Mariners Walk Off Twins, Keep Momentum Alive Ahead of Trade Deadline
With the trade deadline just two days away, the Seattle Mariners’ season seemingly hinged on Saturday's game against the Minnesota Twins. With the contest tied 3-3 in the bottom of the ninth, Cal Raleigh delivered, driving home the winning run in walk-off fashion.
Seattle has struggled to put teams away all season, and that trend continued during the second game of the series. The Mariners scored three runs across the first two innings but were held scoreless the rest of the way until the ninth. This allowed the Twins to claw their way back, ultimately tying it up in the seventh inning.
The Mariners need to start stacking wins to make the playoffs, and Saturday's victory showed how they can do that.
Canzone Clinches Comeback in Texas, Keeps Mariners Season Alive
When Julio Rodríguez popped a two-on, one-out, right-down-Broadway cutter haplessly into center field, it looked like the moment when the downfall was obvious. This downfall, like many, was perhaps better conceptualized as a calque of the word’s German equivalent: going under - a slow process that takes a while to materialize after it is set into motion, but which becomes ever clearer until there is a point when it is undeniable.
On the flip side, the decision seemed easy for the brass. A Mariners loss would put the team three and a half games underneath the division lead right before the deadline, at a time when many teams would be looking for the likes of Randy Arozarena or even George Kirby or Logan Gilbert.
If Dominic Canzone failed to reach base, it would be the culmination of multiple wasted opportunities; the M’s had two men on with one out in the fourth and the same amount of baserunners with no outs in the sixth, all with nothing to show for it. The Texas Rangers’ two-run lead was a number not insurmountable but that seemed hard to overcome for an offense whose approach could scarcely have been called Fabian over the course of the year, because the Fabian Strategy actually worked.
Rangers reliever Cole Winn fell behind Canzone 2-0 and hung a splitter right down the pipe, a little below the middle of the zone. For the first time in more than two weeks, Canzone walloped a homer, putting the Mariners in the lead.
“I got him 2-0 pretty quickly, and with first and second there, he’s gotta come in the zone with something, and they’d been throwing me soft pretty much the whole series,” Canzone told Mariners TV’s Brad Adam. “Not that I was necessarily sitting on it, but just trying to get something elevated and get it in the air.”
Seattle, who had been looking for the game to latch onto as a starting point, clung to their lead for the rest of the game, winning 6-4 and preventing - for now - calamity.
Mariners Build Momentum Ahead of Trade Deadline, Clinch Series Win With 6-3 Win vs. Giants
Seattle won their second straight game against the lowly Giants 6-3. Behind six strong innings from starter Logan Gilbert, a shutdown bullpen, and timely hitting, the Mariners looked primed to go on a run to put their first-half struggles in the rearview mirror.
With two weeks remaining until the trade deadline, Seattle needed to come out of the All-Star break with some urgency. After getting throttled in the first game of the series 7-0, it looked like the team had not used their time off to reset well. But after two satisfying victories, and the struggling Cincinnati Reds coming into town, Seattle is one more series win away from cementing itself as a buyer in the wide-open American League.
Dan Wilson pushed all the right buttons Sunday, a rare sentence for this Mariners club. His timely deployment of pinch-hitters and bullpen usage showcased what this ballclub can look like at its best. Yet there are still some things to work on as with any baseball team.
Mariners Searching for Answers After 6-1 Loss to Rays Extends Florida Losing Streak to Five Games
Enduring a horrifying road trip to the Sunshine State, the Seattle Mariners continue to frustrate their fan base as they fell flat again in their 6-1 loss to the Tampa Bay Rays on Saturday. Poor luck, situational hitting, and an abnormal dud from ace Logan Gilbert made for a lackluster performance at Tropicana Field.
Gilbert allowed nine hits and two walks, but in his defense, he exited the game having only given up two runs to that point. He did leave runners on first and second as reliever Gabe Spier proceeded to give up a three-run blast on the first pitch he threw. That promptly put the game well out of reach for a Mariners team that has been struggling offensively as of late.
Continuing a season-long trend, Seattle had no issues with reaching base. They put 10 batters on, but their issues arose getting them home once again. The Mariners went 0-for-6 with runners in scoring position (RISP) Saturday, bringing their five-game road trip total to a shocking 2-for-38 (.053).
Once a division favorite, the Mariners now sit two games back in the AL West at 47-49. No matter the outcome of the series finale on Sunday, they will enter the All-Star break below .500, an astonishing outcome considering their expectations heading into the year.
Mariners Blast Blue Jays on Independence Day, Still Need Consistency
About the only similarity between the Mariners’ game on July 3 and their game on July 4 was the general state of the Toronto Blue Jays offense. Even there, the degree of futility varied from day to day; the Jays had a generally mediocre offensive day on Friday and a horrific one on Saturday. The latter performance was largely due to the Mariner starter Logan Gilbert’s excellence.
Other than that, the games could not have been any more different. In one, the Mariners fell 2-0 as their offense failed to show up. In the other, Seattle torched the Blue Jays so badly that Myles Straw was pitching in the bottom of the eighth despite not being a pitcher. The 11-0 victory that the M’s put together was tremendously cathartic for a team that had been tied for fifth-lowest in run production during the month. The most catharsis of all was reserved for one Randy Arozarena, as despite his largely consistent career-year production, he had been the biggest standout in his team’s ugly batting performance the day prior: he lost both his team’s ABS challenges with nobody on in the first inning, neither in a conducive count for challenging.
Arozarena, as it turned out, was actually on the bad side of a 2-0 strike call in the bottom of the first with nobody on. This time, he didn’t challenge. The issues with his challenges in the first had been related to inning, yes, but challenging in the first inning isn’t bad if it’s a full count or there are men on base; but both of Arozarena’s challenges on Friday came with nobody on and without three balls. In any event, the Mariners left fielder whacked a double off the right field wall. Neither Dominic Canzone nor Cal Raleigh knocked him in, but perhaps it set a more favorable tone than the day prior, when the M’s were a few hairs away from being no-hit.
Randy Arozarena capped off a monster second inning with a grand slam.
Two men fell quickly to Jays starter Shane Bieber to begin the second, but the third out is no guarantee against any MLB offense. Cole Young lined a double into the right center gap and Victor Robles shot a liner of his own into left to log Seattle’s first run, but the real damage came a few minutes later as a single and a walk loaded the bases for the aforementioned Arozarena.
Four Runs Still Out of Reach as Mariners Fall 4-3 to Guardians
The Seattle Mariners continue to eye franchise history - for the wrong reasons - as they tied the team record with 13 games in a row while scoring three or fewer runs in a 4-3 loss to the Cleveland Guardians on Saturday. Holding onto a half-game lead in the middling American League West, the Mariners need to decide if they want to build on last year's success or drift sheepishly back into mediocrity.
Even the most optimistic Seattle fans know the phrase “Same old Mariners.” It encompasses the feelings of a downtrodden fanbase that has only made the playoffs six times in their 50 years of existence. Despite having the greatest season in team history last year by reaching Game 7 of the American League Championship Series, most fans are already ready to chalk it up as a fluke given their team’s struggles this year.
The roster is not devoid of talent; quite the opposite actually. FanGraphs Playoff Odds still gives the M’s an 80.3% chance of making the postseason. The lineup still needs to wake up though, as this roster has shown that it cannot sleepwalk its way to winning the division.
The trade deadline is approaching. Changes need to be made. What can this SoDo squad do to get back on track?
Gilbert, Mariners Salvage Red Sox Matinee, Keep Heads Above Water
All wins are equal on the final sheet of standings at the end of the year, but not all these wins mean the same things when they are played. Some wins are triumphant jewels in the crowns of great streaks, others are dead cat bounces for a team plummeting into the gutter. The Mariners’ 3-1 win over the Red Sox on Sunday was neither of those, but it was the definitional salvaged game, turning what could have been a sweep to go under .500 on the summer solstice into a lost series and a 40-39 record with the halfway point nearly reached.
The offense, for the eighth straight game, didn’t impress, but the Mariners worked a win anyway thanks to an incredible start from a rebounding elite arm, a couple of timely hits, and a sharp bullpen. And yet the win may be pyrrhic, with another key player falling to the injury bug.
Logan Gilbert worked into the seventh and kept the Red Sox to a single run.
While the Mariners haven’t had everyone clicking at the same time, they have had the relative luxury of often getting a cold man hot once their hot man goes cold. While Emerson Hancock has seemingly taken a big step back over the past two outings, Logan Gilbert has finally settled into a real adjustment against the five-and-dive outings and long at-bats that had created them.
This adjustment has been quite simple and equally effective: instead of relying solely on his secondary pitches in favorable counts - a strategy that teams effectively countered by simply laying off the low sliders and buried splitters they would see time and time again - Gilbert has truly mixed things up with fastballs, curveballs, splitters, and sliders in these counts. This means, in the aggregate, that he is throwing the heater a lot more.
Mariners Right Road-Trip Wrongs, Start Homestand With Gritty 3-1 vs. Orioles
Back in tandem for the first time in nearly a month, Logan Gilbert dazzled and Cal Raleigh stole the show as the Seattle Mariners sidestepped a recent myriad of injuries to start off their latest homestand on the right foot, earning a late 3-1 win over the Baltimore Orioles at T-Mobile Park on Tuesday night.
The Mariners returned home for a six-game set still on the wrong side of the injury report. Three lineup mainstays were unavailable, even with Raleigh and J.P. Crawford returning, putting more pressure on Dan Wilson’s stars to show up. And boy did they ever.
Happily firing darts to Raleigh in his first game off the injured list, Gilbert tossed seven innings of one-run ball while striking out a season-high 10 batters. Making an immediate impact with his bat after a long rehab stint in Everett and Tacoma, Raleigh came through in the clutch, scorching a go-ahead RBI single that plated the winning two runs in the seventh inning.
What stood out in Tuesday’s series-opening win?
Mariners’ Tuesday Bombshells: Rotating Piggyback, Pereda Sent Down, Arozarena to IL
Tuesday ended in a solid 3-1 win for the Mariners at home against the Orioles, but a flurry of roster moves and decisions may have been even more hectic for the team than that night’s action. The team called Cal Raleigh back up to the MLB roster, announced a first-of-its-kind rotating piggyback, and had to call up a guy who had taken four total plate appearances above High-A ball in his entire career thanks to a seemingly bizarre lack of preparation on Randy Arozarena’s injury status.
Mariners general manager Justin Hollander, speaking with media Tuesday afternoon, noted the inordinate severity of the injury situation as compared to other bugs he had dealt with in his tenure with the team; he noted that Luke Raley and Josh Naylor were both dealing with issues and that Matt Brash, Carlos Vargas, and Cooper Criswell would be out until around the trade deadline. Brendan Donovan is set to start running work in the week, but these persistent injuries are not a good sign. This is especially true of Raley’s lower back tightness, given that similar injuries ended up shattering his 2025 season well after he was officially healed.
The mechanistic plan to have each of Seattle’s six starting pitchers rotate the piggyback amongst themselves is many things, but to use a judgmentally neutral term, it is unprecedented. It is also seemingly contradictory that the same organization that came up with a plan as intricate as a rotating piggyback also waited until a gameday to MRI Arozarena despite having a rest day to do so; had they done the simple thing of scheduling an earlier MRI, they would have been able to call Connor Joe back up as is clearly their long-term plan.
But what’s done is done, as bizarre as the events were. What should be made of these decisions, and what do they mean for the near future of the Mariners’ season?
‘Just When You Think You’ve Seen it All’: Blissful Mariners Take 6-5 Thriller in Baltimore
“This game’s put years on my life,” said Mariners catcher Mitch Garver after the team’s 6-5, 10-inning victory.
The 35-year-old catcher seemingly left it ambiguous as to whether “this game” referred to the night’s win (one more claustrophobic than a closed-up cave) or whether he meant baseball itself, but in any case, Tuesday’s might be the unlikeliest win the M’s have scratched across yet.
Where Víctor Robles and Jose A. Ferrer failed the Mariners on Tuesday night, Ryan Bliss and Nick Davila saved them. Where Mitch Garver’s lack of a challenge in the bottom of the first led to an Orioles run, his A-plus showing over the remaining nine innings allowed his team to take the win.
The victory required incredible plays from Patrick Wisdom and from a somewhat out-of-position Cole Young. It required the weakest arms in the Mariners bullpen to log two clean combined innings and give some rest for their weary companions. Perhaps most of all, it required grinding, gutsy, going-all-out play from a guy who had played in two MLB games in the previous 365 days.
And it required a man on barely four hours of sleep to make the biggest, most stressful pitches of his life. Isolating the only hero from the course of Tuesday’s game would be a task harder than those that befell both Davila and Bliss. But these tasks were not only reserved for the final innings.
Logan Gilbert put together an unlikely quality start despite being at 58 pitches through two.
Despite a 3.79 ERA going into Tuesday’s game, M’s starter Logan Gilbert has had his share of five-and-dive outings with batters fouling off good pitches and laying off tough filth. Much of it had been due to predictable sequencing, though that issue has been less apparent in May than it was in March and parts of April. The O’s stretched him thin over the first two innings, and with all of four available relievers in the bullpen, there wasn’t much room for inefficiency.
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.
M’s Complete 22-4 Sweep of A’s with 9-1 Blowout, Take First Place in AL West
Despite still being a game back of .500, the Mariners are in first place in the AL West. In one sense, it doesn’t matter; a man once said that you should check the standings once on June 1 and every day starting July 1. But in another sense, the series was massive.
“Yeah, I think so,” said Mariners starter Logan Gilbert when asked if the series (in which they outscored their opponents by 18 runs) was their most complete of the season. “To go out there and prove it like that, and everybody steppin’ up at different times, it says a lot about the team.”
For the first time since sweeping the Astros at home back in April, the M’s cobbled together three consecutive complete wins. From the first inning onward on Wednesday afternoon, Seattle held a watertight lid on a team that had come into the series scoring 4.8 runs per game in their home ballpark. Julio Rodríguez put a bow on the whole thing with a three-run jack in the eighth, but the final outcome was not in doubt long before the 9-1 final score.
Rob Refsnyder got the Mariners started with a three-run homer, continuing an inchoate upturn.
The Mariners’ $6.25 million acquisition of platoon bat Rob Refsnyder hasn’t been a very productive signing despite the clear pedigree of production against lefties over his previous four seasons. With a horrific .113/.195/.197 slash line going into Wednesday’s game, it appeared that his time with the Mariners was nearing an ignominious conclusion.
That may yet be true. But a glimmer of hope shone through in the first inning, as he built on a hit in Tuesday’s game with a loud 107.7 mile per hour bomb.
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.
Bumpy Stretch For Rotation Blocking Mariners’ Breakthrough
One of the clear strengths of the Seattle Mariners at the beginning of the 2026 season was their starting rotation. Last season, they ranked fourth in Major League Baseball in innings pitched as a starting rotation and 11th in FIP (which is ERA but factoring out fielding luck).
Bryan Woo and Luis Castillo eclipsed 180 innings pitched. Two of their starters had an ERA better than 3.50. Three of them exceeded 160 strikeouts. Four of their starters made at least 23 starts last season. Eight different players needed to make at least two starts. For context, the World Series champion Dodgers had 14 different players make multiple starts. The American League champion Blue Jays needed 11 such starters.
They had one of the strongest, most reliable rotations in baseball last year. With the same cast of characters coming into 2026, the consensus was the Mariners would be able to lean on their starting pitchers to another postseason run. However, over the last few weeks, the starting pitching has not been the strength, but the weakness of this Mariners club.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.