Pereda, Mariners Clobber Mets 8-3; Win Streak Extends to Eight
It’s not clear exactly which Mariner defined the team’s resounding 8-3 victory on Tuesday night. Perhaps it was catcher Jhonny Pereda, whose putaway homer represented a recovery from the canonical worst experience for a catcher to have. Or maybe it was Colt Emerson, who increased his OPS to .935 with a pair of hits and who finished off the game with a sweet sliding catch. A case could be made for Patrick Wisdom, who logged his first Mariners home run and got the hitting party started way back in the second.
All three of those, it might be noted, began 2026 with the Triple-A Tacoma Rainiers.
But regardless of whoever may be first among equals, the Mariners had a steadily stiffening hold on the game from start to finish. Even when the visiting Mets tied it up in the third, Seattle kept the pressure going against bulk hurler Jonah Tong and New York soon cracked. And the M’s finally logged a string of three straight series wins.
“Boy, if I had the magic touch, we’d keep it forever,” Wilson said of his team’s eight-game win streak. “Sometimes that’s just the game, and we’ve talked about how offense is contagious, and it just feels like the energy offensively has been outstanding … we’ve seen just how exciting it can be when it gets that way.”
Patrick Wisdom knocked his first Mariners homer to put Seattle up 2-0 early.
Coming into Tuesday’s game, the Mariners had hit a grand total of 18 home runs in their previous seven contests, a pace of 2.57 homers per game. That isn’t going to be sustainable over the long term; the highest figure a team has ever posted was a tie between the 2023 Atlanta Braves and 2019 Minnesota Twins at 1.90 home runs per game. But it was a marked upturn from Seattle’s 1.11 home runs per game figure, and after Tuesday, the M’s have hit 1.31 home runs per game in all of 2026.
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.
Arozarena, Mariners Gut Out Series Win vs. White Sox
It would be quite an understatement to say a Wednesday win was badly needed after the gut-punch the Mariners had suffered on Tuesday.
Luckily for Seattle (with luck indeed on the team’s side more often than not), the M’s gutted out the afternoon rubber match, defying even a no-outs, bases loaded miss to put up five runs and win the game 5-4. It was their first one-run win since May 4 and 24th win on the whole year, though they still sit three games under despite heroics from Randy Arozarena and Jhonny Pereda.
Emerson Hancock pitched an uneasy five innings but avoided extra damage.
Wednesday’s game gave Mariners starter Emerson Hancock the chance for revenge on the only team to yet put up a crooked number on him in 2026. Results were mixed innings-wise, but the hurler kept the White Sox to far less runs than the five he had given up in Chicago.
The strangeness of the sport was on display in the second and third innings for the Mariners starter. Despite a whistle-clean first inning, Hancock lost his control in the second, unable to figure out the release point on his fastball. One heater after another flew high and away to the lefty Colson Montgomery for a leadoff five-pitch walk, followed by four straight up and in to Chase Meidroth. He tried to get his feel back with a sweeper to Jarred Kelenic, only for it to bounce out of Jhonny Pereda’s reach and advance the runners - but the wild pitch scarcely mattered since Kelenic walked anyway.
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.
Bullpen Locks Down Four Frames, Mariners Eke Out 3-1 Win in Houston
It was power on power in the bottom of the ninth. Mariners closer Andrés Muñoz, who had reached 101.3 miles an hour two pitches earlier, had a 2-2 count against Yordan Alvarez himself. Alvarez represented the tying run, and with 13 home runs already this season, he was a real threat to knot the game.
Muñoz tossed his rarest pitch, a 93.2 mile an hour changeup that tailed away from Alvarez. Expecting either a roaring fastball up or a slider along the lower edges, he was completely flummoxed; the Mariners won 3-1 as Alvarez struck out.
For a team desperately in need of a hot streak, getting any win on the board against Houston was a plus. George Kirby didn’t go as deep into the game as the M’s would have hoped and the bats fell silent for nearly the entire game, but they got just enough production while Kirby and every other arm stepped up enough run-prevention wise to notch Seattle’s 20th victory.
Mariners hitters put three early runs on the board but fell familiarly silent as the game wore on.
The second inning was fruitful for Seattle. Randy Arozarena knocked a one-out single into right and Luke Raley walked to set a two-runner table, and with two outs, both Dominic Canzone and Cole Young found the outfield for an RBI each. Julio Rodríguez rocked a towering homer to begin the third.
And then 20 of the next 23 batters made outs.
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.
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.
Two Electric Homers Give Mariners Comeback Win against White-Hot Braves
Home runs are thrown, not hit. That is an adage that holds up among the best and most consistent hitters in the game, who take what is given to them and do the most they can with it, whether that means lining one the other way or launching it in the air. When a hitter tries to force a home run on a pitch that won’t allow it, there are a whole lot of outcomes like strikeouts and rolled-over grounders that end up much worse for the hitter.
Paradoxically, this also means that home runs are determined by the hitter. Pitchers who allow fly balls will allow home runs, but it’s up to the hitter to put that swing on it when it comes.
A lot of hitters tried to hit homers on Monday night in Seattle as the Braves took on the Mariners, the visitors white-hot and the home crew struggling. While nobody could get it done with the bases loaded, six hits left the yard: four for Atlanta and two for Seattle, but the M’s got theirs with men on base and won 5-4.
Logan Gilbert got through six innings by the skin of his teeth, with three solo shots coming in the last frame.
Gilbert’s efficiency issues over the past two seasons are well documented. After throwing a combined 3.8 pitches per plate appearance from 2022 through 2024, Gilbert threw 5.2 per plate appearance from May 2025 through the end of 2025. Batters’ adjusted to his style of pitching, laying off the splitter thanks to the predictability of its usage, but they still had issues squaring up the pitches, jacking up his pitch counts thanks to tons of foul balls and good takes.
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.
Living on the Sweet Spot, Two Mariners Dialed in to Open 2026 Season
You hear it the second you start playing baseball as a kid. “Find the sweet spot” on the bat. If you rope one to center field, you might hear a parent or coach yell “way to find the sweet spot!” They call it the sweet spot of the bat for a few reasons. In my personal experience, that was the spot on the bat where it didn’t even feel like you made contact. The contact between ball and bat was so optimal, that it didn’t reverberate into my hands at all.
Of course, for big leaguers, the sweet spot really means, the highest quality of contact. In fact, MLB’s glossary has an official definition for “the sweet spot.” It states, “colloquially, a player who hits the ball solidly is said to have gotten the "sweet spot" of the bat on the ball. The sweet spot classification quantifies that as a batted-ball event with a launch angle ranging from 8 to 32 degrees.”
So, it’s not necessarily a geographic location on the bat itself. Rather, it’s the quality of the contact, mostly considering the launch angle.
Mariners’ Plan Finally Functions, but Questions Linger from Walk-Off Win vs. A’s
For better or for worse, the Seattle Mariners haven’t wavered from their game plan after losing 15 of their first 25 games. All across the team, the players have bought into the plan that the organization built, trusting the process to get them out of their current rut.
“I really rely on the hitting coaches to help us out every day, and they do such an incredible job, but I think it’s just staying on the process and having fun while playing, knowing that failure is your friend, and learning to accept it,” first baseman Josh Naylor told Mariners TV’s Ryan Rowland-Smith after hitting a walk-off single to salvage a 5-4 win in the team’s three-game series against the Athletics.
In a team sport, this stubbornness can be beneficial.
The best laid schemes of mice and men, to translate Robert Burns [1], often go awry. “No plan survives first contact with the enemy” goes a similar phrase often misattributed to 19th century Prussian general Helmuth von Moltke the Elder.
But trying to tweak a plan that is veering a bit off course can just end up making things a whole lot worse. For a baseball team, there are always going to be good and bad spells. The most effective plans have an inherent flexibility [2] - and if Seattle’s plans go fully off the rails, it will be because they are inflexible - but in the absence of anything else, believing in the process can end up being the best a struggling team can have.
Mariners Should Learn Two Lessons from Monday Loss to Athletics - But Will They?
The old adage goes as follows: you win a third of your games, you lose a third of your games, and it’s the third in the middle that counts. So it goes for baseball teams and aspiring politicians alike.
Monday’s game was squarely one of those middle games, but the reasons the Mariners lost 6-4 can be sorted into two camps: roster construction and roster usage. The M’s went 1-12 with runners in scoring position, but this is something the team basically just has to weather for the rest of the year when it shows up.
But as for the use case of Casey Legumina and when to take out the left-handed member of a platoon? The M’s and manager Dan Wilson got a couple pieces of useful information on Monday night.
That information, however, only goes so far as the Mariners will take it. But first, a little on the initial five and a half frames.
M’s Fall Back to Fallen Bats, Offense Goes Limp in 4-1 Loss to Padres
Seattle took full advantage of a get-right series in the standings, at least, but when it came to resetting the hitters, the lessons evidently didn’t stick. The lone run of the Mariners’ 4-1 loss to the Padres on Tuesday was a bases-loaded sacrifice fly, with no other sources of production. Bryan Woo got handed his second loss of the season thanks to the resurgent incapability of his hitters and a little bit of poor defense to boot.
It’s beginning to seem like this is what the 2026 Mariners offense really is.
The Mariners offense took a big step back against healthy MLB pitching, failing to capitalize on some early opportunities.
On Friday, the Mariners had begun a series of cold versus cold, taking on a skidding Astros club and spitting out their rivals with a four-game sweep. From near-disaster to near-.500 was one thing, but Tuesday’s game presented a contest of hot versus hot. The Padres entered the series coming off a four-game sweep of the Colorado Rockies and with a five game winning streak, though the Dodgers’ hot start meant that the Dads were further behind first in the NL West (two games) than the M’s were in the AL West (one and a half games).
But against Petco Park’s perennial playoff contenders rather than a banged-up (in the understatement of the century) Astros hurling staff, the M’s had to deal with good starters and elite relievers.
Crawford Completes Comeback with Walk-Off Single, Mariners Best Astros 8-7
“J.P.! J.P.! J.P.!” rang out the chorus of 43,294 happy, exhausted spectators on Saturday night. Perhaps some of the Central Washington students among them (who had a special discount for the game and got some CWU-themed jerseys) were planning on continuing the night on Lower Queen Anne or Capitol Hill; the older and wiser CWU alums in the crowd were probably set to take their modes of transportation home so as to get some shuteye. All of them shared in the electricity of the evening’s end.
Mariners shortstop J.P. Crawford hadn’t been part of much of the first two weeks of the season for Seattle, nursing a shoulder injury sustained in Spring Training, and the first five games of his season saw him hit a paltry .118 over 26 plate appearances.
“I was going crazy not being able to play,” Crawford told Mariners TV’s Ryan Rowland-Smith after the game.
The Mariners shortstop had put together a 1-3 game with two walks during Seattle’s skid-breaking win on Friday, hitting leadoff with Brendan Donovan out of the lineup with an illness. But Saturday night saw him punch through a pair of massive bases-loaded singles to bookend the team’s biggest comeback of the young year.
Randy Arozarena’s Mammoth Fifth Inning Homer Reverses Hitting Woes, M’s Beat Stros 9-6
The look on Andrés Muñoz’ face told it all as Leo Rivas stepped on third to complete the final out: exhaustion and catharsis.
It was a feeling that reverberated around Mariners country as the team won its first game and nearly a week, put more than two runs on the board for the first time in a few days, and had a solid defensive showing after scores of innings full of botched glovework.
The Astros’ struggling pitching and the Mariners’ struggling offense both showed early on Friday.
Ichiro’s statue unveiling outside T-Mobile Park on Friday night encountered an unusual mishap: the bat cracked and bent at the handle as the tarp was taken off to unveil it.
It was the proverbial picture that said a thousand words about the Mariners offense. Over the first 13 games, the Mariners had failed to score before extras in four of them. The whole batting crew had looked about as lost as three Roman legions in the Teutoberg Forest.
Familiar Culprits Waste Kirby Complete Game as M’s Drop Fourth Straight
The Mariners fielded their first full top-depth lineup of the 2026 season on Tuesday, but it didn’t lead to much production on the offensive side of the ball. The defense - this time, even standout defender Cole Young, though through positioning and not bad glovework per se - continued giving away runs to the Mariners’ opponents on the way to a one-run loss thanks to said baffled bats.
Kirby worked very efficiently early in the game, but yet more hibernating hitters and letdowns on defense gave him his first career loss to Texas.
Brendan Donovan hit a home run on the very first pitch of the game. Cal Raleigh had an excellent two-out piece of hitting against a top-edge fastball, driving it into center for an RBI single. That was the only hit with runners in scoring position, bringing the team’s RISP slash line down to .216/.327/.371.
But with a guy on the mound with a career 1.04 ERA against the Texas Rangers, those two runs still gave them a shot.
Bats Go from Quiet to Silent, Mariners Drop Third Straight to Open Texas Series
Sometimes, when a good team is in a rut of bad performance, it only takes one good break to open the floodgates and turn things around.
But when the M’s put up eight against the Guardians, or walked off the Yankees, or stole a theretofore scoreless match in extras from the Angels - or when Cal Raleigh launched one halfway into the upper deck on Monday night in Arlington, Texas - it was less like the great floodgates opening and releasing an overpowering torrent and more like little droplets of water gathering on the collection surface of a solar desalination plant: the tiny pellet of hydration was followed by yet more aridity.
Cal Raleigh finally found his stroke in his first at-bat of the game, torching a middle-middle Jacob DeGrom fastball 418 feet to right field.
What’s that old saying about the darkest time of the night? Well, the sun only shone for one at-bat in the top of the first and then quickly went away again (what’s the inverse of an eclipse?), but at least Cal Raleigh got himself into the .500s in OPS (talk about scarce droplets of water!) by the end of the night.
Sluggish Mariners Start Hitting Late, Drop Series to Yankees
Things won’t usually go well when you are scoreless for 16 straight innings and score one run in the span of 23 innings. Seattle dealt with quite a lot of those stretches in 2025, and even with a bolstered offense for the new year, it looks like that issue won’t go away, even if it’s the heart of the lineup in the doghouse this time.
Seattle made it interesting in the late innings, but too many mistakes on all sides of the ball gave Cole Young, one of the M’s riding a hot streak, the unfortunate task of being the final out.
George Kirby deals through five but gets some dear punishment from Paul Goldschmidt after walking two in the sixth.
If “Furious George” had forgotten how much he hates walks before Wednesday’s action, his second start of the season surely reminded him. All three batters Kirby walked came around to score, starting in the first inning as Cody Bellinger walked and stole second before Ben Rice scorched a double down the right field line for New York’s first run.
Cal Raleigh Walks Off Yankees, Mariners Take One-Run Win Despite Missed Chances
The Mariners exited the weekend four-game set against the Guardians having scored nine more runs than their opponents but with just as many losses as wins. One-run games on Thursday and Saturday both went against the hosts, with the team seemingly figuring out how to deploy its roster in close matchups.
Seattle faced another one-run game against a 3-0 Yankees team on Monday night, and although the pitching was filthy, both the defense and offense seemed to have a bad case of the Mondays, letting several opportunities slip past at the dish and serving up a key non-out to New York in the seventh. But all’s well that ends well, and none other than Cal Raleigh knocked the winning run home in the bottom of the ninth to put all the night’s adversity behind them.
Luis Castillo notches his 1500th strikeout against Aaron Judge to cap off six shutout innings.
Mariners starter Luis Castillo isn’t the ace he once was. His once-elite grounder rate from his time with the Reds fell to around league average in his last few years with the Mariners, and his above average ratio of homers to fly balls in 2025 suggested he got on the good side of the Seattle marine layer. Still, his decline into his 30s has thus far been a graceful one, with a 3.54 ERA and 3.88 FIP last year.
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