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.
Trade Revisited: Brendan Donovan a Costly Miss for Mariners Thus Far
Heading into the 2026 season, the Seattle Mariners were the odds-on favorite to represent the American League in the World Series. The Mariners have drastically underperformed those expectations, however, limping to the final month of the season barely clinging to playoff life.
Many fans want to clean house. Since ownership can’t be fired, Jerry Dipoto and Dan Wilson are on the chopping block. While nobody believes Wilson will survive the offseason, Dipoto deserves to keep his job, and Seattle fans should hope he sticks around for the long haul.
One of Dipoto’s big offseason swings might be viewed as a failure by the average fan, as Brendan Donovan has had an injury-plagued season and, like the entire team, has performed below expectations.
Hindsight is 20-20, but let’s revisit the offseason blockbuster to see who came out on top almost a season later
“I Was Trying to Be Me”: Lazaro Montes Excels in MLB Debut, M’s Win 9-6
Yordan Alvarez comparisons had long since fallen out of favor for Lazaro Montes, at least in neutral outlets. Although his power was palpable throughout his minor league tenure (he had 38 homers between Double-A and Triple-A between the beginning of the year and his promotion on Sept. 1), his swing-and-miss proclivities were a sharp departure from the imposing contact rates of perhaps the most complete hitter among the current generation.
The jury still doubts that Montes will be sterling Alvarez, while he still has more work to do to prove whether he was called up at the right time. But there’s no disputing that the Mariners’ most recent call-up had one of the best debuts anyone could possibly ask for.
When a slicing fly ball to dead center disappeared into the triangular mass of fans in that particular nook of Fenway Park’s iconic grandstands, Montes became the first Cuban player since Alvarez to homer in his MLB debut. He became the 38th debutant in baseball history to log a least a homer, walk, and two total hits, joining a club inaugurated by “Frosty Bill” Duggleby in 1898 [1].
“I was trying to be me, be myself like they told me and like I learned,” Montes said after the game. “And giving 100% no matter what happens.”
Hancock, Mariners Get Sunk by Flock of Blue Jays Big Flies, Own Rudderless Offense
If the Mariners drive this busted up tractor all the way to the postseason, Fernando Alonso himself should bestow their accolade.
Before the All-Star Break, the Mariners could have perhaps been considered a slightly above mediocre team that was underperforming to the level of a slightly below mediocre team. They had scored 392 runs and allowed 376 runs, not to the level of their supposed World Series contention but better than what has since followed.
With the conclusion of Seattle’s 8-1 loss to the Toronto Blue Jays on Friday, the M’s have now been outscored 215-135; with the second fewest runs in the majors ahead of only the Angels and the third most runs allowed behind only the A’s and Rockies. Their -80 run differential since the All-Star break is up there with said Athletics among the worst in the game, and if their .299 Pythagorean winning percentage would be a 48-114 record if it were applied evenly to a full season.
Their actual 16-22 second half record (instead of their Pythagorean 11-27) would be a 68-94 season extrapolated out. Not that such a performance is anywhere close to what they needed, but ever so barely, their overperformance - it could be euphemized to optimal run distribution - has kept them in the hunt for an AL West title. Even at a queasy 64-71, they are four games back of the Astros in the AL West.
If their play against their onetime ALCS rival is any indication, that last lick of resurgent energy could be all but spent. They are long since out of games to punt away, with a butcher’s bill dozens of contests long that shows no signs of letting up before the M’s can have a snowball’s chance of paying it off.
Incredibly, those metaphors were far less tortured than the team’s efforts on Friday night.
Emerson Hancock gave up two homers and five runs as his sweeper took a dip, with an injury scare to boot.
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.”
Miller Start Goes South, Mariners Lose 19-2 to Cubs
Bryce Miller’s previous start had become, for a given and quite load-bearing definition of “worst”, the worst loss in Mariners history, a 22-0 thrashing that began to be as humorous as it was maddening.
Going by that same run differential metric, Sunday was the fourth worst loss in team history, only behind their Milwaukee calamity, a 21-1 loss in Houston in 2019, and a 20-3 loss in Detroit back in 1993. It became the worst run differential ever in a Mariners home game, beating out three 16-1 losses.
The score was 19-2. Both teams left this series disappointed. Seattle, despite winning two out of three, had long since run out of games to punt, whereas the Cubs outscored their opponents 28-13 and lost the series.
“Today ended up similar to the other day, just kinda got out of hand, and those are tough ones,” said M’s skipper Dan Wilson. “Our team has shown the ability to flush them.”
While it is true that these awful losses haven’t set off any massive avalanches of failure, they haven’t been able to build any momentum from their successes, either. That’s why Sunday’s loss dropped them to 62-69, a record that would knock them out of commission in a normal year but one that barely keeps them afloat in the chase for the worst AL West since 1994, when the best team at the time of the strike was the 52-62 Texas Rangers.
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.
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.
Ugly Anniversary Sweep Symbolizes Futility of Mariners Nostalgia
Outsiders have doubted this franchise for 49 years,” Alvin Davis said to cap off the Mariners’ 50th anniversary. “Let that doubt fuel you; prove them wrong. We believe in you; prove us right.”
There comes a point where the past and future clash and one side must win. For the Mariners, this was no more obvious than when the team celebrated the 50th anniversary of the team’s inception over the course of 1976.
To put it diplomatically, the previous 50 years have been some of the most comically inept and irrelevant in American athletic history. Until “the Kid” came along, the most famous man to ever wear a Mariners logo was a serial killer; By the time Bill Bavasi was done with the team, the city saw him with equivalent contempt.
It’s hard to run out of ways to describe the depths of humiliation the team has found in 50 years. At least the Jacksonville Jaguars haven’t ever had that much raw generational talent; the M’s wasted the Hall of Fame primes of Ken Griffey Jr., Ichiro, and Edgar Martinez. If Randy Johnson hadn’t “quiet quit” more than two decades before that word entered common parlance, he would have suffered the same fate.
Nostalgia can be destructive even when the thing being looked back upon is good, but in the Mariners’ case, nostalgia seems diametrically opposed to success. It is as if there is a giant blinking neon sign telling the organization that it can choose one: dwelling on the past or winning a World Series. The M’s need not forget the past, but the outright reverence that the organization holds towards failure brings nothing but a rather karmic continuation of such.
After all, in 49 years of outsiders doubting the Seattle Mariners, those outsiders have been right 49 times. And based on the way the Mariners played against the Tampa Bay Rays - and the situation they put themselves in - there’s no reason to think that season 50 will end any differently.
Mariners Fall Lifeless for Shutout No. 11, Loss No. 60; Team Once Again at Brink
Less than 24 hours after another game that seemed like a potential jumping off point for the streak Seattle has sought all year, the team found themselves turned into a semi-liquid mass of pulp as the Tigers delivered one of the worst beatdowns all year: an 11-0 loss and the 11th time that the team has been shut out in the 2026 season.
The game was notable for being managed by bench coach Manny Acta, with Dan Wilson suspended one game due to Gabe Speier’s intentional hit-by-pitch on Wednesday. But it didn’t look like any sort of turned page for Seattle, who fell asleep at the dish after falling behind the Tigers early on, grounding into four double plays and failing to get an extra-base hit.
It was the 34th time this season that the Mariners have gone without an extra-base hit, most in MLB by three games. They’re on pace for 47 such games this season, which would land them in a 13-way tie for 34th most in the integration era. It would be the most ever in the 21st century.
Those extra base hits were the difference in the series against the Tigers, as the one game they managed to get more than singles, they scored four runs and logged their 56th win of the season. In the two games they didn’t, they scored zero runs in total. Thursday’s loss in particular came as a gut-punch, on the heels of benches-clearing near-fireworks on Wednesday.
The Mariners offense came crashing down to earth on Thursday, failing to score any runs.
For much of Wednesday’s game, the M’s were as scoreless as they had been on Tuesday and would be on Thursday. The scoreless tie was broken by a three-run homer from Julio Rodríguez in the sixth and Colt Emerson rocked a bomb in the eighth to cap off Wednesday’s 4-2 win, but that turned out to be all the runs the team scored in the series.
Mariners Walk Off Twins, Keep Momentum Alive Ahead of Trade Deadline
With the trade deadline just two days away, the Seattle Mariners’ season seemingly hinged on Saturday's game against the Minnesota Twins. With the contest tied 3-3 in the bottom of the ninth, Cal Raleigh delivered, driving home the winning run in walk-off fashion.
Seattle has struggled to put teams away all season, and that trend continued during the second game of the series. The Mariners scored three runs across the first two innings but were held scoreless the rest of the way until the ninth. This allowed the Twins to claw their way back, ultimately tying it up in the seventh inning.
The Mariners need to start stacking wins to make the playoffs, and Saturday's victory showed how they can do that.
Bats Clock Out Early, Mariners Drop Five Games Under in Game 111
The Mariners are five games under .500 for the second time this year. The first time was 25 games into the season, when they had a 4-9 record after an ugly sweep at the hands of the Texas Rangers. From then until the 62nd game of the year on June 2, they went 23-14 to take the division away from the Athletics and put themselves in the catbird seat as the team everyone expected to pull away with the West.
Two months later, the story of the AL West in 2026 could be summarized by paraphrasing the Sumerian King List: “Who was in first? Who was not in first?” But you don’t need a familiarity with 4,000-year-old Mesopotamian literature to see how the Mariners have dropped the ball and allowed the Rangers, then the Astros, to climb into first place. The bats have gone awfully quiet in the nearly 50 games since, with a .225/.297/.352 team slash line from June 3 to July 30. By the time the M’s faced off against the Twins on Friday, they were 53-57 and uncomfortably close to falling out of the race entirely.
When Mitch Garver struck out and finished a 5-3 loss, the situation declined even further. The M’s are now three games back of the division-leading Astros, two and a half games back of the Rangers for second place, and three games back of the Twins and Guardians for the third wild card spot. They are guaranteed a losing season record against the Guardians and Rangers - effectively making them a game further behind those teams - while one more loss to the Twins would lock in that same losing tiebreaker with them, too.
The bats fell asleep for six innings and missed opportunities throughout.
If the Mariners ever got the chance to wish into existence one simple change to their team, it might be prudent to choose the ability to punish mistakes. Underneath much of it, Seattle has a remarkably bad performance against pitches right down the middle: against pitches in the middle square of the strike zone - imagine it split like a tic-tac-toe grid - the M’s went into Friday night with the lowest batting average (.275), fifth-lowest slugging (.552), and sixth-lowest hard-hit rate (49.1%). These become even more stark when sorting for just fastball-type pitches: the lowest batting average (.279), third-lowest slugging (.522), and fifth-lowest hard-hit rate (51.9%).
Part of it is due to some bum luck, with a .234 batting average on balls in play (BABIP) on such pitches; one might imagine it would coalesce towards the .306 leaguewide middle-middle BABIP. The following graph shows the difference in spray locations between the Mariners and the team with both the highest batting average and highest slugging on pitches down the middle, the Phillies:
Mariners Drop First Game of Critical Rangers Series
Every contest is an opportunity for a team to advance one game in the standings. The Mariners entered Friday night’s game having won 51 of those opportunities and lost 52 of them. They hadn’t given much indication at all that they could transform themselves into a competent, consistent squad during those 103 games, with every speck of momentum mired in a following slump, and with the team seemingly unwilling to impose themselves on the game.
At times, it appears that the team really wishes to turn things around. At others, they seem convinced that they can’t really control or influence what happens during a game. Skipper Dan Wilson didn’t touch upon the divisional implications of the loss, instead focusing on an offense that he saw as indicative of an upswing and a level of fight he admired.
“The score didn’t go our way tonight, but I thought we did a lot of good things offensively. We particularly really put a lot of pressure on it, a lot of pitches on. I thought they took their walks when we needed them, and able to get some hits and create a lot of traffic,” Wilson said. “I like the way they continue to fight back as they always do. Got behind after the solo shot, came back in it, got behind after the two-run shot, and were able to jump right back in it again. And they kept fighting ‘til the end.”
There is a difference between finding silver linings and blinding oneself to one’s own flaws. If that was the Mariners fighting, it goes a good ways to explain their season-long lethargy. It may have been one of the least close one-run games ever played, with the score only reaching 5-4 in the ninth because they lucked into a two-out wild pitch. Once they fell behind 5-3 in the bottom of the sixth, they had two total baserunners for the final three innings of the game.
This is flatly not how a contending team plays against a divisional opponent, let alone one that the world fancied as runaway division champions before the season. Their autopsy for Friday’s game has long since started to resemble an autopsy for the whole season, though as has held true the entire year, the other American League teams have been too busy immuring their own chances to take advantage of Seattle walling itself off.
Mariners’ Meandering Losses to Reds Leave Team Shrinking Breathing Room
On March 31, 2026, the Mariners lost their sixth game of the season and fell to a .500 record. The team did so again on July 21, and in the 111 days between, they performed that same act thrice (June 20 and 25, July 9). Five times in between those days (April 3 and 29, May 29, June 29, and July 19), the M’s did the opposite, winning a game to get back to an even record.
Before the season, the team was held as one of the best squads in the American League. According to FanGraphs, they went into Wednesday’s matinee with the second-highest chance to win the World Series of any American League team, only behind the Yankees.
But the experience for the Mariners in 2026 has been a dreary cycle of drought and drenching. They get a set of wins and then the foot goes off the gas. They lose a bunch, struggle a bunch, and then get a cathartic burst of energy that sets them off for some wins. Rinse and repeat: 63% of the way through the season, they won half and lost half.
Wednesday wasn’t encouraging. Once again - this time by a score of 5-3 - the Mariners fell below .500, having lost the following two games of their series against the Reds to turn what could have been a momentum-bringing homestand into yet more water-treading.
Tuesday’s loss had been a little more of an encouraging one, with good at-bats during most of the game - other than clutch situations, as has been depressingly common with the team - and some good defensive plays by the Reds keeping Mariners runs off the board. But a mystifying decision by skipper Dan Wilson to put Michael Rucker in ended in a ninth-inning homer for Cincinnati and the complete dissipation of the team’s energy.
Both games were winnable, but the team plainly lacked the killer instinct to put the Reds away. Seattle is now 52-53; they would have to go 38-19 over the rest of the year just to match their win total from 2025. In more immediate terms, the losses continue their gradual, brick-by-brick immurement in the divisional race.
Mariners Build Momentum Ahead of Trade Deadline, Clinch Series Win With 6-3 Win vs. Giants
Seattle won their second straight game against the lowly Giants 6-3. Behind six strong innings from starter Logan Gilbert, a shutdown bullpen, and timely hitting, the Mariners looked primed to go on a run to put their first-half struggles in the rearview mirror.
With two weeks remaining until the trade deadline, Seattle needed to come out of the All-Star break with some urgency. After getting throttled in the first game of the series 7-0, it looked like the team had not used their time off to reset well. But after two satisfying victories, and the struggling Cincinnati Reds coming into town, Seattle is one more series win away from cementing itself as a buyer in the wide-open American League.
Dan Wilson pushed all the right buttons Sunday, a rare sentence for this Mariners club. His timely deployment of pinch-hitters and bullpen usage showcased what this ballclub can look like at its best. Yet there are still some things to work on as with any baseball team.
Bats Take Nine-Inning Nap as Giants Pummel Mariners 7-0
A little over a year before Friday night, Julio Rodríguez announced that he would not participate in an All-Star Game he had been selected for, noting he would rather focus on improving his own game to a better standard.
Rodríguez wasn’t on the field on Friday, recovering from a concussion sustained earlier that month when a Nolan Schanuel throw bounced off the back of his head. Concussions are a case of needing however much time he needs in order to recover from the knock. But it means he can’t lead by example as he did after the Mariners’ horrific loss in the Bronx last year.
And it seems no other hitter is willing to put himself forward in such a way. The starting pitchers have borne the brunt of the blame when they’ve let the team down, especially Bryan Woo. But aside from some strong words from Cal Raleigh after a pungent loss in Cleveland - words that seemingly only went heeded for a six-game stretch - it has been crickets from the team leaders and an utter lack of urgency from the manager.
“It’s the first one back, and I think guys got back in the groove today and looking for us to come out tomorrow and have different results,” said M’s skipper Dan Wilson, “Obviously, you want to get off on the second half with a win, but just weren’t able to get anything going offensively and tomorrow we get a chance to turn that around.”
Those may have been Wilson’s strongest words after his team lost 7-0 to a shambolic San Francisco Giants squad that entered the game 41-55, second only to the Colorado Rockies in NL West helplessness. Sure, one of their few bright spots, a 21-year-old masher named Bryce Eldrige, did some of the damage. But the M’s made visiting starter Landen Roupp, a C-list pitcher on a good day, look like a veritable barnburner.
It can’t go on like this - well, in the immortal words of Mick McCarthy, it can - but the M’s won’t be a playoff team or even a .500 team if it does.
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