“We Can’t Get Satisfied With One Win”: Mariners Fall Below .500, Below First Place with Cuyahoga Collapse
Mariners manager Dan Wilson didn’t appear to treat Sunday’s game like a must-win contest. This was despite the fact that the team’s AL West lead had all but evaporated and that the game directly determined a tiebreaker between the M’s and Cleveland Guardians, one that could in turn be the difference between the Mariners getting a first round bye or not. The guidelines of long-term player management were all but catechisms for Wilson even as his team’s 4-1 lead fell into the dust.
“Our guys, they want the ball, and we'll give them the ball when we can, and when they want it, and some guys are available for one-pluses and some aren't, and we make adjustments as we go,” Wilson said after his team’s 6-5 loss. “And that's just where we're at right now.”
There was no willingness on Wilson’s part to stretch anyone beyond their usual usage. No reliever up-downs would be allowed and no starter could surpass 100 pitches; in short, there would be no second wind for his team. By the time such second winds are allowed in September, it may be too late, just as it was in 2024 (and before Wilson’s tenure, in 2023, too). Such is the peril and just dessert of treating the first five months of the season like extended Spring Training.
They fell out of first place, under .500, dropped the series and the season series, and yet again let an opening win go unfulfilled in the final two games as they took their foot off the gas.
The Mariners, injury-conscious given the circumstances, committed to reliance on Michael Rucker and Josh Simpson.
Starter Emerson Hancock worked into the sixth inning, but with 98 pitches and a heap of armside misses to Cooper Ingle with two outs, Wilson went to the bullpen and called upon Eduard Bazardo. It took a bit for him to settle in, as he gave up a double, but his punchout of Patrick Bailey sealed the deal for that frame.
A series of left-handers made for the Mariners to go to Gabe Speier in the seventh, and though he worked around a pair of two-out hits to punch in another clean frame, his usage marked the last quality arm before closer Andrés Muñoz. Jose A. Ferrer had pitched in both previous games, and with his 39 season appearances, perhaps the two-on, one-off guideline was the best one to treat like a catechism
Four Runs Still Out of Reach as Mariners Fall 4-3 to Guardians
The Seattle Mariners continue to eye franchise history - for the wrong reasons - as they tied the team record with 13 games in a row while scoring three or fewer runs in a 4-3 loss to the Cleveland Guardians on Saturday. Holding onto a half-game lead in the middling American League West, the Mariners need to decide if they want to build on last year's success or drift sheepishly back into mediocrity.
Even the most optimistic Seattle fans know the phrase “Same old Mariners.” It encompasses the feelings of a downtrodden fanbase that has only made the playoffs six times in their 50 years of existence. Despite having the greatest season in team history last year by reaching Game 7 of the American League Championship Series, most fans are already ready to chalk it up as a fluke given their team’s struggles this year.
The roster is not devoid of talent; quite the opposite actually. FanGraphs Playoff Odds still gives the M’s an 80.3% chance of making the postseason. The lineup still needs to wake up though, as this roster has shown that it cannot sleepwalk its way to winning the division.
The trade deadline is approaching. Changes need to be made. What can this SoDo squad do to get back on track?
Bryan Woo Groundhog Day, Randy Arozarena Game of Inches Produce Disastrous Pittsburgh Rout
An exasperated Bryan Woo talked with the media after his loss on Wednesday, a game where he gave up a nuclear inning in an occurrence that has become awfully common for the team’s 2025 ace. He was frank about his struggles and the fact he isn’t sure what the source of his woes has been.
“It’s baseball, you know. And it’s kicking my ass right now,” Woo said.
It may have been very close for an 11-1 game. In other words, it was a perfect reflection of what happens when a winnable game snowballs totally out of the control of the losing team, with all fight and verve driven from the Mariners blow by blow as the Pirates tacked on hit after hit to pounce on every chance they had.
Pittsburgh melted Bryan Woo in the fourth inning, handing Woo the fifth five-run start of his season.
Since April 25, Woo has had an ERA of 5.31, but this doesn’t tell the full story of his struggles in 2026. It is often broken down into home and road splits - where his ERA is 2.00 at home but 6.38 on the road - but this is also an incomplete look at the situation as it currently stands.
Looking at the things a pitcher can control, Woo has struck out 40, walked 11, hit two, and given up seven homers in 48 innings on the road; at home, he has struck out 52, walked seven, hit one, and given up two homers in 45 innings. Turning those results into fielding independent pitching (FIP) numbers gives a 4.14 FIP on the road and a 1.90 FIP at home.
But the big note from it all is that the damage is coming in the form of big crooked innings. As soon as teams get a man to second, the wheels fall off the bus and fast. That’s what happened on Wednesday as Woo fell apart in the fourth inning.
Cole Young’s Hometown Game-Winner Marks Early Career Highlight, M’s Win 3-2
Neither Pittsburgh nor Seattle sit directly beside an ocean (though Puget Sound of course connects quite nicely to the Pacific and gives the Emerald City a strong oceangoing port), yet these teams cleared the decks for their first of three sea battles on Tuesday night.
It was a low-scoring affair, but the Mariners’ two cannonballs were enough to seal the deal as they came out ahead 3-2. The one homer had special significance for Cal Raleigh, as it was his first big fly since returning from the IL, but it was the second that shone brightest: Seattle’s own Yinzer flipped the score from a Mariners deficit to a Mariners lead.
Triumphant homecoming is one of humanity’s oldest seagoing motifs, but with a 22-year-old hitting three homers in a month for the second time in his career, the game had more to do with the beginning of Young’s odyssey than its end.
Cole Young blasted a go-ahead homer in his Pittsburgh homecoming.
Going into Tuesday, the Mariners were tied with the Twins for the second-worst winning percentage (.094) when trailing a game at the beginning of the seventh inning, having won three of 32 such contests. The only teams worse in this regard (the Giants, Angels, Guardians, Astros, Rangers, and Royals) had a combined 212-261 record and .448 winning percentage.
For comparison, the two teams FanGraphs projects as more likely than the Mariners to win it all (the Yankees and Dodgers) have a combined .196 winning percentage when entering the seventh inning in a deficit. The Brewers, Braves, Phillies, and Rays - the next four teams down after the M’s on FanGraphs’ projections - had a combined .227 winning percentage in games where they entered the seventh inning losing.
And when the top of the seventh began on Tuesday, the M’s trailed 2-1, marking the 33rd time they had entered that inning with a deficit in the season. Pirates starting pitcher Mitch Keller had thrown just 72 pitches, the M’s struggles continuing with the bat as they didn’t break up his efficiency or get many runs across.
Mariners No-Hit Through 6, Late Comeback Comes Up Short in 6-2 Loss to Red Sox
Coming off a gratifying shutout victory against the Baltimore Orioles, the momentum slowed down for the Seattle Mariners on Friday night. Facing an underperforming Red Sox team limping into the Emerald City, Seattle looked primed to rattle off a win streak against a Boston squad fresh off suffering a sweep by the Toronto Blue Jays.
Boston had other plans however, capitalizing on poor pitching decisions, an inability to hit lefties, and a lack of bench depth, as the Sox punished the M’s mistakes at every turn to open the series with a 6-2 win at T-Mobile Park.
Julio Rodriguez homered in the ninth inning to drive in two runs, but it proved far too little, too late. Outside of the centerfielder’s blast, the Mariners had little to celebrate on Juneteenth as they donned their popular Steelhead jerseys, paying homage to the Negro League team that predates the M’s.
What went wrong in the Mariners’ latest defeat?
Bryan Woo Burns Through Baltimore Lineup, Mariners Win Series
The Mariners scored three runs in each of their games against the Baltimore Orioles as they began a two-series homestand against a pair of East Coast teams, a tally of runs that is seldom enough for consistent victory. And yet thanks to some incredible pitching - from Logan Gilbert on Tuesday and from Bryan Woo on Thursday - they won two of their three games and took their first series against the Orioles since 2022.
Seattle is now two games above .500, 39-37, after playing a series without Randy Arozarena or Luke Raley and having missed Josh Naylor for two games and Julio Rodríguez for one. In spite of all their hardships over the past couple of weeks, they have kept their heads barely above water as the days of June tick forward and the halfway point inches closer.
Bryan Woo struck back on Thursday, pitching seven scoreless innings with nine strikeouts.
This year, Woo hasn’t benefited from the incredible consistency of his 2025 campaign, coming into the game with a 4.28 ERA thanks to a newfound tendency to give up scores of hits with runners in scoring position. With a 1.037 WHIP, 3.25 FIP, and 5.27 strikeout-to-walk ratio, this ERA pace marks a significant outlier. Still, it takes a certain amount of mental fortitude to keep tough innings from becoming disasters, and Woo had given up five or more earned runs in a start four times out of his most recent nine outings. Interspersed among those games were four quality starts and one “Felix quality start” of seven innings, no earned runs, and nine strikeouts.
That seven-inning outing was repeated in style on Thursday as Woo did all three of those things once more. His ERA dipped back down to 3.94 as he mowed down the Orioles inning after inning, catching them off-guard with fastballs well above the zone and using an effective two-strike mix of heaters and breaking balls. A greater unpredictability in his pitch mix was the thing Woo cited as his main adjustment.
Mariners Right Road-Trip Wrongs, Start Homestand With Gritty 3-1 vs. Orioles
Back in tandem for the first time in nearly a month, Logan Gilbert dazzled and Cal Raleigh stole the show as the Seattle Mariners sidestepped a recent myriad of injuries to start off their latest homestand on the right foot, earning a late 3-1 win over the Baltimore Orioles at T-Mobile Park on Tuesday night.
The Mariners returned home for a six-game set still on the wrong side of the injury report. Three lineup mainstays were unavailable, even with Raleigh and J.P. Crawford returning, putting more pressure on Dan Wilson’s stars to show up. And boy did they ever.
Happily firing darts to Raleigh in his first game off the injured list, Gilbert tossed seven innings of one-run ball while striking out a season-high 10 batters. Making an immediate impact with his bat after a long rehab stint in Everett and Tacoma, Raleigh came through in the clutch, scorching a go-ahead RBI single that plated the winning two runs in the seventh inning.
What stood out in Tuesday’s series-opening win?
Mariners’ Tuesday Bombshells: Rotating Piggyback, Pereda Sent Down, Arozarena to IL
Tuesday ended in a solid 3-1 win for the Mariners at home against the Orioles, but a flurry of roster moves and decisions may have been even more hectic for the team than that night’s action. The team called Cal Raleigh back up to the MLB roster, announced a first-of-its-kind rotating piggyback, and had to call up a guy who had taken four total plate appearances above High-A ball in his entire career thanks to a seemingly bizarre lack of preparation on Randy Arozarena’s injury status.
Mariners general manager Justin Hollander, speaking with media Tuesday afternoon, noted the inordinate severity of the injury situation as compared to other bugs he had dealt with in his tenure with the team; he noted that Luke Raley and Josh Naylor were both dealing with issues and that Matt Brash, Carlos Vargas, and Cooper Criswell would be out until around the trade deadline. Brendan Donovan is set to start running work in the week, but these persistent injuries are not a good sign. This is especially true of Raley’s lower back tightness, given that similar injuries ended up shattering his 2025 season well after he was officially healed.
The mechanistic plan to have each of Seattle’s six starting pitchers rotate the piggyback amongst themselves is many things, but to use a judgmentally neutral term, it is unprecedented. It is also seemingly contradictory that the same organization that came up with a plan as intricate as a rotating piggyback also waited until a gameday to MRI Arozarena despite having a rest day to do so; had they done the simple thing of scheduling an earlier MRI, they would have been able to call Connor Joe back up as is clearly their long-term plan.
But what’s done is done, as bizarre as the events were. What should be made of these decisions, and what do they mean for the near future of the Mariners’ season?
Rest of AL West Doing Mariners Favor So Far, But Will It Last?
The 2026 Seattle Mariners have experienced a series of stops and starts thus far. They have been as many as five games under .500. They recently rode an eight-game winning streak to put them back on track towards leading the AL West division.
However, since that streak was snapped, the Mariners are back to an uneven stretch, going 4-7 since, with two series losses sandwiching a series split in Baltimore.
That’s not the type of success expected of a contender. Sitting at 37-36, that typically is not the record that would lead a division. For example, in the National League, they would be currently eight games back at least of any of the three divisions with that record and would even be outside of the Wild Card picture.
However, given that they are in the weaker American League, their record is good enough to be atop the AL West by just a half of a game over the Athletics despite ranking 13th in winning percentage overall in MLB.
Winning Fixes Everything: Mariners Enter June in Excellent Shape
Rarely does a 2 ½ game lead seem so wide. Yet with the way the Mariners are playing and the roster they have, there is a very real possibility that the third month of the season cements them as clear AL West leaders. They do, after all, play in the game’s weakest division this year.
FanGraphs’ projections are often seen as the gold standard for playoff chances, often given without comparison as the stone cold definitive odds. According to FanGraphs’ default projections, the M’s have a 67.7% chance to win the division.
Baseball Prospectus’ PECOTA has been even more bullish on the M’s from the jump, and their current figure is 78.9%. Even models that weight games played more heavily than preseason projections have the M’s at a greater than 50/50 chance to keep the crown: Neil Paine’s Elo model gives Seattle a 57.7% chance to win the West while FanGraphs’ season-to-date projections give the M’s a 56.3% chance.
But the thing about streaks is that they end. After all, this is a game where a team can throw eight no-hit innings and lose 13-8. Where do the M’s need to see improvement in June, and what has to happen to keep their hot players going?
Could Cal Raleigh’s Injured List Trip Be a Good Thing for Mariners Over Long Haul?
Batting barely over .160, Cal Raleigh's struggles at the plate have played a big role in the Mariners' sluggish start to the 2026 season, and now the team will be without him for at least a few weeks.
Emerald City Spectrum writer Nick Lee examines Raleigh's tough run at the plate thus far and why a break to get back to 100% health may be exactly what the player and team needs to be able to get back on track in time to start pushing for a playoff spot once the calendar flips to June.
Mariners Win Series in Houston, Set Sail for Uncharted Waters with Raleigh Out
After their 8-3 victory against the Astros on Thursday, the Mariners are 7-1 with a +26 run differential against that team in 2026. They’re also 15-22 with a -7 run differential against every other team.
Thursday was something of a fulcrum for Seattle. It was the day the M’s officially sent Cal Raleigh to the 10-day IL, though this was an obvious development after his exit from Wednesday’s game with clear discomfort on the same oblique he had tweaked earlier. Mitch Garver caught Luis Castillo in the latter’s final full start for some time as the piggyback plan goes into effect the next time through the rotation. The cloud of these changes hung over the game’s activities, which saw the M’s take the bad Astros pitchers to task once more.
Brendan Donovan and Mitch Garver stood out on both sides of the ball on the day Cal Raleigh went to the IL.
There were two individual performances in particular that echoed Raleigh’s absence in a way. Garver, obviously, moved into the primary catching role upon his addition to the IL, while for Brendan Donovan, his performance was a lesson in the virtues of caution around early injuries.
Arozarena, Canzone Crush Stros Pitching, Raleigh Breaks Slump in 10-2 Mariner Win
Monday night and Tuesday night represented two very different kinds of Mariners victories. In the bottom of the ninth on the first night, the M’s got a win by the skin of their teeth, with Andrés Muñoz getting the better of Yordan Alvarez to finish out a badly-needed win for the M’s.
When Domingo González wrapped up the bottom of the ninth on Tuesday, things were far less tense. Although the Astros had runners on first and third, the M’s were already up 10-2, and with the final out, that was the final score. It was sublimely special for González, who had just completed his very first inning, but the Mariners’ offensive explosion had long since shattered all but the slightest chance of even the mighty Astros offense clawing back into the match.
Against the whole gamut of Houston hurlers they faced on Tuesday, the Mariners put up numbers. They scored 10 runs on 11 hits, six walks, and two batters hit by a pitch; they got hard hits on 57.6% of their batted balls. With runners in scoring position, the M’s went 2-for-8, but one of those hits was Dominic Canzone’s first career grand slam, which he slammed on the first pitch Astros starter Tatsuya Imai sent his way in the fourth inning.
Seattle took Tatsuya Imai to Randyland and the Can-zone.
The Astros’ big pitching signing of the offseason, Tatsuya Imai, hasn’t turned out how Houston had hoped in the first month and a half of the season. The last time he faced Seattle, he had to be pulled with one out in the first inning due to four walks and one hit batsman, then he wound up on the IL with right arm fatigue. He did better on his return start on Tuesday on account of the fact he went four innings. That’s about the only positive Joe Espada’s club got out of the outing.
Analysis: A Deep Dive Into Mariners’ Slugger Cal Raleigh’s 2026 Struggles
It certainly has not been the smoothest of starts for the Seattle Mariners, or their star catcher Cal Raleigh. Dating back to the World Baseball Classic in March, Raleigh has been under the spotlight for all the wrong reasons. From Handshake Gate with teammate Randy Arozarena, to his subpar hitting, Raleigh is under a microscope this season.
Fair or not, the expectations are sky high. How could they not? After all, he became just the sixth player ever to reach 60 home runs in a season. Once you enter the same company as Babe Ruth, Aaron Judge, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Roger Maris, the expectations change.
Still, Raleigh has stumbled out of the gate in 2026. Why? Could it be the weight of those crushing expectations? Locker room trouble with teammate Randy Arozarena? Or just simply, the ebbs and flows of the grueling marathon that is a 162-game regular season? Or is he injured and trying to play through it?
Jacks Full of Threes: Raley Clubs Seven RBIs, M’s Bash White Sox 12-8
Things go a lot more easily for a baseball team when they hit three home runs to score three or more men each. Good offense over nine innings can more than smooth out a bad inning on the other side, though the Mariners’ 12-8 win on Friday night against the White Sox took a while to get to the coasting stage.
In a sense, it wasn’t nearly as close as the score said; most of the high-end relievers were able to rest as Chicago scored three runs in the final two innings to turn a giant lead into a respectable one.
But in another sense (it was a one-run game until the seventh), the game was closer than its final score. M’s starter Emerson Hancock slipped quite a bit in the third inning and gave up five runs on the night, but recovered enough to go six innings and preserve the bullpen. Seattle’s first chance with the bases loaded didn’t produce anything else, but they broke the gates later on.
The big hero of the night was the still-mashing Luke Raley, who upped his season line to .258/.314/.567 with eight homers and 23 RBIs.
Luke Raley began the barrage with the first grand slam of his career.
The Mariners gave White Sox starter Sean Burke a couple of easy innings on Friday, falling in seven pitches in the first and 11 in the fourth. But crucially, they also put tons of traffic on the bags in the second and third, and though the second was underwhelming, things came together in the following frame.
Big-Time Bryan Woo Bounce-Back Outing Gives Mariners Series Win vs. Atlanta
It might have seemed that the Atlanta Braves were the worst possible team for a struggling Bryan Woo to face. Woo, whose arsenal depends almost entirely on two zippy fastballs thrown over the plate, was set to face an aggressive squad that feasted on fastballs. That ability to jump on the heater has been the lynchpin of Atlanta’s stellar opening salvo of the 2026 campaign, and Woo had to stare them down as the M’s tried to be the very first team to hand the Braves a series defeat.
On the other side of the ball, the Mariners needed to produce more with the stick, having logged quite a few uncompetitive innings on offense in both previous games in the series, with a pair of well-timed homers providing just enough runs on Monday but not on Tuesday. The hitting took a bit of an improvement overall on Wednesday, and though the sequencing didn’t do them many favors, the runs they scraped across were enough for a 3-1 victory.
There were banner days for several involved. For Julio Rodríguez, who came about 20 feet from denting the newly-unveiled Randy Johnson plaque with a mammoth homer; for Cole Young, who put together a three-hit outing; and for Josh Naylor, who showed up with the glove, the bat, and the well-renowned mind to find stolen bases.
But it all started with the guy on the mound, who gave his team an excellent chance to win the game.
Highs, Lows, and Other Notes from Mariners’ Three Losses to Royals
If there is to be a moment when the 2026 Seattle Mariners finally put early woes behind them, it will not be for quite some time. The team got swept for the third time in the season, this go around by a Kansas City Royals team that had been 12-19 with a -22 run differential. The first two games were thin margins, winnable for the Mariners, but they weren’t at all able to salvage the third game as hitting and defense broke down once more, a Groundhog Day-like occurrence even as April has turned to May and numbers are piling up in the wins and losses column.
As befits a set of bad losses, the M’s went right up to the edge of victory multiple times, but ultimately let it slip through their fingers. Let’s go over the highs and lows of the series, from mistakes that would be bad in grade school T-ball to a pitching performance worthy of Randy Johnson.
Very High: Emerson Hancock struck out 14 in a seven-inning masterpiece on the night the M’s retired the Big Unit’s number.
Things in this sport can change on a dime, but for now, Emerson Hancock has vanquished all doubts of him being an MLB-worthy starter. He precisely used his four-seamer, sweeper, cutter, and even sinker to fold one Royals hitter after another like his opponents were cheap lawn chairs. By the time he exited the stage at the end of the seventh, 103 pitches to his name and his team nursing a one-run lead, a near-sellout crowd in T-Mobile Park gave him the a roaring ovation.
Mariners Suffer Second Straight Bryan Woo Beating, Drop Randy Johnson Series Opener to Royals
The Mariners and Royals spent most of Friday evening locked in a back-and-forth batter’s duel, with the Royals eventually coming out in front. In all the action of the game - from the Royals knocking four first inning runs off Bryan Woo to Julio Rodríguez’ two homers to a late Kansas City rally off Jose A. Ferrer to Alex Hoppe blowing down the Royals’ best hitters in the ninth only for the Mariners to go down with a whimper in the bottom half by a 7-6 score - there were a lot of moments that made the difference.
But among those, there is one that is perhaps most instructive in two concepts: one, that baseball is a game of inches where defense matters (you already knew that), and two, that a run in the first is worth as much as a run in the ninth. This isn’t about ABS, but based on how ABS strategy is often discussed, a reminder is perhaps in order.
Bryan Woo’s two bad bookends fell in two separate but similar buckets.
Woo came into his start against the Cardinals as a potential clear Mariners ace. He left the sixth inning of his start against the Royals having given up 13 runs in his last nine innings and carrying a 4.61 ERA.
The story of how he got rocked for seven runs in three innings against the Redbirds has already been told, though that game was not defined by the bad start thanks to a big-time offensive showing. The M’s got four homers to power six runs at home, but it wasn’t enough this time.
Young Slugs RBI Double, Slaps Two-Run Single in Mariners’ Comeback Win over Twins
A .500 batting average and a .500 on-base percentage. 16 total bases in 22 at-bats. A 1.227 OPS. One home run, two doubles, and eight RBIs.
Those were Cole Young’s hitting stats over the Mariners’ 5-1 road trip to get back to .500 baseball by the end of April. Three of those RBIs came in the Mariners’ 5-3 win in their rubber match against the Minnesota Twins on Wednesday and two were as timely as could be with the M’s down one in the top of the ninth.
What goes up must go down, but the second baseman’s offensive breakout has been the Mariners’ best friend more than once in the young season on plenty of different-color diamonds.
George Kirby kept the Twins to two runs despite a big fourth inning opportunity.
Just like Logan Gilbert on Tuesday, George Kirby didn’t get the defense behind him that he wanted, with uneasy outfield play extending a fourth inning that saw the Twins put a pair of runs on the board and ballooned his pitch count enough to end up nixing the quality start and adding some workload for the Mariners bullpen.
M’s Beat Cards 11-9 in Bizarre Back-and-Forth Battle Despite Woo Blowup
Whatever happened between the Mariners and Cardinals on Saturday afternoon in Busch Stadium, it was one of the most beautiful examples of the chaos and unpredictability inherent in baseball. Perhaps it was fitting that all nine innings were played in the sun, what with the pastoral pastime unfolding in such a way as it did.
This was a game where Connor Joe knocked a game-tying single and Will Wilson drove in two of the Mariners’ runs, while Bryan Woo got smacked around for four homers and seven runs in just three innings pitched. Cole Young was a triple away from the cycle, while Mitch Garver had a multi-hit game even while getting a would-be homer robbed by the glove of Redbirds left fielder Nathan Church - who in turn mashed two big flies of his own but made the final two outs of the Mariners’ 11-9 victory.
And it was Leo Rivas, the same man who came into the game hitting .141, who delivered the go-ahead hit in the top of the ninth. Unlike many of the previous games, Rivas started on the bench on Saturday, logging two appearances. But in a game full of inflection points and twists, Rivas’ two appearances were some of the biggest moments of the game.
Julio Rodríguez set the tone with a second deck shot in the top of the first and Will Wilson launched his first career homer in the second.
Coming into Saturday, Julio Rodríguez had logged a hit in 16 of his past 48 at-bats, but 12 of those had been singles. Still, his process had been very sound after the slump of his first couple weeks, with Rodríguez driving stuff up the middle, drawing walks, and limiting strikeouts.