unfitness for their positions.
Such was the scale of the disaster that 2026 was for the Mariners.
This article is the first in a series of 50 analyzing the Mariners’ 50th season.