Cole Young Walks Mets Off; Mariners Win Seventh Straight
A baseball club in Seattle is showing that when it rains, it pours. Through May 24, the team went 7-12 in one-run games and lost four out of five extra-innings contests. Since then, the M’s have won three of each, with all the luck falling their way even in games where they leave quite a lot on the table.
All three of those have been walk-off wins, each from the bat of a different Mariner. Monday’s hero in the end was Cole Young, but unlike the others, there was a notable uniqueness to his hit. During the game, 22 players had plate appearances on Monday night. Four had hit home runs, but other than Young, no hitter had found a patch of green grass or evaded the waiting glove of an opponent.
Mariners manager Dan Wilson smirked as he described his team’s “flair for the dramatic” after the game, the team’s second straight 3-2 10-inning victory. That was certainly an understatement, though the drama started with dueling lineup card moves between the managers.
Seattle tried to play coy with the lineup against the Mets opener, but the visitors got the hurling they sought.
For the first time all year, the Mariners faced a team going with the fabled “opener” strategy, with listed starter Austin Warren being a bullpen arm tasked with beginning the game. That setup has its issues, but so had Manaea; the once-blockbuster signing entered the game with a 5.56 ERA entirely as a relief arm.
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?
Analysis: Why Continue Piggyback When Tactic Lacks Intended Benefit?
From the score of the game itself, the Mariners’ performance on Monday against the A’s was as good as they could hope for. Seattle took advantage of some defensive miscues in the top of the third to scratch across a pair of runs before the wheels flew off Sacramento starter Aaron Civale’s bus with two outs and the team wound up with a 6-0 lead before the end of the frame and a 9-2 win by the end of the game.
But that explosion of runs papered over some clear tension as the team continued to use its tactic of piggybacking two of their six starters. To be abundantly clear, the tension itself isn’t the main reason why the idea is flawed - that would be the self-imposed constraints on player usage - but given that it seems to have been adopted in order for such tension to be avoided, the uneasiness was notable and instructive.
Bryce Miller had spun a gem given his pitch limitations on Tuesday, May 19, going 5 ⅔ innings in the first of Seattle’s attempted piggybacked starts. The game fell apart in the ninth as the M’s tried to stretch the piggyback beyond the point where it made sense, but Miller’s performance itself during that game was a good sign.
It’s Time for Dan Wilson, Mariners to End Platoon Obsession
The Seattle Mariners began this season with a clear plan to cycle through several players. A “platoon” in baseball is defined as a “a managerial strategy where two players share a single defensive position, alternating starts based on the handedness of the opposing starting pitcher.”
For example, the Mariners signed Rob Refsnyder this offseason to mash against left-handed pitching. When Seattle faced a right-handed starter, Dominic Canzone and Luke Raley would be in the lineup with Refsnyder on the bench.
But after 55 games, now closer to the halfway point of the season than the season opener, it’s time to ditch this approach.
Mariners Show Mediocre Makeup, Roll Over Dead in 5-0 Defeat to Royals
Friday’s game, a 5-0 loss for the Mariners, was over in the first inning. It didn’t matter how many ostensibly good hitters were in the lineup, and it wouldn’t have mattered if Cal Raleigh had been healthy and swinging. George Kirby got the benefit of the baseball world’s decision in eons past to go with ERA instead of RA/9, therefore getting the quality start. In fairness to him, an error (this time J.P. Crawford quite literally dropping the ball while standing on second base when Cole Young sent him a toss for a force out, rather hilariously charged as a throwing error on Young) directly led to that first inning becoming a three-run frame instead of a one-run frame, but Kirby didn’t do well to avoid contact in those situations, with far too much tilted chucking down the pipe.
Royals starter Stephen Kolek cruised from the first inning to the last, becoming the fourth pitcher league-wide to log a complete game shutout. Simply by throwing strikes and forcing the Mariners to make contact, the hurler broke them down as a light touch breaks a rust-ridden nail. Despite striking out only two batters, the Mariners got just four hits in 32 at-bats. Outside of Luke Raley and Cole Young, they got none. The team barely even looked sharp enough to be in the defending-everything-means-defending-nothing zone of bad hitting; they simply appeared to give up right off the rip.
Perhaps that is a little inaccurate. After all, when Raley and Young knocked a pair of one-out singles in the top of the second, the M’s had the beginnings of some sort of rally. It was quickly snuffed out as Dominic Canzone swung at a changeup in the dirt and grounded into a double play.
M’s Take Close, Stable Pitcher’s Duel to Begin Road Trip in Kansas City
The Mariners have seen games take wild courses in Kauffman Stadium over the past few years, but on Friday night, it was remarkably stable. Both teams struggled quite a bit at the plate, leading to a low-scoring pitcher’s duel, but one home run for the visitors led to Seattle taking a 2-0 lead and the M’s bullpen went all according to plan.
Logan Gilbert threw nearly six shutout innings, recovering from his seven-run disaster against the Padres.
The last time Logan Gilbert had gone out to the mound, he had thrown 21 of his 27 first pitches for strikes, yet the San Diego Padres jumped on them for seven runs in total. Gilbert threw 15 of 21 first pitches for strikes on Friday, yet he kept the opposing Royals scoreless.
Talking with the media before the game, manager Dan Wilson downplayed concerns that the Mariners’ strike-throwing had allowed hitters to sit on and ambush early strikes.
“We do attack the zone, we do want to get ahead, and I think it’s a different at-bat when you do,” Wilson said before Friday’s game. “I think the good always outweighs the bad when it comes to that.”
Of course, the devil is in the details. Looking at a map of these first pitches, with those against San Diego on the left and those against Kansas City on the right, there are a couple things that are clear.
Welcome to the Show: Colt Emerson Whacks Big Jack for First Career Hit, M’s Top White Sox 6-1
On Sunday morning, the Mariners brass was faced with a decision. Brendan Donovan had re-injured his groin during a game against the Astros, and with Leo Rivas’ struggles continuing unabated and an unclear timeline for Patrick Wisdom (though he was evidently taken off the IL the following day), the time was arriving for 20-year-old top prospect Colt Emerson. At least, that’s the decision that the front office made.
“We think he’s the best option,” Hollander said about Emerson on Sunday. “This period will give him some runway; this is not a 15 at-bat or a 20 at-bat tryout to see if he’s capable of taking the job and running with it for the rest of the year.”
One key homer does not a good player make, but when Emerson sent a low liner a hair’s breadth above the yellow crown of T-Mobile park’s right field wall in the bottom of the eighth - a shot that put the M’s up by the 6-1 score that would prove final - Seattle got a glimpse of things that may be.
Colt Emerson’s first major league hit was a three-run homer to turn a close lead into a comfortable one.
When Emerson went up to the dish, the momentum of the game had left a growing pit in many stomachs across the Northwest. Seattle had scored one run on a Julio Rodríguez bomb in the first, another on a third inning Randy Arozarena RBI double that was more memorable for what happened between second and third, and a run-scoring Josh Naylor single in the sixth.
But despite an electric double steal growing the inning into a second-and-third, one out opportunity, neither Cole Young nor Emerson had cashed in, and a homer followed by a bunch of stranded traffic had put the wind at the White Sox’ back.
Banged Up Mariners’ Bullpen Needs to Weather Mid-May Storm
During a 162-game marathon of an MLB season, there is bound to be some attrition and injuries. It’s a natural part of the game. Every team goes through it. It’s not very often that a specific position group on one team gets hit seemingly all at once with the injury bug.
The Seattle Mariners are currently down three different relievers that they were counting on to get big outs late in games. Flamethrower Matt Brash and lefty Gabe Speier seemingly got hurt on the same day. That means they quite literally are without the two top bullpen arms manager Dan Wilson uses to get through the seventh and eighth innings before the closer Andres Muñoz closes it down in the ninth.
Mariners Bats Give Kirby Vintage King Félix Treatment, M’s Drop Winnable Contest to Braves
The names and faces change but the general concept remains the same. Gone are the days when a pitcher like Steve Carlton could win 27 games for a team that only won 59 games total; in modern baseball, such pitchers get saddled with no-decisions, a concept pioneered by a 13-12 Félix Hernández in 2010 who won the Cy Young Award on the back of his league-leading 2.27 ERA.
That was still 21.3% of that awful Mariners team’s wins. They weren’t quite as bad as Carlton’s old side. They may have given 702 plate appearances to Chone Figgins and 278 more to Milton Bradley, but there are few teams who were ever as bad as the ‘72 Not-Really-Phightin’ Phils.
Arisen during the career of that selfsame Hernández was the term “Félix Quality Start”, based on the definition of quality start (six innings or more, three earned runs or less) but narrowed in scope to seven innings or more and two earned runs or less. Hernández got plenty of those in his career.
Another Mariner got such a start on Tuesday night, and like a lot of those “King Félix” outings of old, his team lost 3-2. Whether it is an aberration or a harbinger, it is still too soon to tell. But the hour of judgment is drawing nearer than those in T-Mobile Park might like to admit.
George Kirby put together a “Félix Quality Start” against one of the best teams in baseball.
With a direly stretched bullpen, the Mariners needed their starter to go deep into the game. And with an offense once again struggling to put anything together, he needed to keep the Braves to a low score.
How Much Did Managerial Decisions Matter in Mariners’ Losses to Padres?
Top of the sixth, Mariners down by three, bases loaded, one out. A white-hot Luke Raley was set to come to the plate, having had eight hits in his last 14 at-bats, but the Padres replaced struggling reliever Bradgley Rodriguez with powerhouse lefty Adrián Morejón. Mariners manager Dan Wilson played the match-ups and brought in the right-handed Connor Joe.
Joe struck out on three pitches. The Mariners weren’t able to score again in the game and lost 5-2 in the end, falling to the business end of the Padres’ heavy-hitting bullpen and losing their eighth straight road game.
Should Raley have stayed in the game? Well, perhaps a less extremely platoony lefty should have stayed in as a proverbial “hot hand”, but Raley is one of the most platoony hitters in the game. His career .247/.335/.463 slash line against right-handers is offset by his .182/.249/.284 slash line against left-handers. Hot or not, he simply does not hit against left-handers, which is why the team signed Rob Refsnyder - but Refsnyder was out on paternity leave, leaving the M’s with four right-handed options: Leo Rivas, Mitch Garver, Connor Joe, and Patrick Wisdom.
Naylor Bombs, Kirby Strikes Finish Mariners’ Four-Game Sweep against Astros
How quickly things can turn around for a baseball club. Just four days prior, the Mariners took a badly-needed rest day as they came off a five-game skid to round out an opening baker’s dozen contests where each series had been worse than the last: a four-game split, a three-game series loss to a good team (the Yankees), a three-game series loss to a bad one (the Angels), and a three-game sweep at the hands of the Texas Rangers.
And then an odd thing happened: the M’s got handed a get-right series by the Houston Astros of all teams. The same Astros that had tyrannized the division for a decade, with a philosophy of a never-ending window and an organization that seemed to churn out All-Stars like butter. But early in April, Houston’s arms have been either banged-up, straight-up bad, or both.
With that and a bit of mental fortitude, a Mariners offense who had scored 40 runs in their first 13 games finished up a 29-run four-game set with a 6-2 victory over their rivals on Monday, completing as big a sweep as an April series can offer.
Josh Naylor finally broke through his early-season slump, mashing two homers and knocking in five.
For much of the beginning of the year, even during the sparse games when the offense put up strong numbers, the bulk of the production had been coming from the bottom of the lineup. Even in the turnaround game on Friday and the thunderous comeback on Saturday, it was Randy Arozarena and bottom of the order that got the party started.
Analysis: What Does Cal Raleigh Non-Challenge Mean for Mariners ABS Strategy?
Use it or lose it. That’s a phrase that applies to many things in life: youth, a second language, differential calculus, Mark Knopfler’s finger-picking technique, and as of the beginning of the 2026 Major League Baseball season, your team’s two Automated Ball-Strike (ABS) system challenges.
Here are the rules: each team gets two ABS challenges for balls and strikes that must be used immediately after any pitch is thrown. If a challenge is unsuccessful, one challenge is taken away from that team. If a team is out of challenges by the beginning of any extra inning, they get one more.
On Thursday night in Seattle, the Cleveland Guardians offered two challenges: one by catcher Bo Naylor to overturn a 2-2 ball call and strike out Cole Young in the bottom of the fifth inning, and the other a failed challenge by left fielder Steven Kwan after a 1-2 Logan Gilbert slider veered back onto the strike zone at the last gasp.
The Mariners didn’t use any.
Mariners’ Andrés Muñoz Enters 2026 as Top-Level Closer - Can He Become Best in Baseball?
Any premier baseball team needs a top-line reliever for the biggest situations, and the Mariners’ Andrés Muñoz proved himself time and again in 2025. How does he stack up against baseball’s other elite closers?
Three Takeaways from Mariners 2026 Coaching Staff Announcements
The Mariners announced their coaching staff going into 2026, and although most of the figures from their recently concluded season are coming back, that in and of itself - along with the additions that did take place - give a window into Seattle’s plans.
Eduard Bazardo Had Breakout Season in 2025; Can He Recover from Game 7 Disaster?
One of the biggest surprises out of Seattle’s bullpen in 2025 was the stamina and ability of Eduard Bazardo, who filled out the middle innings more than anyone else over the course of the year. But can the breakout reliever recover from his Game 7 blown save?
Glimpsing Offseason Priorities: Four Takeaways from Mariners’ End-of-Season Interviews
The Mariners front office responded to the media’s questions on Thursday morning, offering some indication—however murky—about their plans for 2026. What were the four key things that the press conference told us?
Decisions Behind Disaster: Managerial Tendencies Sunk Mariners in Game 7
Mariners manager Dan Wilson made a decision that will live in infamy during Game 7, and the mistake cost the M’s the season. That decision and others on Monday reflected long-visible managerial tendencies that Wilson will have to adjust come 2026.
Heartbreak: George Springer Ends Mariners Season in Game 7 of the ALCS
The Mariners couldn’t get it done. That much is not new; it has been true 48 times before. But the way it happened in 2025 was one that brought the city of Seattle closer than they had ever come—and that is why it stung the hardest.
‘All Hands on Deck’: Mariners Face Blue Jays in ALCS Game 7
For the very first time, the Mariners are playing in a Game 7, but it will be in hostile territory as Toronto looks to punch their own World Series ticket in their friendly confines. Do the M’s have what it takes to reach the Fall Classic?
Good Vibes Only: Inside Geno Suárez' Finest Hour
Eugenio Suárez’ Game 5 go-ahead grand slam was a long time coming for the once and present Mariner, and the moment was one that will be remembered in the Emerald City for generations.
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