> ## 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. # Painful Pentagon of Problems Paralyzes Mariners in 7-3 Loss at Little League Classic - URL: https://www.emeraldcityspectrum.com/painful-pentagon-of-problems-paralyzes-mariners-in-little-league-classic-mets-come-ahead-7-3/ - Published: 2025-08-18T17:26:06.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-08T05:58:43.000Z - Author: Callaghan Bluechel - Tags: Analysis, Mariners, Little League Classic, George Kirby, Tayler Saucedo, Jackson Kowar, Julio Rodriguez, Jorge Polanco, Randy Arozarena, Cal Raleigh, Dominic Canzone, Cole Young [Embed from Getty Images](http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/2230000765?ref=emeraldcityspectrum.com) WILLIAMSPORT, Pa. – A national audience of ESPN watchers and a local audience of exhilarated little leaguers watched a Seattle Mariners game that showed them good examples of five problems (well, seven) that have dogged the team all year. It was a game that, for the Mariners, raised serious concerns, not only about whether or not this team can win a playoff series—but whether they can make it there at all, as they fell 7-3 to the New York Mets to ultimately lose the series. ### Not Hitting with Runners in Scoring Position Let’s start with the bats. For the fifth time in six games, the Mariners scored three or less runs. That’s not good in result, but obviously, there are things that lead to that result. First to mind for many people was the hitting with runners in scoring position. After Sunday’s result, the Mariners are 10 for 46 with runners in scoring position over the current road trip. Take out Friday’s game, and they are four for 28\. Overall on the season, their OPS with runners in scoring position going into Sunday was .693, one of the few teams whose production *decreases* with a runner on second or more. They say hitting is contagious, but for the Mariners, the reverse seems to be the case. It is as if the gambler’s fallacy—the mistaken idea that past outcomes of chance influence future outcomes of chance—is in fact true for the M’s, and a present hit reduces the probability of a future one in the same inning because that outcome has already occurred. Obviously, that isn’t the case, but their run of bad production when it counts continued on Sunday. The team had two really good innings to put a crooked number together: the fourth and the ninth. Julio Rodriguez led off the fourth with a double, but Josh Naylor struck out and Eugenio Suárez grounded him over to third. Jorge Polanco looped a soft RBI single off Francisco Lindor’s glove and the next two reached base to bring Cole Young up with a bases-loaded situation. Young popped up to end the inning. With two outs in the ninth, the M’s were down by four, but they finally began to get something going with singles by Raleigh and Rodriguez. It was all for nought, though, as Naylor grounded out to end the game. ### Not Punishing Mistakes Although the hitting with RISP was bad, the biggest problem for Seattle on Sunday was that they couldn’t reliably take advantage of bad pitches. As a team, the Mariners aren’t the best at taking advantage of the typical “good pitch to hit.” There are several stats we can look at when determining this, but I am going to look at four: on-base percentage (OBP), on-base plus slugging (OPS), weighted on base average (wOBA), and expected weighted on base average (xwOBA). Using Baseball Savant’s search tool, I controlled for every 2025 instance of a pitch of a fastball type pitch (four-seamer, two-seamer/sinker, and cutter) over what StatCast determines the heart of the plate. In real terms, the heart of the plate is the area of the strike zone that is four inches or more from the edge vertically and 3.3 inches or more from the edge horizontally. The Mariners’ OBP with these parameters (fastball type, heart of the plate) is .292, 24th in MLB and 12th in the American League. Their OPS in these situations is .815, 16th in MLB and 9th in the AL. Their wOBA is .345, 16th in MLB and 10th in the AL. The xwOBA goes back down in the pack once again, with the Mariners’ .371 being 22nd in MLB and 12th in the AL. Going back to the Young pop-up, the at-bat actually started well for Seattle. Mets pitcher Clay Holmes threw three straight balls. In danger of walking in a run, Holmes opted to groove some fastballs and hope Young couldn’t take advantage. The Mariners second baseman took the first one, but on a 3-1 count, he took a great big hack at the second. It was right down the middle, but that didn’t matter. There was a whole lot of that on all kinds of pitches left out over the plate that the M’s couldn’t get to. Hitting with RISP has been an issue all year, but in the second half, Seattle’s offense has the third lowest OPS in the American League, and missing on meatballs is a big reason why. Now, Seattle partially makes up for this due to an odd ability to do damage on terrible pitches to hit. The team’s .267 xwOBA on pitches in the “shadow” attack zone—within 3.3 inches horizontally and four inches vertically of the edge of the strike zone—is fourth in the MLB. Their real result stats such as OBP, OPS, and wOBA are more middle of the pack, but it’s a better edge over other teams than their performance on grooveballs. Cal Raleigh is the king of the team’s bad-ball hitting, and he did it once more on Sunday. The other two Mariners runs came when Cal Raleigh whacked a low splitter over the left field wall for a two-run bomb. ### Starters Grooving Fastballs Despite the Mariners’ digestive issues on meatball subs (and compensatory skill at bad-ball bashing), the typical trend for hitters is to thrive on the good juicy meat out over the plate. Unfortunately for the Mariners, George Kirby was dishing out a lot of that stuff on Sunday evening. One bad tendency that the fastball-heavy Mariners staff can oftentimes fall into is to try to work back in counts with a little bit of cheese out over the plate. Kirby was doing a fair bit of that, but his real issue was that he was missing his intended spots on the corners and missing them out over the plate. Sure, he walked three—unusually high for Kirby—but two of those batters were Juan Soto, so that’s not much of a stain. And it wasn’t just fastballs up for Kirby. Sure, it was the sinker and four-seamer, but it was also the slider and the knuckle curve. He left them up out over the plate and the Mets, unlike the Mariners, took full advantage to put a seven-spot on him. I’ll go over why it really was six earned runs later, but for now, I’ll go over something that isn’t happening. As I was writing this article, I hypothesized that teams like the Mets—who are 9th in OPS in the MLB on fastball type pitchers over the heart of the plate—were feasting on fastball-heavy pitchers like George Kirby, Luis Castillo, and Bryan Woo, essentially rendering over half the Mariners rotation useless against hard hitters. But I’m not going to just publish a narrative without backing it up, so I took that BaseballSavant data and plotted it with combined Woo/Castillo/Kirby ERA split by opponent, so that each plot point on a graph shows the team’s overall xwOBA against fastballs in the middle of the plate (the x-axis) and the ERA of the three aforementioned starters against said team (the y-axis). There was no statistical correlation. \[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="752"\] ![ This is a chart where there is no correlation between the points, they are essentially random. This might as well be titled “shark attacks plotted against stubbed toenails.” ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1d/f2/1df2f77b-83dd-4bc0-a6d2-6d1bb5df89a3/content/images/2026/10/xwoba-diagram-format-original.png) This is a chart where there is no correlation between the points, they are essentially random. This might as well be titled “shark attacks plotted against stubbed toenails.” \[/caption\] Now, this dataset was affected by a couple of outlier duds against the Cincinnati Reds, but even removing those duds didn’t give much of a correlation. I checked what would happen if I added StatCast’s “attack zone 12,” that is to say, the area above the heart of the plate, stretching from four inches below the top edge to four inches above. There’s more correlation when you factor in this zone, but the xwOBA in total is lower, since although this includes areas high in the strike zone that are good for hitters—which is what I was checking for—it also includes that rising fastball playground just above the zone. Even when I factored in zone 12, removed the Cincinnati outlier, and removed some further Yankees outliers, the resulting trend line was still less drastic than the overall trend line for Mariners pitchers as a whole. This means that Bryan Woo, George Kirby, and Luis Castillo are more effective against fastball-feasting hitters than other pitchers, even if those other guys rely on breaking stuff. Basically, Kirby had an off-day. The reason I included this tidbit is to show why testing ideas against data is important. I had a hunch and that hunch was completely wrong. Falsehood can get halfway around the world in the morning before the truth has its boots on, so it’s best to check. ### Bad Outfield Communication Back to scheduled programming and the defensive miscommunication. This only happened once, but it’s something that you’d rather not happen at all. Towards the end of the Mets’ crooked fifth inning, with a runner on second and two outs, Francisco Lindor whacked a high fly ball into the gap in right center. Dominic Canzone and Julio Rodriguez both looked to have a beat on the ball, but neither was yielding to the other. At the last moment, Canzone slowed down, but Rodriguez, trying to avoid Canzone, overran the ball. It bounced off his glove and into the outfield, a little league play during the Little League Classic. Run number seven came in for the Mets, who now had a six-run advantage on the Mariners. This has been an issue quite a few times in the outfield with the Mariners, where two guys will nearly collide, slow down on a catchable ball, and let it drop to the outfield. Obviously, it’s pretty loud in the stadium and yelling at the other fielder is like yelling while skydiving, but this is an issue that can be dealt with—so it’s frustrating to see it pop up consistently. ### Infield Playing Too Shallow There was an instance of this happening, though nothing ended up coming out of it on the Mets’ side. Now, there was one case of a single up the middle where Young and Crawford were in on the grass with a runner on third, but that ball was fast enough to zip by both of them regardless. It was the bottom of the eighth inning, Jackson Kowar in the middle of a pretty solid inning of relief. A walk and a steal by Juan Soto put a man in scoring position however, and Brandon Nimmo grounded a ball up the middle. Had Crawford been playing at the line of the outfield, he would have gotten to the ball, but he was playing a few steps in, and the ball zipped by him and sent Soto to third. Now, having Crawford in was to keep the runner honest at second. But the M’s hadn’t cared enough to even attempt a throw to second on the stolen base, so they clearly weren’t thinking that much about the runner. It’s not nearly as egregious as previous examples, and the Mets didn’t get a run out of it anyway, but it’s something to consider. ### Dishonorable Mention I: No Adjustment As often happens with this Mariners team, once things start going wrong, they immediately fall off the rails. There isn’t a whole lot of adjustment or secondary plans, it seems, as players across the lineup, from Kirby on the mound to the batters at the plate, kept going back to the same non-functional things hoping they would start working when they hadn’t been all day. ### Dishonorable Mention II: Folding Under Attention This isn’t the Mariners’ worst Sunday Night Baseball performance (there’s a lot of contenders for that one), but it shows that when the spotlight is on the boys from Seattle, they have a real tough time not stumbling. Part of it is that they’re definitely not used to it (they have been on Sunday Night Baseball nine times in the third millennium, six of which came before 2005), part of it probably has something to do with their ability in the clutch. Maybe it’s related to the RISP problems? Stats tell us that “clutch” is effectively random; our hearts tell us otherwise. Either way, they need to step up their game in these big moments. ### Dishonorable Mention III: Victor Robles Blowup Remember when I said there were two other things? I lied. Well, kind of. This one, however, wasn’t in Williamsport. The Tacoma Rainiers played the Las Vegas Aviators during a Sunday Pacific Coast League game. The game was quickly overshadowed by an outburst from Victor Robles, in for the Rainiers on a rehab assignment. Aviators pitcher Joe Estes threw a 0-0 fastball that whacked Robles high on his frame, the third time he had been hit in his career by Estes and the fourth time he had been hit during his current rehab stint. To add insult to injury, Robles had accidentally swung while trying to get out of the way. Robles promptly hurled his bat at Estes and started shouting at the pitcher. The umpire immediately tossed him from the game and then switched gears to try and get him to calm down as he stomped to the mound, and the scene slowly de-escalated from there. Once Robles reached the dugout, he hurled what appeared to be a bucket of chewing tobacco onto the field. It’s clear Robles will be suspended, though for how long is unknown. The rehabbing Mariner posted a couple apologies to his Instagram account—mentioning the tough time he’s been through due to the passing of his mother—but the damage is likely done. ### Bright Spot: Tayler Saucedo Fresh back from Tacoma, Mariner long reliever Tayler Saucedo put in a good outing. With the team down by a lot, Saucedo came in with two away in the fifth and pitched through the end of the seventh. He gave up just one hit in his 2 ⅓ innings and struck out three, lowering his ERA from 7.71 to 5.14. It may have been low leverage, but it’s good to see Mariners relievers put in solid work when they need to. And you need those low-leverage guys to do their work so that your team has a chance to come back in bad losses and doesn’t give up big leads on the other end. ### On Deck The M’s fell to 68-57 on Sunday, 11 games over .500\. They are still tied with the Red Sox for the first wild card spot, but the Yankees—seemingly over their recent losing spell—are just a half game back. Cleveland, however, has continued to fall, and is three and a half back of the Yankees for the third wild card and four games back of the Mariners. Seattle’s east coast road trip concludes with a three-game set against the Philadelphia Phillies, starting on Monday.