50 in 50: 2026 Mariners Waited and Wasted Too Long

April or September, wins and losses matter.

In all walks of life, there are different values to be placed on the big and small pictures. The view from 10 feet and the view from 10,000 feet. The day-to-day and the month-to-month.

All athletes must balance these two views, but 90% of it is indeed the day-to-day, the 10-foot view. The other half, to ape Yogi Berra, is the big picture. 

Throughout the 2026 season, Mariners players couched their daily disappointment in a faith that things would turn out in the end, that they would get on a hot streak, that they were just going through a rough patch. No doubt this is what they aspired to believe, even if gnawing internal voices grew louder as the season grew older.

But it goes without saying that none of that came to pass. Without any lasting willingness to make the season turn around, inertia prevailed.

“The ‘waiting on it part’ maybe that was the wrong thing to do,” Cal Raleigh said on Sept. 24, the day of the Mariners’ elimination. “You shouldn’t hold back on something that maybe needed to be done … I look at myself, and could I have done more? Yes, I should have done more. But I think again, it's not just me. I think it's a lot of guys, I think it's staff, I think it's front office, I think it's players. From top to bottom, I think we could have been a little more aggressive.”

In categorizing these 50 takeaways from the Mariners’ 50th season, it becomes very apparent that the issues the team had in 2026 viciously reinforced each other. The difficulty in balancing the daily with the monthly was probably intertwined with their inflexible plans, with no meaningful strategy in place to course-correct when something went deeply wrong. Both affected (and were affected by) the deterioration in team culture.

One wonders whether the cognitive dissonance from saying and hearing that things would work out on one hand while seeing and intuiting that things were going wrong on the other had an effect on morale. Outlets for squaring that circle were seldom; Raleigh’s impromptu interview on Aug. 11, where he opted to take near-full responsibility on himself for the team’s failure, could be seen as a way that Raleigh tried to find that outlet.

The 2027 Mariners will have to figure out their balance between the day-to-day ups and downs and the overall course of a season, but when it came to the back half of the 2026 season, there was a notable circularity and repetitiveness to it. The team would take a few games or maybe a couple series, giving them a shot at getting back in the swing of things, but the energy would fade and they would be right back where they started by the end of the following week.

It didn’t have to turn out this way, of course. Seattle actually got some breathing room with an eight-game win streak in late May, but where they could have used that as a springboard to a winning season, they instead dithered and wasted away their winning record and their divisional lead. 

Here lies that lesson: that a win in April matters as much as a win in September. Plenty of teams get out to a slow start, but the Mariners treated theirs with a startling lack of urgency from top to bottom. When they faced the Astros there and again, the life returned to their bats and arms, but mucky series against teams like the Nationals and Pirates showed a team that lacked the ability to finish what they started; all counted, the Mariners won the first game of a three-game set and then lost the final two nine times in 2026, compared to 11 times when they managed to win at least once in the following two games.

Three of those series were sweeps, meaning that upon winning the first game of a three-game series - something the M’s did 20 times - the team went 14-26 (.350) in the remaining games. Just as one could say that Seattle lost six games from their defense, they were six games under .500 after winning the first game of a series.

Here again is a disconnect between the big picture and the day-to-day. Just as they assumed things would get better whenever they had lost a few, they seemed to take it for granted that the first win would magically get them going and therefore let off the gas pedal for the next game.

So too was it exemplary of the team’s proclivity for kicking the can down the road.

“If it happens once, that’s one too many times, and if it happens again, it becomes a habit,” Raleigh said. “So it’s just about changing that.”

And just like any bad habit, turning it around often means immediate and uncomfortable decisions, rather than waiting around for the perfect time to turn things around. After all, the longer you wait to make that decision, the deeper your hole becomes.