Cole Young’s Hometown Game-Winner Marks Early Career Highlight, M’s Win 3-2
Neither Pittsburgh nor Seattle sit directly beside an ocean (though Puget Sound of course connects quite nicely to the Pacific and gives the Emerald City a strong oceangoing port), yet these teams cleared the decks for their first of three sea battles on Tuesday night.
It was a low-scoring affair, but the Mariners’ two cannonballs were enough to seal the deal as they came out ahead 3-2. The one homer had special significance for Cal Raleigh, as it was his first big fly since returning from the IL, but it was the second that shone brightest: Seattle’s own Yinzer flipped the score from a Mariners deficit to a Mariners lead.
Triumphant homecoming is one of humanity’s oldest seagoing motifs, but with a 22-year-old hitting three homers in a month for the second time in his career, the game had more to do with the beginning of Young’s odyssey than its end.
Cole Young blasted a go-ahead homer in his Pittsburgh homecoming.
Going into Tuesday, the Mariners were tied with the Twins for the second-worst winning percentage (.094) when trailing a game at the beginning of the seventh inning, having won three of 32 such contests. The only teams worse in this regard (the Giants, Angels, Guardians, Astros, Rangers, and Royals) had a combined 212-261 record and .448 winning percentage.
For comparison, the two teams FanGraphs projects as more likely than the Mariners to win it all (the Yankees and Dodgers) have a combined .196 winning percentage when entering the seventh inning in a deficit. The Brewers, Braves, Phillies, and Rays - the next four teams down after the M’s on FanGraphs’ projections - had a combined .227 winning percentage in games where they entered the seventh inning losing.
And when the top of the seventh began on Tuesday, the M’s trailed 2-1, marking the 33rd time they had entered that inning with a deficit in the season. Pirates starting pitcher Mitch Keller had thrown just 72 pitches, the M’s struggles continuing with the bat as they didn’t break up his efficiency or get many runs across.
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?
Cole Young Walks Mets Off; Mariners Win Seventh Straight
A baseball club in Seattle is showing that when it rains, it pours. Through May 24, the team went 7-12 in one-run games and lost four out of five extra-innings contests. Since then, the M’s have won three of each, with all the luck falling their way even in games where they leave quite a lot on the table.
All three of those have been walk-off wins, each from the bat of a different Mariner. Monday’s hero in the end was Cole Young, but unlike the others, there was a notable uniqueness to his hit. During the game, 22 players had plate appearances on Monday night. Four had hit home runs, but other than Young, no hitter had found a patch of green grass or evaded the waiting glove of an opponent.
Mariners manager Dan Wilson smirked as he described his team’s “flair for the dramatic” after the game, the team’s second straight 3-2 10-inning victory. That was certainly an understatement, though the drama started with dueling lineup card moves between the managers.
Seattle tried to play coy with the lineup against the Mets opener, but the visitors got the hurling they sought.
For the first time all year, the Mariners faced a team going with the fabled “opener” strategy, with listed starter Austin Warren being a bullpen arm tasked with beginning the game. That setup has its issues, but so had Manaea; the once-blockbuster signing entered the game with a 5.56 ERA entirely as a relief arm.
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?
Crawford, Rodríguez Log Firsts; Mariners Walk Off Diamondbacks
Friday night began as a game of firsts and ended as such, even if, for a few frames, an uneasy familiarity washed over T-Mobile park.
The Mariners had to scrape, scratch, and battle just to get back to an even .500 record, 29-29. But a win is a win is a win, and the team’s 7-6 extra innings victory was just the same as if it had been the easy ordeal it initially appeared. For five innings, home runs from historic places were putting players in great positions and George Kirby was apparently grooving.
In truth, Kirby was missing danger by the thinnest of margins, and once that tiny bit of tricksy pixie dust dissipated, Arizona’s high-contact bats and eagle eye for the strike zone made Seattle pitchers fight for every blade of grass. One after another fell before the onslaught, conducting an ordered retreat by the skin of their teeth until the tide turned at a most unlikely Mariner with the proverbial morningstar upon his brow.
Homering Mariners set their own records as Seattle powered out to an early lead.
As befits this Mariners team as much as those of other years, all runs scored in regulation innings came on the longball. But these homers - at least those powered before the game became a nailbiter - set personal records for multiple guys on the team. In the end, all three M’s leading the team in homers added to their edge on Friday.
It’s Time for Dan Wilson, Mariners to End Platoon Obsession
The Seattle Mariners began this season with a clear plan to cycle through several players. A “platoon” in baseball is defined as a “a managerial strategy where two players share a single defensive position, alternating starts based on the handedness of the opposing starting pitcher.”
For example, the Mariners signed Rob Refsnyder this offseason to mash against left-handed pitching. When Seattle faced a right-handed starter, Dominic Canzone and Luke Raley would be in the lineup with Refsnyder on the bench.
But after 55 games, now closer to the halfway point of the season than the season opener, it’s time to ditch this approach.
Mariners Show Mediocre Makeup, Roll Over Dead in 5-0 Defeat to Royals
Friday’s game, a 5-0 loss for the Mariners, was over in the first inning. It didn’t matter how many ostensibly good hitters were in the lineup, and it wouldn’t have mattered if Cal Raleigh had been healthy and swinging. George Kirby got the benefit of the baseball world’s decision in eons past to go with ERA instead of RA/9, therefore getting the quality start. In fairness to him, an error (this time J.P. Crawford quite literally dropping the ball while standing on second base when Cole Young sent him a toss for a force out, rather hilariously charged as a throwing error on Young) directly led to that first inning becoming a three-run frame instead of a one-run frame, but Kirby didn’t do well to avoid contact in those situations, with far too much tilted chucking down the pipe.
Royals starter Stephen Kolek cruised from the first inning to the last, becoming the fourth pitcher league-wide to log a complete game shutout. Simply by throwing strikes and forcing the Mariners to make contact, the hurler broke them down as a light touch breaks a rust-ridden nail. Despite striking out only two batters, the Mariners got just four hits in 32 at-bats. Outside of Luke Raley and Cole Young, they got none. The team barely even looked sharp enough to be in the defending-everything-means-defending-nothing zone of bad hitting; they simply appeared to give up right off the rip.
Perhaps that is a little inaccurate. After all, when Raley and Young knocked a pair of one-out singles in the top of the second, the M’s had the beginnings of some sort of rally. It was quickly snuffed out as Dominic Canzone swung at a changeup in the dirt and grounded into a double play.
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.
Arozarena, Canzone Crush Stros Pitching, Raleigh Breaks Slump in 10-2 Mariner Win
Monday night and Tuesday night represented two very different kinds of Mariners victories. In the bottom of the ninth on the first night, the M’s got a win by the skin of their teeth, with Andrés Muñoz getting the better of Yordan Alvarez to finish out a badly-needed win for the M’s.
When Domingo González wrapped up the bottom of the ninth on Tuesday, things were far less tense. Although the Astros had runners on first and third, the M’s were already up 10-2, and with the final out, that was the final score. It was sublimely special for González, who had just completed his very first inning, but the Mariners’ offensive explosion had long since shattered all but the slightest chance of even the mighty Astros offense clawing back into the match.
Against the whole gamut of Houston hurlers they faced on Tuesday, the Mariners put up numbers. They scored 10 runs on 11 hits, six walks, and two batters hit by a pitch; they got hard hits on 57.6% of their batted balls. With runners in scoring position, the M’s went 2-for-8, but one of those hits was Dominic Canzone’s first career grand slam, which he slammed on the first pitch Astros starter Tatsuya Imai sent his way in the fourth inning.
Seattle took Tatsuya Imai to Randyland and the Can-zone.
The Astros’ big pitching signing of the offseason, Tatsuya Imai, hasn’t turned out how Houston had hoped in the first month and a half of the season. The last time he faced Seattle, he had to be pulled with one out in the first inning due to four walks and one hit batsman, then he wound up on the IL with right arm fatigue. He did better on his return start on Tuesday on account of the fact he went four innings. That’s about the only positive Joe Espada’s club got out of the outing.
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.
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.
Living on the Sweet Spot, Two Mariners Dialed in to Open 2026 Season
You hear it the second you start playing baseball as a kid. “Find the sweet spot” on the bat. If you rope one to center field, you might hear a parent or coach yell “way to find the sweet spot!” They call it the sweet spot of the bat for a few reasons. In my personal experience, that was the spot on the bat where it didn’t even feel like you made contact. The contact between ball and bat was so optimal, that it didn’t reverberate into my hands at all.
Of course, for big leaguers, the sweet spot really means, the highest quality of contact. In fact, MLB’s glossary has an official definition for “the sweet spot.” It states, “colloquially, a player who hits the ball solidly is said to have gotten the "sweet spot" of the bat on the ball. The sweet spot classification quantifies that as a batted-ball event with a launch angle ranging from 8 to 32 degrees.”
So, it’s not necessarily a geographic location on the bat itself. Rather, it’s the quality of the contact, mostly considering the launch angle.
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 Should Learn Two Lessons from Monday Loss to Athletics - But Will They?
The old adage goes as follows: you win a third of your games, you lose a third of your games, and it’s the third in the middle that counts. So it goes for baseball teams and aspiring politicians alike.
Monday’s game was squarely one of those middle games, but the reasons the Mariners lost 6-4 can be sorted into two camps: roster construction and roster usage. The M’s went 1-12 with runners in scoring position, but this is something the team basically just has to weather for the rest of the year when it shows up.
But as for the use case of Casey Legumina and when to take out the left-handed member of a platoon? The M’s and manager Dan Wilson got a couple pieces of useful information on Monday night.
That information, however, only goes so far as the Mariners will take it. But first, a little on the initial five and a half frames.
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.
How Much Did Managerial Decisions Matter in Mariners’ Losses to Padres?
Top of the sixth, Mariners down by three, bases loaded, one out. A white-hot Luke Raley was set to come to the plate, having had eight hits in his last 14 at-bats, but the Padres replaced struggling reliever Bradgley Rodriguez with powerhouse lefty Adrián Morejón. Mariners manager Dan Wilson played the match-ups and brought in the right-handed Connor Joe.
Joe struck out on three pitches. The Mariners weren’t able to score again in the game and lost 5-2 in the end, falling to the business end of the Padres’ heavy-hitting bullpen and losing their eighth straight road game.
Should Raley have stayed in the game? Well, perhaps a less extremely platoony lefty should have stayed in as a proverbial “hot hand”, but Raley is one of the most platoony hitters in the game. His career .247/.335/.463 slash line against right-handers is offset by his .182/.249/.284 slash line against left-handers. Hot or not, he simply does not hit against left-handers, which is why the team signed Rob Refsnyder - but Refsnyder was out on paternity leave, leaving the M’s with four right-handed options: Leo Rivas, Mitch Garver, Connor Joe, and Patrick Wisdom.
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.
Stock Watch: Who’s Hot, Who’s Not After Mariners Sweep Astros
The Seattle Mariners seem to have finally righted the ship after a very rough start. Following a four-game sweep of the rival Houston Astros, they sit at 8-9, right back in the thick of things in the AL West.
For that turnaround to happen, several players had to step up at T-Mobile Park over this past weekend. Let’s highlight three players who are on a hot streak right now, and three who still are waiting for things to thaw in the early stages of the 2026 season.
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.
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