“We Never Turned it Around”: Disappointing 2026 Mariners Enter Final Series Officially Eliminated
The 2026 season has developed not necessarily to the Mariners’ advantage. Even as all the trends of the league turned in their favor, the team turned away their best and easiest chance to make the World Series.
And with the Texas Rangers’ 3-1 win over the New York Mets on Thursday, they are officially eliminated from postseason contention.
“Obviously we were kind of riding high off of last year, and somewhere along the way, things just didn’t click, didn’t come together, and we were never able to right the ship,” Cal Raleigh said on Thursday. “That’s the frustrating part, I thought we were gonna be able to get there, and we just never did. We never got better, we never turned it around.”
The Mariners, up to this point, have gone 10-3 against the Astros and 64-81 against every other team. Simply applying their .441 winning percentage to those 13 games would have resulted in a 70-88 record by the beginning of their final week, with their rivals holding an 82-74 record. Such an evenness would have long since sent the Mariners packing from the playoff race; in fact, that would be the fourth-worst record in baseball, even worse than the Giants.
Seattle’s draft lottery position is worse for ware given their overperformance against the Astros, but their ticket sales sure aren’t; going into their last four games, they have sold 4,759 more tickets per game than they did last year, according to Baseball-Reference.
All that those extras eyeballs got to see was an extremely preventable slow-motion bicycle wreck - it was not grand enough to rise to the level of a train wreck; it was merely pathetic, sad, and pitifully humorous - yet unlike most such wrecks, it was filmed in high definition and broadcast daily in every state and dozens of nations around the world. All that preseason hype, all those projections, all those expectations, only for a drawn-out disaster so disappointing yet so anticlimactic as to bring to mind the eighth season of Game of Thrones.
Look at the way the Mariners got eliminated, for instance. Technically, they lasted to the fourth-to-last day of the season, but only because they still had a chance for a three-way tie as action began around the league on Thursday, and that was if the Rangers went 0-4, the Astros went 0-4, and the M’s went 4-0. This was because the only way for them to take the west at that point was for all three teams to finish the year in a tie, at which point the M’s would take the division due to their record against the two teams.
Even then, it was only possible because they played in perhaps the worst division in the history of the game of baseball. A 74-84 team should by all rights have been eliminated weeks ago, yet they were hanging around unceremoniously with playoff odds that could only be measured at quantum scale.
“We definitely didn’t deserve to make the playoffs,” Raleigh said. “Frustrating year in general, a lot of areas to improve in. Ultimately, it sucks, because you failed, but you gotta accept it.”
Those miniscule chances didn’t even disappear on Wednesday. In keeping with perfect fashion with many near-miss seasons of the past, they fought what was in and of itself of an exciting battle, a 10-inning game against the Astros where they fell into a 5-4 deficit in the top half of the extra inning before Houston closer Josh Hader walked Julio Rodríguez to tie the game and Josh Naylor walked things off to keep the season alive.
“This team never gives up, it’s amazing to be a part of,” Naylor said of the game.
It could have been a truly touching moment, except for the fact that the season had for all intents and purposes had already ended. It was more of a facsimile of a season-saving game, rather than a real example of such.
That’s something the team had already processed. Logan Gilbert, when he lost to the Angels on Sept. 15 to ensure a losing season, said that the only thing they could do was continue playing.
“In my career here, I think, the last game of the season, we’ve been either in or almost in, down to the last game or two games. That’s all I’ve known here. At this point, nothing changes: it’s win every day, win every game, that’s the job every time you show up to the park.”
The team’s ability - outside of 2022 and 2025 - to be at the very edge of contention and yet ultimately fail no matter how good or bad their competitors are is something that someone must study at some point. From a pure talent perspective, the 2021 Mariners should have been nowhere close to even the 2026 team’s mediocrity, yet they won 90 games and had their own forlorn season-saving moment, a go-ahead Mitch Haniger single on the second-to-last day of the season - only for elimination to be cemented the following day.
A similar thing happened in 2023, when they were in a three-way race with the Rangers and Astros for the division and a wild card spot, only to somehow find themselves out of the playoffs entirely despite that spot being the second wild card. At least that team won 88 games and, as they did in 2021, made it to the final day of the season, where they were eliminated when the Toronto Blue Jays won and axed the possibility of a two-way tie for the third wild card (one that would have gone to the Mariners).
And a different story had the same ending in 2024, when a team who accrued a comfortable lead early in the season fell apart by mid-August, losing faith entirely in manager Scott Servais. Management canned said manager and brought in Dan Wilson, a move that appeared to jolt the team back into contention as they went on a 21-13 run. They even won their last four games straight - yet they were eliminated on the Thursday before the end of the season as other teams won to clinch the final wild card spots.
Back in the 1850s, an obscure German once wrote that things in history happen twice, first as tragedy and second as farce. The Mariners’ 2026 managed to be the farcical echo to three years at once: to 2021, with its meaningless season-saving single; to 2023, with its three-way battle for the AL West; to 2024, with its squandering of opportunities and official exit thanks to another team’s win on the fourth-to-last day of the season.
And make no mistake: 2026 was utterly and completely farcical. It was a year that Baseball Prospectus projected the Mariners to win upwards of 90 games on average. The Astros, who might end up being division winners, got riddled with injuries and played most of the year with a pitching core made up of duct tape and the stuffed animals in a Dave & Buster’s claw machine. The Rangers are the dictionary definition of uninspiring and mediocre. Whoever wins the division can have no better than an 82-80 record.
Yet the Mariners sputtered out of the gate and couldn’t take what was right in front of them. All they had to do was take candy from a baby and they failed. It was even more awe-inspiringly inept than that: it was as if someone had assembled an international team of crack thieves who wound up failing to take candy from a baby. The team talked often about their expectations that a hot streak would lift them up back into contention, even as July turned to August and September. The question became clear: was this a mere passive expectation, that such fruits of victory would just fall into their mouths?
“I don’t think it’s passive,” Wilson said on Thursday. “I think in some ways we all understand that you have to kind of make that happen at the same time, it’s not just gonna happen. We talked about that a lot, trying to do the things to make that happen.
“And sometimes you get in situations where you put too much pressure on yourself and it just doesn’t come your way that way. Again, it’s a matter of trying to look back, trying to see where messaging went wrong, maybe messaging went right, all those kind of different things that you look at.”
Wilson, who seemed to spark things at the end of 2024 but whose notable flaws had led to the end of the 2025 season, began to appear outmatched as 2026 wore on. Games in June and July slipped by as he and the team expected a resurgence to just appear out of thin air. By the end of the season, his imminent departure became the worst-kept secret in Seattle.
“Obviously, tons of speculation, all that kind of stuff, and again, just trying to get through these next four days, push hard, and finish up as strongly as we can,” Wilson said. “Find some positives here at the end.”
After that, the deluge. The questions, the soul-searching, the late nights up thinking about the knife’s edge moments that went wrong. The incoming labor war, as that one frayed horsehair inevitably fails and the Sword of Damocles falls upon America’s pastime. Will there even be baseball next year?
The Mariners, as a team, cannot control when the 2027 season starts, if at all. What they can control is their response to such a catastrophic display of mediocrity. Wilson was asked what his immediate takeaways and points of improvement were, and - in keeping with a rather detail-light style he has become known for in his tenure as skipper - his response might as well have been that our rivers are full of fish.
“There are a lot of obvious things you can look at,” Wilson said. “Obviously, sometimes, it begins to sound like excuses, and that’s not what this is about. I think it’s about looking at the things that need to be addressed and things that need to get improved and, as I said, we will continue to look at those things, continue to figure them out, and continue to solve them, that’s what we need to do.”
More questions came for Wilson, all angling for some takeaway, but little more came but the fact that improvements would have to be made.
Raleigh didn’t need much time to come up with things that went wrong as he addressed the media.
“Ultimately, I think it was a lack of execution, a lack of focus, a lack of, I’d say, energy at times,” said Raleigh. “And then you can kind of pool that in with, defense was not good all year. Controlling the running game was not good all year. Playing bad on the road all year. Hitting with runners in scoring position was definitely not good. I’d say those were kind of some key points.”
Perhaps the team’s expectation was passive, perhaps not; what was abundantly clear throughout the season was that, even if they knew where they had to go, the 2026 Mariners hadn’t the foggiest clue how to get there.
Now all the forlorn hopes are officially gone. There are four games remaining against a 60-98 Angels team who the Mariners will join on the couch when the postseason begins.
As Gilbert said when the team lost its 82nd game, Raleigh noted the only thing left for those contests was the game they are paid to play.
“You try to finish the season strong, right? You give it everything you got ‘til the end, and once the offseason hits, the war starts,” Raleigh said. “It’s gonna be a lot of reflection, a lot of taking the time to look yourself in the mirror and taking accountability for what you’ve done.”