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?
Mariners Pitchers Lock Down Win Despite Continued Batting Sluggishness
A bobble from Guardians second baseman Travis Bazzana in the top of the seventh seemed like the first piece of good luck the Mariners had gotten in a very long time. It came with two outs and a man on third, turning what would have been an inning-ending grounder into a go-ahead run for the Mariners. It proved the winning run in Seattle’s 3-1 victory against Cleveland.
On the one hand, none of their issues really fixed themselves. The team couldn’t get a fourth run for the 12th straight game, marking just the third such streak in team history. Pitch recognition woes and issues against left-handers continued with no real end in sight. But on the other hand, for the fifth time in those dozen games, it was enough.
Luis Castillo tossed a quality start, with all his pitches in action.
Mariners starter Luis Castillo came into the game with a better track record since the onset of his first piggyback outing, but there had still been notable inconsistencies for him. Despite a 3.38 ERA in his six appearances since the first piggyback, he was still without a quality start aside from his first outing of the year. Going into a game where the M’s did nothing but continue to crawl along on offense, he needed to find his best stuff for a full start.
Luckily for the M’s, Castillo had a firm command of all three of the pitches he needs to build a good outing. The slider was his most common delivery, followed by the four-seamer and changeup in that order, but he threw each quite often with the occasional sinker thrown in.
Mariners No-Hit Through 6, Late Comeback Comes Up Short in 6-2 Loss to Red Sox
Coming off a gratifying shutout victory against the Baltimore Orioles, the momentum slowed down for the Seattle Mariners on Friday night. Facing an underperforming Red Sox team limping into the Emerald City, Seattle looked primed to rattle off a win streak against a Boston squad fresh off suffering a sweep by the Toronto Blue Jays.
Boston had other plans however, capitalizing on poor pitching decisions, an inability to hit lefties, and a lack of bench depth, as the Sox punished the M’s mistakes at every turn to open the series with a 6-2 win at T-Mobile Park.
Julio Rodriguez homered in the ninth inning to drive in two runs, but it proved far too little, too late. Outside of the centerfielder’s blast, the Mariners had little to celebrate on Juneteenth as they donned their popular Steelhead jerseys, paying homage to the Negro League team that predates the M’s.
What went wrong in the Mariners’ latest defeat?
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?
Mariners Forget Fundamentals, Drop Saturday Game 8-3 to Nationals
It seems the Mariners are yet to escape their consistent inconsistency. After having beaten the Washington Nationals 10-2 the previous day, with every starting Mariner position player getting a knock, the team lost 8-2 as the pitching slipped up and the offense took a big step back outside of the ever-impressive Colt Emerson.
But the biggest issue for the team was the defense, which was docked for three errors and looked quite shaky even outside of those official events on the scoresheet. The game served as an example of bad fundamental play across the board and a reason why the team has a losing record in one-run games and just one win after trailing in the seventh. They still have the luxury of playing in the division that they do, but they aren’t forming good habits for the playoffs and the lack of precision has turned what should be a lock in the weakest division in baseball into a 1 ½ game lead over a mediocre Athletics team.
Defensive miscues piled up early, and a would-be clean first became a three-spot for the Nats.
Josh Naylor didn’t have himself a very good game on Saturday, with big misses with the glove and stick. The former came first, with a bad throw in the bottom of the first allowing the Nationals to put together a two-out rally and tack three runs on Luis Castillo.
Winning Fixes Everything: Mariners Enter June in Excellent Shape
Rarely does a 2 ½ game lead seem so wide. Yet with the way the Mariners are playing and the roster they have, there is a very real possibility that the third month of the season cements them as clear AL West leaders. They do, after all, play in the game’s weakest division this year.
FanGraphs’ projections are often seen as the gold standard for playoff chances, often given without comparison as the stone cold definitive odds. According to FanGraphs’ default projections, the M’s have a 67.7% chance to win the division.
Baseball Prospectus’ PECOTA has been even more bullish on the M’s from the jump, and their current figure is 78.9%. Even models that weight games played more heavily than preseason projections have the M’s at a greater than 50/50 chance to keep the crown: Neil Paine’s Elo model gives Seattle a 57.7% chance to win the West while FanGraphs’ season-to-date projections give the M’s a 56.3% chance.
But the thing about streaks is that they end. After all, this is a game where a team can throw eight no-hit innings and lose 13-8. Where do the M’s need to see improvement in June, and what has to happen to keep their hot players going?
Analysis: Why Continue Piggyback When Tactic Lacks Intended Benefit?
From the score of the game itself, the Mariners’ performance on Monday against the A’s was as good as they could hope for. Seattle took advantage of some defensive miscues in the top of the third to scratch across a pair of runs before the wheels flew off Sacramento starter Aaron Civale’s bus with two outs and the team wound up with a 6-0 lead before the end of the frame and a 9-2 win by the end of the game.
But that explosion of runs papered over some clear tension as the team continued to use its tactic of piggybacking two of their six starters. To be abundantly clear, the tension itself isn’t the main reason why the idea is flawed - that would be the self-imposed constraints on player usage - but given that it seems to have been adopted in order for such tension to be avoided, the uneasiness was notable and instructive.
Bryce Miller had spun a gem given his pitch limitations on Tuesday, May 19, going 5 ⅔ innings in the first of Seattle’s attempted piggybacked starts. The game fell apart in the ninth as the M’s tried to stretch the piggyback beyond the point where it made sense, but Miller’s performance itself during that game was a good sign.
Mariners Win Series in Houston, Set Sail for Uncharted Waters with Raleigh Out
After their 8-3 victory against the Astros on Thursday, the Mariners are 7-1 with a +26 run differential against that team in 2026. They’re also 15-22 with a -7 run differential against every other team.
Thursday was something of a fulcrum for Seattle. It was the day the M’s officially sent Cal Raleigh to the 10-day IL, though this was an obvious development after his exit from Wednesday’s game with clear discomfort on the same oblique he had tweaked earlier. Mitch Garver caught Luis Castillo in the latter’s final full start for some time as the piggyback plan goes into effect the next time through the rotation. The cloud of these changes hung over the game’s activities, which saw the M’s take the bad Astros pitchers to task once more.
Brendan Donovan and Mitch Garver stood out on both sides of the ball on the day Cal Raleigh went to the IL.
There were two individual performances in particular that echoed Raleigh’s absence in a way. Garver, obviously, moved into the primary catching role upon his addition to the IL, while for Brendan Donovan, his performance was a lesson in the virtues of caution around early injuries.
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.
Another “Rock” Detonation Raises Rotation Questions for Mariners
In Luis Castillo’s first start of the season, he blew down the New York Yankees with basically two pitches: his four-seamer and slider.
Over the following five outings, Castillo has given up less than four runs just once and has not finished a single sixth inning. Over that time, he has given up 35 hits, 24 runs, and 20 earned runs in 22 ⅓ innings, an 8.06 ERA over that time.
Five of those innings came on Monday night in rainy Minnesota. Although in his previous four starts (also struggles of outings, though not without bad defense behind him), he had struck out 16 and issued seven walks while giving up two homers - it was all hits in the field that had sunk him - Monday’s game was bad in the so-called three true outcomes and bad in the actual result. Castillo gave up two home runs, walked two batters, and struck out three. He gave up seven hits in total and just as many runs.
The Mariners’ loss on Monday started and ended, mostly, with Castillo’s bad start. Sure, debutant Alex Hoppe’s second inning of work fell off the rails as his control waned and hitters adjusted to his slider, but the M’s had essentially decided on pushing Hoppe as far as they could to mop up the game. Sure, the Mariners offense took quite a while to wake up, but they managed to put four runs on the board.
The question has to be raised: does Castillo’s slump warrant a change in outlook for the Mariners about how to utilize him for the rest of the season?
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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?
Luis Castillo, Mariners Get Pulverized by Blue Jays 8-2 in Game 4, ALCS Tied at Two Games Apiece
It was another boat race for the Blue Jays on Thursday night, as Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and co. once again put on a hitting clinic to knot the series at two games apiece. Why did the Mariners once again fall victim to Toronto’s aggressive swingers?
Seven-Game Set Begins in Toronto: Pitching Matchups for Games 1-3 of M’s-Jays ALCS
The Mariners’ most important series in 24 years begins on Sunday night as the team goes on the road to Toronto. How do Seattle’s short-rested starters match up against the first three guys the Blue Jays will offer?
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