> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.emeraldcityspectrum.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Mariners’ Andrés Muñoz Enters 2026 as Top-Level Closer - Can He Become Best in Baseball? - URL: https://www.emeraldcityspectrum.com/mariners-andres-munoz-enters-2026-as-top-level-closer-can-he-become-games-best/ - Published: 2026-01-22T19:56:19.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-08T05:56:45.000Z - Author: Callaghan Bluechel - Tags: Analysis, Mariners, Andres Munoz, Dan Wilson [Embed from Getty Images](https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/2235143878?ref=emeraldcityspectrum.com) Death, taxes, and Andrés Muñoz coming out to pitch in the ninth inning. The Mariners’ best reliever by ERA and both types of wins above replacement followed up an excellent 2024 with an elite 2025, anchoring the bullpen as he more than lived up to preseason expectations. Already the best reliever in Seattle’s bullpen and manager Dan Wilson’s go-to closer, Muñoz had 22 saves and six holds along with five blown saves in 2024\. He almost exclusively pitched in the ninth inning or later in 2025, saving 38 out of 45 games with a 1.73 ERA and 2.43 FIP, all career bests. The advanced metrics only serve to confirm what is obvious from watching Muñoz pitch: he is one of the best relievers in baseball. That begs the question: how did his 2025 season stack up against other elite closers of the season - and how does he project to perform in 2026? I’ve compared Muñoz to other high-end closers - those with a sub-three ERA, sub-four FIP (fielding independent pitching) and 20 or more saves - across a number of statistics, those being ERA, FIP, saves (SV), save percentage (SV%), left-on-base percentage (LOB%), ground ball rate (GB%), rate of whiffs and called strikes (CSW%), both common types of wins above replacement (WAR), and some individual measurements of different pitches in their arsenal \[1\]. While some of the pitchers have more pitches than listed, I only included those that were the most used in each top-line category and were thrown more than 10% of the time \[2\]. Numbers listed in bold are the best among all the closers, while pink or light blue backgrounds indicate figures above 95th percentile or below 5th percentile, respectively, among all relievers, though they are not included for save data. As for the *best* closing season of 2025, that might be Aroldis Chapman, whose Red Sox renaissance was one of the bigger reliever stories of the year. The 37-year-old fireballer had the best year of his career in Boston, putting up better numbers than he had 10 years prior. His 1.17 ERA and 0.701 WHIP were the best of any reliever with more than 17 appearances while his 1.73 FIP was the second best of any such reliever, behind only the White Sox’ Grant Taylor. Chapman upped the usage of his two fastballs in 2025, using the two-seam fastball in pitcher’s counts and the four-seamer in neutral or hitter’s counts. In addition to the top-end opposing OPS, strikeout rate, and walk rate, his two-seamer had the best whiff rate (35.5%) and opposing batting average (.115) of any two-seamer or sinker thrown 200 or more times in the 2025 season. Or maybe the best closer of 2025 was the Royals’ Carlos Estévez, who led baseball with 42 saves while sporting a 2.45 ERA. His team never quite put together the kind of miracle run many in baseball made room in their minds for, but no small part of their ability to hang around until almost the end was Estévez’ consistency. Many closers in baseball had the luxury of playing for teams that often left ample room for rest, but the Royals depended on Estévez to finish out more than half of their wins. Mason Miller was the most promising. The 26-year-old found himself dealt at the deadline from Sacramento to San Diego, and although the Padres offense didn’t lend him a whole lot of playoff time to make a splash, he still wowed the baseball world with a [perfectly painted 104.5-mile-per-hour strike three](https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/sporty-videos?playId=e95b51f4-12e3-3dde-bbc1-4417facfb9ed&ref=emeraldcityspectrum.com). In terms of consistent output, however, while his fastball was the hardest in the majors, he got more mileage out of his lights-out slider. Miller had issues controlling his fastball, and his overall 12% walk rate kept him from being the very best in 2025. And Jhoan Duran is still in the back of the Seattleite mind as the one that got away. Averaging over 100 miles an hour on his heater with the highest ground ball rate in the sport, he was reportedly a high target for Seattle at the 2025 deadline - but Duran ended up with the Phillies as the M’s wound up perhaps one reliever short of World Series glory. Although his heat wasn’t as Hollywood-worthy, Muñoz was similar to Miller in his overall 2025 profile, with Miller’s slider having the lowest opposing OPS of any in baseball, followed by Muñoz in second. The batting averages were especially close, with 2025 hitters going .108 against Miller’s slider and .109 against that of Muñoz. Like Miller, the biggest issue for Seattle’s closer was the walks, as Muñoz gave a free pass to 11% of opposing hitters, and like Miller, those walks tended to come on the fastball. Unlike Miller, however, Muñoz also throws a sinker, which generally fares better than his four-seamer despite generating less whiffs and strikeouts, and Muñoz’ tendency to elicit ground balls means that each individual batted ball has less of a chance of causing major damage. Those chances added up over the course of the year: Miller gave up four home runs in high leverage in 2025, and Muñoz yielded none. Coolness under pressure was Muñoz’ greatest strength in 2025\. The last time he had been in the postseason in 2022, he tended to play setup man, and every shaky ninth inning - there is a notable tendency to let a man on early as he warms into the game - brought forth a specter of this older role. October 2025 left no doubt about the wintry veins within Muñoz, as he kept his opponents wholly scoreless over 8 ⅓ innings, but it was perhaps September that was more impressive. Seattle’s thunder run, though led by Cal Raleigh’s relentless home run surge, was kept humming by Muñoz’ steady hand. The closer struck out 41.7% of all his opponents that month and gave up just two runs in nine innings, both of which came in a non-save situation after the team had already clinched the division. Those were the only two runs any team scored against Muñoz between Aug. 31 and the end of the season, during which he had a 0.98 ERA. And yet Muñoz was tied for fourth most in blown saves last year with seven. Two of those blown saves, it should be noted, came in extra innings with a one-run lead, and so the ghost runner did not become an earned run. Seattle’s closer stranded fewer enemy runners than Boston’s or Houston’s ninth-inning go-to guys, and the obvious correlation is confirmed by a quick search (see below), but the good news for Muñoz is that LOB% doesn’t seem to be very sticky year-to-year. In fact, Muñoz’ was quite similar to league average, while those above him in ERA and SV% like Chapman and Edwin Díaz \[3\] had much higher left-on-base percentages. \[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="1620"\] ![ Andrés Muñoz is right in the middle of the cluster that forms around ~77.5% left-on-base and ~85% save rate. It’s notable that in spite of being more towards the mean in LOB% (and hence SV%), just two closers bested his ERA. ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1d/f2/1df2f77b-83dd-4bc0-a6d2-6d1bb5df89a3/content/images/2026/10/svpctlob2025-format-original.png) Andrés Muñoz is right in the middle of the cluster that forms around \~77.5% left-on-base and \~85% save rate. It’s notable that in spite of being more towards the mean in LOB% (and hence SV%), just two closers bested his ERA. \[/caption\] Will Muñoz - who has been an All-Star for two straight years - become the best closer in baseball in 2026? That is, of course, hard to say. Kenley Jansen, who I didn’t mention in my above blurb but who had the best save percentage of the bunch, has clear age limitations at 38 years old and benefited from some LOB% luck, though his unusual cutter-heavy arsenal seems to still fool the shoes off hitters. Chapman has similar age concerns and also got a bit of good LOB% luck in 2025, but all his fundamentals were incredibly sound in 2025: his ERA and FIP were both sub-two, and his expected ERA and expected FIP \[4\] were 2.05 and 2.53, respectively. Aside from the walks, Muñoz has a whole lot of stuff that hovers a bit above the 95th percentile among his fellow pitchers. Given an improvement in fastball command and a few more runners stranded on the basepaths, he could very well be the very best in ‘26; you could make the argument he already was in 2025\. That’s true about Chapman, Miller, Díaz, and Duran, too. What Muñoz really showed Seattle in 2025 is that he was the best, most reliable arm in that bullpen, and he certainly had the calmness needed to go into any situation and extinguish the flames. Seldom can any stat show you that when a high-level hurler takes the mound, everyone in the ballpark and certainly in each dugout knows who has a mountainous edge, and that in and of itself shakes the foundations beneath his opponents. For the Mariners, they don’t need Muñoz to make an iron-clad case of being the best reliever on Earth in 2026\. If you want my view, I’d put him as fourth most likely to be the best closer in baseball in 2025, behind Duran, Miller, and Chapman, in that order. But how much does it matter if his ERA is 1.55 or 2.35? His ERA hasn’t ever been above three in a Mariners uniform, and I might remind you he has played four seasons at the corner of Edgar and Dave; that’s an elite level of consistency coming from anyone, especially a bullpen arm. Everyone in the organization knows Muñoz will either be great or elite, so the greater task for Dan Wilson and his guys in the dugout is to be more willing to trust another guy with the 9th when all the chips are on the line earlier in the game. The most painful lesson from Seattle’s last war will stick like superglue, I’d imagine. We’ll see if next time is different, and if it is, Andrés Muñoz has as good a chance of anyone to toss the pivotal strike. \[1\] The acronyms and colors are those used by Baseball Savant: FF for four-seam fastball, SI for sinker or two-seamer, FC for cutter, SL for slider, KC for knuckle curve, CU for curveball, FS for splitter, and CH for changeup feature in the table. \[2\] Although cutters are usually grouped with fastballs, Emilio Pagán’s cutter is much more akin to a hard slider in the way he uses it, and so I categorized it as a breaking ball. \[3\] Two more similarities between Muñoz and Miller in 2025 were their LOB percentages and their save percentages. \[4\] While xERA is similar to other expected stats in that it uses StatCast data, xFIP does not do so and in fact predates StatCast. The way xFIP works is by taking the home runs component of FIP and replacing it with the total fly balls given up by the pitcher multiplied by the home run to fly ball rate (HR/FB%) of the league (this works because HR/FB%, like BABIP for hitters, is generally volatile or outside of the pitcher’s control year-to-year), further regressing FIP and making it generally more predictive.