Mother Goose Mariners: Mustachioed M’s Bash 10 Homers, Take Final Two from Braves
ATLANTA, Ga. — Hollow fear of the gods. Those were the words Cicero used to describe superstitio, a word that bequeaths us superstition but meant something more like over-religiosity or improper worship back in his time.
Well, the Romans never played baseball; that’s probably why their empire fell. Ballplayers’ bizarre practices may have little obvious relation to the physical world, but time and time again, some superstition sears itself across a once-struggling side and seems to swiftly swap their fortunes.
For the September 2025 Seattle Mariners, that strange key to victory might be the mustache. The spirit of Burt Reynolds, Rollie Fingers, and Wade Boggs seems to have arisen in full force to—for now—avert a late-season Mariner meltdown.
They had lost six of their last seven games going into Saturday. They hadn’t won a road series since the All-Star Break. A campaign for top seeding in the AL West had deteriorated into a scrap to hold on to the final playoff spot.
Already in the first game of the Atlanta series, a trend was spreading through the Mariners clubhouse. Matt Brash had donned the stache; so had pitching coach Pete Woodworth. After Seattle dropped game one, it hit critical mass.
Bryce Miller, who already sported the stache, was the starter for game two. His batterymate Cal Raleigh, bearded on Friday, was mustachioed on Saturday.
For the first six innings in that second game, it didn’t seem to have changed everything. Seattle had struggled all game with runners in scoring position and was stuck in a 2-2 tie only because the Braves were having similar issues.
But the floodgates opened in the seventh, as Julio Rodríguez whacked his second two-run bomb of the game and was followed by a longball from Eugenio Suárez, a Jorge Polanco double, and a J.P. Crawford single. It was only a four-run lead, but even that had been defyingly elusive for far too long.
Josh Naylor hit a three-run bomb in the eighth to turn the good win into a blowout, but the cherry on top was Cal Raleigh’s 52nd blast of the year, a solo shot that brought the Mariners’ lead up to 10-2—and such was the final score.
The M’s picked up right where they left off on Sunday afternoon, scoring a grand total of 18 runs and hitting five home runs, one triple, two doubles, and 12 singles. Seattle went 8-14 with runners in scoring position on Sunday in a welcome improvement to one of their most persistent problems of the 2025 season.
For the first time in what seems like a very long time, Seattle actually had luck on their side on Sunday. Their very first run came on a second inning Mitch Garver triple that probably should have been caught by Michael Harris II, and Nacho Alvarez Jr. definitely should have grabbed Rodríguez’ third inning grounder and turned it into a double play.
But it was the longball that sealed the series win for Seattle. Seattle hit as many home runs in two games as they had in their previous eight. Raleigh was the headliner due to his immense season total of 53, but Suárez’ three shots in two games pushed him to 45, Rodríguez got to 30 total, Polanco notched his 24th, and Naylor got up to 18.
But why the sudden turnaround? It’s easy to simply say the mysterious magic worked. And perhaps it did, but there’s a psychological—agnostic to the supernatural—reason for the shift.
For almost a month, the M’s have needed to simplify their approach and not overthink things, both at the plate and on the mound. A terrible cycle had formed where the team was on the back foot because they were overthinking things and they were overthinking things because they were on the back foot.
But then everyone takes a razor to their chin and leaves the upper lip untouched. It’s not only a form of bonding, it’s terrifically simple. There’s no analysis paralysis, no overthinking of such a trend. When half the guys on the team resemble a certain type of ‘70s actor, it’s just plain goofy in a way that lifts everyone’s spirits and starts to smooth everything out.
Perhaps no one needed a lift in spirit more than Luis Castillo. The Rock of the rotation had been weathering a windstorm of a slump, with a 10.06 ERA over his previous four outings as team after team jumped on his sinker with the ferocity—and regularity—of a great white hunting down a tuna on Shark Week.
Although he didn’t himself take part in the mustache craze, he came into Sunday’s outing having made a simple adjustment to get back ahead of the hitters: swapping out the sinker for his four-seam in the aggregate and mixing up the order with some secondary pitches early in counts. Expecting the sinker, Braves batters swung under the four-seam, over the slider, and in front of the changeup.
Of Castillo’s 82 pitches, the Braves swung at 49 of them—and missed 19 times. Just five pitchers have a whiff rate greater than 38.8 percent, and that is the number Castillo reached on Sunday.
There was a sole scary moment in his start, and it came not from the meager run production Atlanta would produce (Seattle was already far ahead) but from a far more fear-inducing event: a 100.2 mile per hour comebacker that zinged Castillo on his right wrist in the bottom of the fourth.
The trainer rushed out to the mound and spent some time making sure Castillo was okay to continue the game, after which the Seattle starter threw a couple practice pitches and got through six innings in total with just one run given up.
“[it still hurts] a little on the wrist [right now], but I don’t think it will hurt in the morning,” Castillo said after the game.
Luis Castillo being seemingly injury-free is not the only boon Seattle’s two massive weekend wins got them. Since Houston and Texas both won a game each against each other in that span, the Mariners gained a game on both the Rangers and the Astros, and are now two and a half games back of Houston and one and a half games ahead of Texas.
At 75-68, just 19 regular season games remain for the Seattle Mariners. While the Rangers and Royals remain hot on their heels, the Rays have suffered a three-game losing streak and are now four games back of Seattle.
The newly-mustachioed Mariners return to Seattle for their penultimate homestand on Monday, taking on the Cardinals (72-72) and the Angels (67-78). Every game counts, but the series against the Halos counts for a little bit more since any tiebreaker with the Rays would be resolved by in-division records. Hopefully the stubble on the top of the lip keeps inspiring crooked numbers on the scoreboard.
