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.
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.
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.
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.
Rodríguez, Naylor, Young Hack Timely Hits as Mariners Mash Minnesota Late
Here’s a stat: Julio Rodríguez has more triple doubles in the city of Minneapolis than Nikola Jokić does in the calendar year 2026.
Well, adding a three-double baseball game into the widely accepted hoops definition of “triple double” allows that to be true. It’s also a testament to the defensive skill of one Rudy Gobert, who has finally and resoundingly managed to convince the world that he is actually good at basketball.
As far as Rodríguez is concerned, his three doubles - the baseball version - set a couple of tables for Seattle and cleared their last, and the center fielder accounted for two runs scored and two others knocked in during the Mariners’ 7-1 victory over the Minnesota Twins.
It wasn’t just Rodríguez, as Josh Naylor and Cole Young offered some timely hits of their own while starter Logan Gilbert wriggled himself out of enough pickles and jams to make some truly unique culinary concoctions, even while only going five innings. The M’s, after all their tribulations to start the season, are a game behind .500.
Logan Gilbert showed a bit of adjustment but still had to Houdini his way out of a five-inning start.
It is often said that pitchers are crazy. Usually, this refers to intensity or the way the staff interacts with the rest of the players, and it is most stereotypically associated with the isolated (and thus mysterious) bullpen.
Still-Sleepy Mariners Suffer Sixth Loss in Eight Games, Lose Series to Athletics
SEATTLE, Wash. - The M’s didn’t look much worse on Tuesday night than they had all year. The problem was that they didn’t look any better, either.
All they have shown in the first 25 games of the season has been mediocrity, inconsistency, and a gradually weakening confidence in their own abilities. The team hasn’t fallen fully off the table, but as the drudgery continues seemingly indefinitely, the phrase “right now” will become an ever more faded addendum to the phrase “this team is bad.”
Because let’s be realistic: the M’s can’t bank on a 10-plus game win streak to propel them out of the herd every year at the last moment; at some point, they need to learn how to start the regular season strong and not let up. Lifeless 5-2 losses to a sneakily threatening divisional rival can only happen so often for a team with World Series aspirations.
Luis Castillo threw a decent outing, but a high pitch count and loss of secondary control late forced him out early.
For an organization used to unearned no-decisions, Luis Castillo’s five innings of two run ball was about the platonic ideal of a no-decision.
Mariners Free-Fall Continues with 5-0 Home Loss to Rangers
The Mariners dropped their fourth game in a row on Friday night, 5-0 to the Rangers. It was their ninth defeat in a row to teams not named the Houston Astros.
It was Seattle’s fourth shutout loss of the season, with the Mariners becoming the first MLB team to log a fourth game without scoring a run of the 2026 season. Seattle only produced two real scoring chances all game on Friday, and with such paucity of opportunities, even going 1-4 with runners in scoring position (good by 2026 M’s standards), they couldn’t scratch across a run.
Despite early shakiness and persistently bad outfield defense, Logan Gilbert gutted out a solid start.
For much of the first three games the Mariners and Rangers played against each other back in Arlington, the visiting M’s were able to put up early runs against the high-powered Texas pitching staff, even if their bats fell as dead as a doornail for the rest of the game.
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.
Mariners Trajectory Rapidly Approaches Inflection Point with Fifth Straight Loss
Despite an impressively bad two-decade playoff drought to begin the millennium, the Mariners haven’t been in the habit of fully burying themselves three weeks into the year, usually waiting until May to let everything fall apart in their down years, missing the mark in September during their good years, and crashing into the last wall like George Russell in Singapore in their great years.
But inexplicably yet unsurprisingly, the proverbial team bus looks like it’s being steered by a tumbleweed through a baker’s dozen games in 2026. The team’s stellar pitching has carried them to four wins, but a combination of atrocious defense and somehow worse hitting dropped their ninth game of the year (and fifth in a row) on Wednesday afternoon.
Seattle suffered their third (kind of fourth) shutout of the season, barely avoiding getting no-hit by MacKenzie Gore and co.
The Mariners offense, team-wide, has been having the kind of performance where 105 mile an hour groundouts to short are hopeful signs because the team is usually hitting 75 mile an hour groundouts to first.
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.
Woo Strong Early, Mariners Falter Late in Extra-Innings Heartbreaker to Guardians
The Seattle Mariners entered Saturday night’s contest like one of your old roommates - still searching for singles. They checked that box, but it still wasn’t enough.
After a strong five-plus from Bryan Woo, Cleveland’s lineup scratched across three runs late at T-Mobile Park. Despite a late comeback in the ninth, the Mariners folded in extra innings as the Guardians won 6-5.
Woo strong but two-out rally in sixth spoils stellar start
Mariners starter Bryan Woo allowed just one baserunner through his first four innings of work, pumping his elite fastball time and time again: 59 of his 83 pitches on Saturday were the four-seamer, which stayed in the top half of the zone for five frames.
Mariners Turn Three Hits into Five Runs, Tie Opening Guardians Series
The Seattle Mariners still haven’t hit a single through the first two games of the season. That didn’t matter on Friday night.
Cleveland Guardians starter Gavin Williams may have spun good enough stuff to punch out seven Mariners, but he also walked six, and timely round-trippers from Cole Young and Luke Raley put the M’s far ahead of the visitors and brought the team to its first win of the year.
“Furious George” deals with early homer and puts together a quality start to begin his 2026.
Chase DeLauter’s prospect stock is about as high as can be right now. After mashing two home runs in his regular season debut on Opening Day, day two hurler George Kirby became the third Mariner to foolishly leave a pitch on the lower inside part of the plate, exactly where the 24-year-old rookie likes it.
Mariners Release Opening Day Roster; Crawford, Miller Notably Absent with Injury
With opening day right around the corner for the Seattle Mariners - at 7:10 p.m. Pacific on Thursday against the Guardians - the team has released its first 26-man roster for the 2026 season. The top of the depth chart, of course, is very much all over the M’s roster, from returning superstars in Cal Raleigh and Julio Rodríguez to new additions like Brendan Donovan and Jose A. Ferrer.
But of course it is not all sunshine and roses for the defending AL West champions. Longtime shortstop J.P. Crawford is out for the beginning of the year with a shoulder injury while Bryce Miller is working through an injury of his own, leaving holes in the middle infield and the back of the rotation. Leo Rivas is going to get some playing time at short in the meantime (and perhaps Cole Young might swivel
Mariners Drop Saturday Spring Game 10-5; Hancock Appears Solid in Start
The beating Arizona sun took quite its share of victims for the second day in a row as the San Francisco Giants made the trip over from Scottsdale to Peoria for some Cactus League action against the Seattle Mariners. Chief among those victims this time was Emerson Hancock’s Spring Training ERA as the M’s let a five-run lead become a five-run loss.
But since the score doesn’t matter in February, let’s take a look at some of the few things that might give us the faintest echo of an idea for how the Mariners look going into 2026.
Emerson Hancock shows some life in his first outing of the spring.
Seattle’s pitching lab has seen a lot of success in recent years, with Bryan Woo, Logan Gilbert, and George Kirby turning into key pieces of the Mariners’ arsenal. But so far, that success has not been flowing in Emerson Hancock’s direction. Hancock, who has a career 4.81 ERA, 5.23 FIP, and 1.359 WHIP across 37 appearances (31 starts), enters 2026 with one more shot to become a major league starter.
Analysis: Six Trades Mariners Could Make to Bolster Roster This Offseason
While the Mariners will be looking to the free agent market for re-signings and new additions, the trade arena offers another avenue for boosting the team in 2026. What are some of the deals they could look at closing in the winter?
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?
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.
Three Errors, Three Double Plays, Third Jays Win: Mariners Drop Game 6 in Toronto
The Mariners had a chance to punch a ticket to the World Series in Game 6 of the ALCS, but due to a whole host of preventable mistakes, they will face elimination for the second time this season. How did Seattle drop the ball on Sunday night?
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