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.
Mariners’ Late Rally Falls Short in 7-5 Loss to Angels
Having been eliminated from playoff contention, the Seattle Mariners put their pride on the line but came up short against the division-rival Los Angeles Angels in a 7-5 defeat on Friday. After falling behind 6-0 early, Seattle stormed back to make the game interesting but could not overcome the lead it had spotted its opponent.
Left-hander Reid Detmers is having a career year with a 3.47 ERA across 179 innings, and he dealt against a Seattle team that has struggled against lefties all season. The M’s also decided to rest veterans J.P. Crawford and Cal Raleigh, inherently limiting the offense.
Starter Bryce Miller had another up-and-down outing that was indicative of his season. Some innings, he looked like a superstar. In others, he looked like a deer in headlights.
The young rookies continued to look competent against major league pitching, providing hope that they might make the roster out of spring training next year.
What stood out from the final Friday night game of the season?
“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.
Mariners Split First Two against Rockies, Reach Edge of Elimination
When the M’s looked at their schedule in the early months of 2026, the antepenultimate series of the season - a three-game set against the Colorado Rockies - surely did not stand out as particularly important.
The 2025 Rockies, who were the second-to-last regular season series for the M’s, had been mere speed bumps for Cal Raleigh to reach the six decade mark and for the team to clinch its spot as AL West champs. The fact that their opponents were then the Rockies meant nothing, because the story of that team at that point was what they could do, rather than what could be done to them.
And as it turned out, it is not. Despite the fact that the two teams will be separated by somewhere on the order of 15 to 20 wins at the end of the year, neither one will be going anywhere in October. The Rockies, as expected, have been one of the worst teams in the sport, long competing for the NL West cellar with the near-equally hapless Giants until the bottom fell out in September with a 1-11 run going into their series with Seattle.
Over the first two games of their series, the teams have split a game apiece, looking very much evenly matched as they battled - perhaps flailed is a better term - against each other in picturesque Coors Field. Seattle won 5-4 on Friday while Colorado prevailed 5-3 on Saturday, nearly even tallies for teams that, by this point of the year, were nearly even in ability.
Perhaps the Mariners could have won both had their defense been merely average; perhaps the Rockies could have won both had their pitching been merely average. Both teams ensured that their performance in this series wouldn’t meaningfully impact their chances long before they actually faced off; the only difference is that the Mariners didn’t expect it to happen to them.
Mariners Cement Losing Season, Drop Another Game to Angels
When Cole Young rolled one over weakly to second for a game-ending double play on Tuesday, a grim reality that had been all but assured for weeks became official: the 2026 Mariners are a losing team.
Seattle’s 2-1 loss to the Angels dropped the team to a 70-82 record with 10 games left to play. The playoff picture, which became even uglier as the Astros and Rangers both won, is now hardly worth thinking about.
Tuesday’s step into the abyss, like all 81 before them, had a little bit of symbolism. Dan Wilson, surrounded by smoke that he will step down when this year is done, took out one of the team’s top prospects in favor of their half-measure rental.
As any individual game goes, however, Tuesday’s was unremarkable. Logan Gilbert pitched well but got saddled with a loss because the offense died down aside from one run. The team squandered its chances with runners in scoring position. From the 10-foot view, it isn’t meaningfully different from the other losses; in the story of how the M’s went from one to 82, it is only valuable as a milestone.
The 10,000-foot view shows us that this was part of an inexorable pattern. The M’s would often chalk up such games to bad luck, but now there is no ignoring even for Wilson: it wasn’t bad luck.
“We were just waiting for it to turn around, and it never quite did,” Gilbert said. “It’s on us. At the end of the day, that’s the reality of it. We need to be accountable and know that we have to execute better. Things have to change. We have to have those conversations and figure it out.”
Mariners Make History With 19-1 Beatdown of A’s
While not mathematically eliminated from the playoffs, the Mariners are on the edge of despair. Needing to win almost every game from here on out, Seattle got off to a great start with a 19-1 smackdown against the Athletics
For an offense that has been up and down (but mostly down) all year, the Mariners put together their highest-scoring game of the season and recorded the largest margin of victory in franchise history. On the other side of the historic night, starting pitcher Bryan Woo continued his streak of scoreless baseball, dealing six shutout innings.
The bullpen came in and did its part as well, allowing zero earned runs to complete the record-breaking night.
It may have been rather hollow on the whole considering the greater circumstances, but just looking at the score from the 10-foot view, it was the biggest win in team history.
And for rookie Michael Arroyo, there was nothing close to hollow about his trio of firsts.
Offensive Explosion
Mariners Finally Take Singular Series from Rangers in 2026
At least the Mariners can play spoiler.
That is hardly where anyone on the team wanted them to end up when the season began. But the autopsy of the year - where three guys the Szymborski Projection System (ZiPS) had putting up a combined 15.2 FanGraphs wins above replacement (fWAR) only accrued 4.9 fWAR with 15 contests left in the season - is already written in the oft-surprised and oft-sullen faces of those in T-Mobile Park’s home dugout.
Going into their series against the Texas Rangers, the M’s had already squandered their last chance to jump back into the fray with a somewhat robust series loss to the Athletics over their previous four games. Things had already been dire for Seattle since at least the end of July if not earlier, but that set of games was the moment that the players on the team fully realized they had to stare down the music.
Perhaps there was a new attitude that arose a few hours, give or take, after rookie Lazaro Montes sent a Cal Quantrill meat and cheese sub to Saturn on Tuesday. If the M’s can’t make the playoffs for themselves, perhaps they can use one of their last remaining series against a contender to ruin someone else’s day.
Kade Anderson and Logan Gilbert went 13 combined innings with four runs allowed total.
Both the least experienced and most experienced starting pitchers did what the team needed of them on Wednesday and Thursday. That in and of itself was a departure from the muddy record of M’s hurlers since the All-Star Break, when the staff has suffered one of the worst stretches in recent memory up and down its roster. Before Anderson’s first career win on Wednesday, Seattle starters had logged a 4.99 ERA and 5.04 FIP in the second half, and the youngest had struggled with a 5.40 ERA and 5.63 FIP in his first three starts.
Mariners Playoff Hopes All But Finished After Dropping First Two to A’s
Ask not for whom the bell tolls.
Friday saw the Mariners place one more stone on their own immurement, falling to 66-76 and seven games back of the division. In truth, they had long sealed themselves off from any reasonable chance of wriggling themselves out of their predicament, but they had still been in the twilight of the possible as they returned home from a series win against the Red Sox and began their first of four games against the Athletics.
Losing the first two games of that series should put any remaining embers of hope to bed. The long odds of late August have become near-impossible ones with only a few days gone in September, as the team must make up a seven-game deficit with 20 contests left to go.
The word Mariners manager Dan Wilson used after Friday’s 7-6 defeat wasn’t “tough”; it was “difficult” as he began his immediate recap postgame and “frustrating” as he concluded it. But the sentiment was identical, seemingly homologous to the great gray mass of clouds over T-Mobile Park as summer turns to autumn. Such has been the season in 2026.
Not to mention the fact that Lazaro Montes left the game early.
Logan Gilbert gave up five runs on four homers in the third as his heaters went south.
Cal Raleigh to the Rescue? Mariners Not Dead Yet as September Approaches
This certainly has not been the season the Seattle Mariners, nor their fans, had envisioned. As August draws to a close, the Mariners are six games below .500, eight games worse where they were this time last season. Several fingers can be pointed in several directions to find blame for this sluggish season that has failed to live up to expectations.
Certainly, a finger can be pointed squarely at last year’s AL MVP runner-up Cal Raleigh. He even admitted it himself, when he told Seattle Times’ Ryan Divish, “I’m awful” earlier this month. After setting the world on fire last year with 60 homers and a .948 OPS, he is currently on pace for just 22 home runs and a lowly .625 OPS. His batting average is down roughly 80 points. It’s been a dark year for Big Dumper.
And yet, hope remains. Thanks to the mediocre nature of the rest of the American League around the Mariners, they are only two and a half games out of the AL West and four games back of an AL Wild Card spot. And now, Raleigh is showing signs of his former self just in time.
George Kirby Gem Powers Mariners Series Win vs. Phillies
It’s hard to describe how badly George Kirby needed the start he got on Tuesday night. On the other hand, it’s rather easy to describe how badly the Mariners need every win they can get this month and for the rest of the 2026 season.
One win got the M’s to a 64-69 record. Matching their 90-win total from 2025 would require an impossible 26-3 run for the rest of the year, but luckily for the team, they don’t need that. In an embarrassing showing for the sport of baseball itself, 81 wins (17-12 over the rest of the year) would probably get them a division crown; a true heater of, say, 20-9 over the rest of the season would be an easy division clincher.
The other way to look at things is that, even in a year where going .500 probably wins them the division, the Mariners - who had World Series aspirations before the season began - need to put together at least a light heater just to make the playoffs.
The only way ahead is forward, however, and they got one notch closer on Tuesday with their 4-1 victory.
George Kirby reached the eighth, a welcome respite from his recent form.
“George was really the story today,” said Mariners manager Dan Wilson after Tuesday’s game.
Kirby had been lit up from every angle in his previous five outings, giving up six homers and only striking out 13 while walking eight with a 7.13 ERA. This was even with a seven-inning, no-run outing among this stretch, but every other game had seen him get lit up Chicago-style: early and often.
Big Dumper Returns: Cal Raleigh’s Three Homers Power Mariners Past Phillies
With both teams sending their top starters to the mound, a low-scoring game was expected between the Seattle Mariners and Philadelphia Phillies on Monday night. A pitching duel it was not, however, as the Mariners bludgeoned Zach Wheeler and the playoff-bound Phillies by a score of 9-2.
The M’s offense got hot early and stayed hot, scoring five runs in the first inning to give their starter Logan Gilbert quite the cushion. Cal Raleigh finally found his stroke, blasting three home runs and working a walk as well.
Gilbert continued his Cy Young-worthy campaign by battling through five innings, and Seattle’s bullpen put up zeros the rest of the day to put Philadelphia on ice.
The team is being resilient and finding a way to win, as their superstar catcher noted.
“We’ve endured a lot this year,” Raleigh said afterward. “We are fighting with everything we’ve got right now.”
Kade Anderson Debuts, Randy Arozarena Delivers as Mariners Walk Off Cubs Again
Looking to gain ground in a tight wild-card race, Seattle welcomed the Chicago Cubs back into T-Mobile Park after walking them off the night before. The Mariners elected to go the exciting route again, advancing from a walk-off single to a walk-off home run in the bottom of the ninth.
This was the Randy Arozarena game. Coming into the night, everyone thought the story would be about the phenom pitcher making his debut for the Mariners. Randy had other ideas, blasting a two-run home run 404 feet to dead center. If Seattle makes the playoffs this year, this game could mark the turning point of the season.
Seattle saw its top prospect, and one of the top prospects in all of baseball, make a promising debut. The bullpen was also able to keep the game close to set up a dramatic ninth inning.
Leo Rivas Walks Off Cubs, Gives M’s Homestand Jolt
It’s the kind of thing that engenders legitimate hope in a team so downtrodden, but it’s the kind of thing fringe Mariners role players have done for decades in ultimately sour-ending seasons.
Regardless of the view from 30,000 feet, it was a magical moment for those celebrating within a three-foot radius of Leo Rivas in the bottom of the 10th on Friday night.
The game had been a back-and-forth affair between the M’s and Cubs, two teams with high expectations going into 2026 but only one of whom had performed up to snuff. At times, Seattle looked like the team they had constructed on paper, with Brendan Donovan and Cal Raleigh both producing runs. At others, the Cubs ambushed mistake pitches from multiple Mariners pitchers, and it had gone to extras before Seattle triumphed 6-5.
Emerson Hancock recovered from early struggles to put together almost six innings.
During the first half of the season, Mariners starting pitching had the sixth best ERA, fifth best StatCast expected ERA (xERA [1]), best fielding independent pitching (FIP [2]) and third best expected FIP (xFIP [3]) of any rotation in baseball.
In the second half, however, Seattle’s starters have had the seventh worst ERA, fourth worst FIP, and ninth worst xFIP. Their xERA ranking of 10th best since the break is small consolation with their struggles spanning all the non-StatCast metrics. They went from a league-best 11.0 starting pitcher FanGraphs WAR (fWAR) pre-break to a second-to-last 0.5 fWAR post-break.
Analysis: Where Mariners’ Farm System Ranks and What Comes Next
As the Mariners attempt to claw their way back into playoff contention, it can be easy to focus on the letdowns of the major league club. The organization has plenty of other reasons to be optimistic, with a talent-rich farm system that would be the envy of most teams.
When Seattle traded Luis Castillo to the Chicago White Sox, it was initially billed as a salary dump and a way to reduce the logjam of starters in the rotation. The Mariners acquired Seranthony Domínguez, who slots in as a middle-relief option. Seattle also received prospect Boston Smith, who has been mashing with six home runs in his first 11 games. The catcher adds to an already impressive minor league system.
Mariners Survive Brewers, Gain Ground in Wild Card Race
Seattle came limping into Milwaukee after getting pummeled 22-0 the night before, looking to exorcise some demons against the Brewers on Wednesday night. Facing former top prospect Dustin May, the Mariners got the bats going early, plating four runs in the first inning before ultimately winning 7-5.
Current Cy Young candidate Logan Gilbert, emboldened by an early lead, battled through five innings before being pulled in the sixth. Likely two batters too late.
As has been the case all season, Dan Wilson made another questionable decision that nearly cost his team the game. But his players persevered, allowing Seattle to gain considerable ground in the wild-card race.
Did Seattle have a great offensive performance? Absolutely. Were they simultaneously incredibly lucky? Unequivocally. That’s a luxury not often enjoyed by this team as it tries to turn its season around.
“It Just Got Out of Hand”: Mariners Suffer Most Lopsided Loss - 22-0 - in Team History
With one out and the bases loaded in the bottom of the eighth, Christian Yelich sent a routine fly ball to Julio Rodríguez. The Mariners center fielder caught it for an out and Andrew Vaughn trotted home for a Brewers run. Simple, right? Like someone opening their front door to go out for another day of work, just as they have innumerable times before and just as they will countless times after.
It is only when zooming out that a picture of utter mayhem, calamity, and chaos comes into view. That was the 20th run the Brewers scored on Monday. That was Yelich’s second at-bat of the inning and the 11th batter that infielder Leo Rivas faced in his one-inning, nine-run pitching stint. Rodríguez was so checked out that, seemingly thinking there were already two outs, he tossed the ball into the crowd - an action that awarded each runner two bases and thus scored Jonathan Ornelas from second while moving William Contreras to third.
Luis Lara, who had earlier in the inning logged his first major-league home run to make it “only” 16-0, capped off the rout with a run-scoring single. Garrett Mitchell logged a merciful third out to end the eighth and conclude the beating of a horse that was barely even skeletal by that point.
The final score was 22-0.
The good news for Seattle is that whether by a gulf of 22 runs or one, all losses count the same. The merciless beatdown may have counted for two and a half losses on their Pythagorean record, but their actual record only went from 59-66 to 59-67. They need to win both remaining games of the series, but they’re somehow still in this.
That doesn’t make such a putrid loss any less embarrassing. What’s perhaps more surprising is that there was a time when this game was close.
Mariners’ Gutsy Series Win Offers Team Last Lifeline for 2026 Season
When Andrés Muñoz got Taylor Trammell to chase a changeup for strike three on Sunday, he yelled with a ferocity rarely seen even from a man called “Señor Smoke”.
It was an angry, happy catharsis. Had he made slightly better pitches to Jose Altuve or Daulton Varsho two days prior, the Mariners would have swept the Astros and put some real heat on the once and future AL West champions; they would have been two games back of their rivals with the tiebreaker long since clinched.
Instead, the M’s are four games back with 37 left to play. But there’s no use crying over spilt milk, and Muñoz made sure to redeem himself in the bottom of the ninth in the Houston rubber match.
“To be honest with you, that - especially here - hurts a lot when those things happen, because you feel like you let the team down,” Muñoz said. “But I’ve been through these situations a lot, and I’m able to just flush those things easier, especially with the outing that I had.”
Getting to that one-run lead wasn’t as simple as it might have been based on the way the M’s offense had been playing earlier in the series. Unlike the first two contests, when the team got it done with runners on, it was a return to regular programming on Sunday night as they went 1-11 with runners in scoring position.
The M’s, regardless, logged a badly-needed 3-2 win.
Cal Raleigh recorded the mother of all Crawford Box jobs in the sixth, a much-needed stroke of luck.
The winning run on Sunday was a 327-foot fly ball that left the bat at a 45-degree angle. Since the beginning of the StatCast era in 2015, there have been 57 such batted balls - and Raleigh’s was just the second to become a hit (the first was this Yandy Díaz deep fly in a minor league stadium).
Mariners Strike Back vs. Astros, Remain Barely Breathing in AL Playoff Chase
A cloud of horror hung above the Houston air as the Mariners began their game on Saturday. The team was fresh off a gut-wrenching 10-inning loss where the difference depended on two squibbers that fell away from the Mariners defense before Christian Walker torched an Andrés Muñoz cookie into Galveston.
And yet they came back from the brink on Saturday, with a lockdown start from Emerson Hancock and a lively offense in the unfriendly confines of Daikin Park, winning 10-5 on the heels of what, more than all the others, could be described as “the worst loss of the year”.
“I think we all kind of felt like that was a great ball game last night, and it was more indicative of who we are as a team,” said M’s manager Dan Wilson on Saturday, even in spite of Friday’s loss. “And so, I think in some ways, it felt like, yes, we didn’t get the result that we wanted, but we played the way we wanted.”
The Mariners played the way they wanted to on Saturday, and this time, they got just the result they needed.
The Mariners offense went to task with runners on, scoring 10 runs despite just one homer.
Seattle’s offense has depended on the home run for years, and since the start of 2025, around half of all their runs have been scored that way. When Saturday’s game began, the team had a .718 OPS with runners in scoring position since the start of 2025, the seventh-worst in baseball.
Despite their aforementioned bullpen disaster, the team’s performance with runners in scoring position on Friday was commendable, as they went 4-for-12 and scored all seven runs without hitting a home run. That trend continued against the admittedly subpar Astros pitchers on Saturday; the Mariners scored 10 runs while going 7-for-17 with runners on second or third.
“We Know Where We Are At”: Lone M’s Win in Bronx Shows Blueprint Despite Not Being Enough by Itself
Over the past seven games, the Mariners have found themselves outscored 34-11. It was 34-10 going into Thursday’s afternoon contest in the Bronx; the team rode a stellar six-inning, seven-punchout, no-run start from Logan Gilbert to break an ugly six-game losing streak. The spell, starting in Seattle against the Tigers, had seen them finally stop treading water - because they had sunk like a stone. Were it not for some unexpected production on Wednesday (ultimately in vain as the pitching gave up 10 runs that day), the team’s scoring would have been better described not in runs per game but games per run, Anthony Bennett style.
When things go this pear-shaped for a baseball team, a lot of fingers get pointed and plenty of blame gets cast. The Mariners are 57-65, having barely avoided two straight sweeps to the two top teams in the AL; there’s certainly have plenty of blame to go around. No one is hitting, the team’s hurlers aren’t putting up quality starts, and even when they have a lead, their bullpen blows up and another ugly L goes up on the calendar. Perhaps the finger can go at skipper Dan Wilson, or president of baseball operations Jerry Dipoto, or the hitting crew of Edgar Martinez and Kevin Seitzer, or to strength and conditioning, or a player development side that can’t seem to turn good players into great ones, or an analytics department that seems to follow more than it leads, or owner John Stanton. Or maybe everybody, or maybe nobody.
The players blame people far more familiar: themselves. For a team that constantly talks about the importance of belief, the bluntness of their self-doubt is a bullhorn.
“It starts with me. I’m awful,” Cal Raleigh noted after their Tuesday 4-1 loss to open the series in New York. Over the course of the 2026 season, Raleigh has a .159/.267/.297 slash line, good for a worse batting average and OPS+ than all but one of Dave Valle’s Mariners seasons. Raleigh hadn’t been scheduled to speak to media that day, he simply held an impromptu presser where he called himself horrid in every possible way. Can you blame him for feeling like that?
Winning 1-0 on a Thursday Weston Wilson homer won’t meaningfully change things by itself; the M’s have seen too many would-be turnarounds go belly-up to believe that one win means the job is finished. That was true when they were a pair of games over .500, that was true when they were a pair of games under. 500, and it’s still true now that they’re seven games underwater.
Colt Emerson, Mariners Overcome Bullpen Collapse for Second Straight Walk-Off Win vs Twins
The Seattle Mariners raced out to an early 6-0 lead before their bullpen imploded in the eighth inning, allowing the Minnesota Twins to rally to inexplicably tie the game. But after blowing a save in the ninth, the Mariners redeemed themselves for their second walk-off win in as many days.
Rookie Colt Emerson’s hard-hit walk-off single capped another outstanding offensive performance by a club that has struggled with consistency swinging the bats this season. Combined with a scoreless seven innings from George Kirby, it looked like a blowout in the making, but these M’s like to give fans cardiac trouble.
The bullpen had other plans, with several top arms giving up timely home runs to allow their fellow wild-card contender back into the game. How did they squander a six-run lead before managing to survive with the win?
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