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.
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 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.
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.
Mariners Waste Lucky Breaks that Angels Take, Drop Series with 8-7 Loss in Extras
There’s always a strange air around games between the Angels and Mariners. Any divisional rivalry series will have an edge to it, but for the Halos and M’s, it just feels a bit different.
It probably has something to do with this: the modern Perry Minasian Angels are a mirror of the Jack Zduriencik-era Mariners: both teams stuck in the doldrums of mediocrity, wasting the career of two generational players (one Japanese superstar each), but each doing it in the opposite way.
Where the 2010s M’s caromed between 95-loss disasters and missing the playoffs by a game or two, the 2020s Angels hover around 70-75 wins year-in and year-out. The Zduriencik Mariners failed to shore up generational pitcher Felix Hernández, while the Minasian Angels have left future Hall of Fame center fielder Mike Trout out to dry. Ichiro was the first Japanese position player to light up the MLB (doing so with an old-school Wee Willie Keeler-style approach), but was nearing the last few years of his career by the time Zduriencik sent him to the Yankees. Shohei Ohtani, a much more homer-focused modern great (who, by the way, can also pitch) was a few years into his pro career before going to Anaheim.
Analysis: Five Thoughts on Mariners Extending Colt Emerson
News broke early Tuesday morning that the Seattle Mariners agreed to an eight-year, $95 million contract extension with 20-year-old top prospect Colt Emerson (MLB Pipeline’s No. 7 overall prospect and the team’s No. 1). It includes an $8 million signing bonus, a ninth-year club option (valued around $25 million), escalators that could push the total value north of $130 million, and a full no-trade clause.
A deal this big for a player this young - and one who has yet to make his MLB debut at that - always brings eyeballs. Diving into the surprising extension, what stands out for Emerson and the Mariners? Five thoughts:
This is a risk for BOTH sides
This is the largest contract handed out to a player who has yet to play a single inning in the major leagues. That statement alone implies the risks on the Seattle Mariners’ side. Emerson could blow his knee out tomorrow (I didn’t even want to put that out in the universe), and the Mariners would still owe him that money. Even if he doesn’t play an inning for the Mariners ever, that’s still his money either way. Or, he could end up being simply a below average big leaguer as Jarred Kelenic did. We see it all the time with star prospects flaming out and failing to meet expectations.
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
Assessing Three March Mariner Concerns Ahead of 2026 Regular Season
If the Seattle Mariners started the 2026 regular season 6-16-1 (ignore the tie), things would probably be nearing panic mode in T-Mobile Park. But given that it’s Spring Training, the record isn’t all that concerning as Opening Day begins. But from injury concerns to slow starts for stars, there are some points of worry for the M’s as the season comes into view. Just how worrying are these signs, however? Is there any meaning to be derived from them?
Concern 1: Injury questions for players up and down the roster.
Concern level: 4/10
The most-discussed injury question for the upcoming season has been Bryce Miller, and it seems likely by this point that he won’t be ready to start the regular season. The Mariners have Emerson Hancock and Cooper Criswell both available to fill in the fifth starter role - and I personally expect they’ll start with Hancock, with Criswell in the tank if Hancock again struggles as a starter - but they at least have some good indications due to both players’ performance in Spring Training. That doesn’t necessarily mean much for the regular season, especially in the top-line stats such as ERA and FIP, but the M’s have to be impressed with Hancock’s feel for the ball.
Mariners Repeat or Astros Return; Who is AL West’s Deadliest Warrior? Analyzing Division as 2026 Season Approaches
Ever since the Mariners’ dramatic September sweep on Houston’s home ground that all but sealed the division, 2026 has shaped up to be a close rematch between the two teams. Which team, if any, has the edge going into the season?
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.
‘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?
Rapid Reaction: Mariners Stuff Blue Jays 10-3 in Statement Win on Canadian Thanksgiving
Despite some early uncertainty, the Mariners delivered a statement Game 2 win in Rogers Centre, tapping a variety of heroes as they return home with a big advantage for Game 3.
‘Vintage’ Logan Gilbert, ‘Grind-‘Em-Out’ At-Bats Prove Pivotal in Mariners’ Game 3 Rain-Delayed Victory
Despite two close battles at home, the Mariners’ relatively more comfortable Tuesday triumph showcased what often turns Seattle’s solid team into an excellent one.
Rapid Reaction: M’s Cage Tigers 8-4 in Game 3 of ALDS, Lead Series 2-1
It wasn’t a pitching duel like Games 1 and 2, but things fell into place for the Mariners in Game 3 while Tigers manager A. J. Hinch’s best laid plans went awry.
Final Thoughts: Mariners Game 1 Defeat Leaves Steep Hill Ahead, Roster Construction Questions
As morning dawns on the Mariners’ mistakes from Saturday night, some final things can be gleaned before the team gears up to face Tarik Skubal in Game 2. What might be on Seattle’s mind headed into Sunday?
Two Notes from M’s First Midweek Scrimmage
There may not have been any real consequence to the Seattle Mariners’ Wednesday scrimmage at T-Mobile Park, but the five innings of action still gave some insights into what’s going on in the Mariners clubhouse as the ALDS approaches.
Blue Skies in SoDo: Weekend Sweep Puts M’s in Prime Championship Contention
The M’s went into a massive three-game set in Houston tied with the Astros for the division lead, and unlike past heartbreakers, Seattle all but took out their nemesis. Where does this leave the Mariners’ playoff position going into the final week before October?
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