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.
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.
Analysis: What Does Underlying Data Say about Mariners’ Hitting Abyss?
There have been a lot of bad results with the bat in the first 13 games the Mariners have played in 2026, and for every bad result, there are 1,000 ways to quantify and describe it: worst in the league in average (.184), on-base percentage (.280), and slugging percentage (.301). The league’s second-lowest hard-hit rate (34.2%) and highest whiff rate (32.9%). Bat speed declines for Cal Raleigh, Julio Rodríguez, Josh Naylor, and others.
But with 149 games left to go, how much of this is actually meaningful and predictive? How much of it is pure noise?
The top lines are too early to tell right now; any answers will come from underlying data.
There isn’t much that can be told from the first 13 games as to which disappointing slash stats are because a good player is in a slump and which are because the player is plain overmatched. Both Aaron Judge and Willi Castro entered Friday with a .222 batting average, but it’s safe to say that their career OPSes of 1.025 and .696, respectively, are good indicators of who is more likely to get hot.
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.
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.
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.
Mariners Give Big Goose Egg against Fried, Continue Defensive Woes
As might be expected for a team 3-3 out of the gate early in the season, the Mariners’ supposed new-look offense has looked a lot more like a lateral shift. Perhaps it’s the cold weather, perhaps it’s lack of adjustment to the batter’s eye, perhaps it’s lack of momentum for key stars who played in the World Baseball classic - but this is a ball yard that has seen a whole lot of “slow starts that will even out” turn out to be the tone set for the entire year.
And when teams like the Yankees, Blue Jays, and Astros clearly have all their ducks in a row on the first weekend, putting up a goose egg at home against one of the league’s best teams isn’t the best of signs.
Gilbert’s splitter looks limited in his outing against New York, but a better middle-inning pitch mix offers a way forward.
Despite being Seattle’s opening day starter, it doesn’t quite look like Logan Gilbert has yet reached the ace potential billing he has long come with. The first inning didn’t look good for his efficiency slump, with the hurler trying and failing to fool the Yankee hitters with buried curves and splitters on his way to 28 pitches and two runs in the frame.
Hancock Stuns in First 2026 Outing, Mariners Thump Guardians 8-0
It all seemed to come together on Sunday afternoon. Unlike the first or third game of the series, where the Mariners kept it close but fell in the end thanks to some bullpen mismanagement, defensive miscues, and lethargic hitting - and unlike the second game, where two timely homers brought them to victory - there wasn’t a single moment of the fourth game between Seattle and the Cleveland Guardians where it seemed the pressure was on for the home crew.
Hitters up and down the lineup did their duty, the defense looked good, and that whole tone was set when a once-touted prospect whose bad luck had eaten his star finally seemed to turn a corner.
Hancock impresses in first 2026 start, tossing six no-hit innings and setting a career high in strikeouts.
Mariners starter Emerson Hancock came into 2026 with one more chance to become a major league starter. The former first-round draft pick has pitched to a 4.81 ERA, 5.23 fielding independent pitching (FIP), 1.359 walks and hits per innings pitched (WHIP), and a 2.06 strikeout-to-walk ratio. He had particularly struggled with control even more than walks as such, with errant pitches forcing him to groove a strike or two and get punished in bad situations.
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.
Old Mariners Bugbears Continue Biting in Opening Day Loss to Guardians
The more things change, the more they stay the same. It’s hard to say there wasn’t an air of that feeling in T-Mobile Park after the Mariners dropped their Opening Day contest 6-4 thanks to some shoddy relief work, unimpressive defense, and one-trick offense.
Four solo home runs were all the production the M’s could muster, and in a lot of games against the Cleveland Guardians, that might be enough (they scored slightly less than four runs per game last year). But Logan Gilbert once again struggled to go deep, outfielders lacked urgency on fly balls with men on base, and Gabe Speier caught the bad end of some J-Ram magic with men on base.
But for all the lingering of long-lamented woes, the newest guy on the roster burst his way onto the scene in a big way.
Brendan Donovan made the best first impression possible as the M’s new leadoff man.
The Mariners franchise is entering its 50th season this year, having notched its first game in the books all the way back on April 6, 1977. In all that time, no leadoff Mariner had hit a home run in his first at-bat of Opening Day. Not Dave Collins all the way back in that first season nor Harold Reynolds in the late ‘80s nor Ichiro in his Hall-of-Fame Mariners career. Of the 49 season-inaugural batters, not one had left the yard in that first at-bat.
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.
True to the Blue: Early Signs Positive for Mariners Slugger Julio Rodriguez in Spring Training?
Already a multi-time All-Star, Julio Rodriguez has been a face of the franchise for the Mariners since his arrival as a top prospect. But he's still yet to put together a complete season.
Emerald City Spectrum reporter Callaghan Bluechel breaks down early indicators from spring training that could be positive signs for Rodriguez overcoming his prior early season struggles, examines the swings of prospects Michael Arroyo and Jonny Farmelo from four spring training games thus far, and checks out several other prospects and veteran newcomers from the first week of Cactus League action.
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?
WATCH: How Does Mariners' Current Lineup Stack Up Against American League Foes?
Though the Mariners may not be done adding pieces just yet with a little over a month until spring training, no major changes should be expected with their projected everyday lineup. How does their lineup look heading towards spring training?
WATCH: Revisiting Cal Raleigh, Mariners’ Historic 2025 Season
Falling in Game 7 of the ALCS, the Mariners ultimately came up short of their goal of snapping the franchise’s World Series drought, but 2025 proved to still be a historic one for Cal Raleigh and company.
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?
ALL SEATTLE SPORTS, ALL THE TIME
Explore our latest Seattle sports content by clicking on your favorite team(s) below!
