“It Just Got Out of Hand”: Mariners Suffer Most Lopsided Loss - 22-0 - in Team History
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Seattle Mariners center fielder Julio Rodríguez (44) is shown after catching a sacrifice fly by Milwaukee Brewers designated hitter Christian Yelich and tossing the ball into the stands for a fielding error during the eighth inning of their game on Tuesday, August 18, 2026 at American Family Field in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Image credit: Mark Hoffman/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel [/caption]
With one out and the bases loaded in the bottom of the eighth, Christian Yelich sent a routine fly ball to Julio Rodríguez. The Mariners center fielder caught it for an out and Andrew Vaughn trotted home for a Brewers run. Simple, right? Like someone opening their front door to go out for another day of work, just as they have innumerable times before and just as they will countless times after.
It is only when zooming out that a picture of utter mayhem, calamity, and chaos comes into view. That was the 20th run the Brewers scored on Monday. That was Yelich’s second at-bat of the inning and the 11th batter that infielder Leo Rivas faced in his one-inning, nine-run pitching stint. Rodríguez was so checked out that, seemingly thinking there were already two outs, he tossed the ball into the crowd - an action that awarded each runner two bases and thus scored Jonathan Ornelas from second while moving William Contreras to third.
Luis Lara, who had earlier in the inning logged his first major-league home run to make it “only” 16-0, capped off the rout with a run-scoring single. Garrett Mitchell logged a merciful third out to end the eighth and conclude the beating of a horse that was barely even skeletal by that point.
The final score was 22-0.
The good news for Seattle is that whether by a gulf of 22 runs or one, all losses count the same. The merciless beatdown may have counted for two and a half losses on their Pythagorean record, but their actual record only went from 59-66 to 59-67. They need to win both remaining games of the series, but they’re somehow still in this.
That doesn’t make such a putrid loss any less embarrassing. What’s perhaps more surprising is that there was a time when this game was close.
Bryce Miller’s splitter had issues all game and his control fell apart in the fifth.
M’s starter Bryce Miller came into the game on a more than month-long rut, with a 6.12 ERA, 5.65 FIP, and 1.515 WHIP in his previous six starts. His strikeout rate had dipped from 33.2% in his first nine appearances to 15.3% in the aforementioned six that followed, a precipitous drop-off that gave many an opponent the chance to tack on runs - and all six of those had been losses for the Mariners.
Much of this regression had been due to a decline in the quality of Miller’s splitter. Over his first nine outings, opponents had a 14.8% hard hit rate, .098 batting average, and .118 slugging percentage against that pitch; in the seven outings since (including Tuesday), those opponents have a 53.1% hard hit rate, .261 average, and .565 slugging on his splitter.
Miller has often talked about the pitch “staying up” on him in recent outings, but it’s worth pointing out that he has actually thrown it below the zone more often in his recent struggle starts than in his early-season outings. The difference, then, seems to be twofold: Miller is leaving splitters up that he intends to pitch underneath the zone and hitters are recognizing the shape more often when it is in the zone.
Splitter issues started immediately on Tuesday, as he left one in the middle of the plate to Brice Turang and another one to Jackson Chourio, the latter of whom drilled it 402 feet to dead center only for Rodríguez to catch it at the warning track. But Jake Bauers took a 1-2 middle-middle splitter into right field for a double and he came around to score on a single to left, though he certainly “helped” his scoring chances when he seemingly smacked the ball out of Cal Raleigh’s glove as Raleigh tagged him at home. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t; there was another play at the plate as Bauers took a while to discover the ball had even gone loose and barely scampered back to the plate to officially score the first run.
About the only splitters that went where Miller wanted were the ones to David Hamilton in the bottom of the second, with the Brewers again threatening with runners on first and second. Miller laid off the pitch in subsequent innings, going to the curveball and sweeper as his primary secondaries in the third and fourth, but the fifth presented a new challenge: he couldn’t control anything.
With Hamilton on first after a single, Miller walked Turang on four pitches, and both promptly executed a double steal to get to second and third. Chourio lined one hard to center o score Hamilton, but Rodríguez deked Turang into staying at second as he motioned as if he would catch it on the fly. Had the double steal not occurred, he might have had the chance for the rare 8-5 force out at third, but as it occurred in reality, it was Milwaukee’s second run.
Jake Bauers walked on five pitches to load the bases and William Contreras knocked Turang home on a sacrifice fly to make it 3-0 for the Brewers. By this point, both Jose A. Ferrer and Josh Simpson had been warming up in the bullpen and Miller was on 89 pitches.
Manager Dan Wilson could have put either pitcher into the game, but he didn’t. Cal Raleigh - who to this point had been avoiding the kind of repetitive sequences that had allowed hitters to sit on the previous pitch in many a previous game - could have called a lot of other things than three straight splitters, but he didn’t. Miller could have executed the third splitter better, but he didn’t.
Christian Yelich called game with a three-run homer to right center. Wilson yanked Miller for Josh Simpson, who got out of the inning, but the damage was done. The skipper, with a rare bluntness, took the blame on himself.
“That decision is on me,” Wilson said. “Accountability is there. It’s on me. It starts and stops there. It’s a big turning point in the game and wanted to get Bryce through there. Just didn’t make the right choice and it cost us.”
Wilson has struggled with leaving pitchers out there one batter too long for the entirety of his managerial tenure. There have been a lot of painful such moments to learn from and just as many, it seems, unheeded warnings. But when it came to the disaster that followed, there was little he could do but watch in awestruck horror.
The Brewers scored 16 runs in three innings to turn the defeat from awful to historic.
What followed could be compared to infamous lopsided battles, real or fictional. Perhaps Cannae comes to mind, or the Spanish Armada, or Nirnaeth Arnoediad for the Tolkien-inclined. The 7-1 Mineiraço was not quite as lopsided in score but far more lopsided in impact; all losses count the same in this game, and so the meaning of 22-0 is as much as the minds in the Mariners clubhouse will make of it.
On Tuesday, however, it was a hydrogen bomb against a coughing baby.
The volume of the scoring plays speak for themselves. Hamilton hit a three-run homer in the bottom of the sixth, then Bauers launched a two-run shot later in the frame. Hamilton knocked in another run in the seventh with a single and, after a “close” miss at second from Nick Davila, a would-be inning-ending double play became another run because Josh Naylor dropped the catch.
Even by this point, the loss wasn’t as bad as the team’s theretofore worst shutout defeat, a 15-0 loss to the Twins on July 10, 1977. But it was Rivas’ eighth inning where the embarrassment became ridiculous.
Contreras doubled, Yelich singled, Lara homered, and Mitchell and Joey Ortiz both singled before Rivas recorded his first out, which was still a hard hit ball at good launch angle from Hamilton. Brandon Lockridge, Vaughn, and Ornelas all singled and Contreras walked before Yelich flew out to center and Rodríguez tossed it into the seats. That brings us back to Lara’s single that finalized the score.
22-0.
In a closer game, Jhonny Pereda’s (he was in for Raleigh by this point) two-out single down the left field line in the ninth might have been a double and perhaps even brought Naylor home for a run; as the game stood then, nobody was going to do anything but jog. Victor Robles grounded into a force at third to make the ugly result official.
Wilson offered up the understatement of the century after the game.
“It just got out of hand,” the skipper said. “They put up a lot of runs tonight, and we were quiet offensively. It’s a tough one to even think about.”
The next two games will be telling.
From a reasonable perspective, it’s easy to see the Mariners season as all but over and done with. The team has a -45 run differential, is eight games under .500, and has disappointed again and again in a season where they were supposed to make the World Series. They are four games back of the Astros for the division.
By the reckoning of score alone, it was the worst loss in team history. Of course, that can be defined many other ways, and perhaps the worst loss in recent years still remains ALCS Game 7. It’s all about how you measure “worst”; Tuesday’s loss was up there by any metric.
And yet they are somehow just three games back of the third wild card spot. Now, there are six teams between them and that spot (the AL is laughably bad this year), but it offers up the tiny possibility of a chance. They needed to win this series to remain competitive, and somehow, that’s still on the docket.
“We got our ass kicked,” Miller said. “At the end of the day, though, like sitting on it too long is not going to do anything for us. We got to go to the hotel, sleep, wake up, and we got another game tomorrow and we still got a shot to win the series. We got to go out and compete tomorrow and be ready to go from the first pitch.”
But the prospects of such a comeback have long since started to look like deluded dreams of wonder weapons. The only ones who can prove that notion wrong are the Mariners - but do they have it in themselves to do so?
