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# Bats Clock Out Early, Mariners Drop Five Games Under in Game 111
- URL: https://www.emeraldcityspectrum.com/seattle-mariners-bats-clock-out-early-drop-five-games-under/
- Published: 2026-08-01T18:18:59.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-08T06:10:49.000Z
- Author: Callaghan Bluechel
- Tags: News, Analysis, Mariners, Bryce Miller, Cal Raleigh, Josh Naylor, Julio Rodriguez, Weston Wilson, Dan Wilson, Mitch Garver, Jose A. Ferrer, Eduard Bazardo, Michael Rucker

\[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="5703"\]

![  Seattle Mariners starting pitcher Bryce Miller (50) reacts to manager Dan Wilson pulling him from the game during the sixth inning against the Minnesota Twins at T-Mobile Park. Mandatory Credit: Steven Bisig-Imagn Images  ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1d/f2/1df2f77b-83dd-4bc0-a6d2-6d1bb5df89a3/content/images/2026/10/bryce-miller-mound-visit-format-original.jpg)

Seattle Mariners starting pitcher Bryce Miller (50) reacts to manager Dan Wilson pulling him from the game during the sixth inning against the Minnesota Twins at T-Mobile Park. Mandatory Credit: Steven Bisig-Imagn Images \[/caption\]

The Mariners are five games under .500 for the second time this year. The first time was 25 games into the season, when they had a 4-9 record after an ugly sweep at the hands of the Texas Rangers. From then until the 62nd game of the year on June 2, they went 23-14 to take the division away from the Athletics and put themselves in the catbird seat as the team everyone expected to pull away with the West.

Two months later, the story of the AL West in 2026 could be summarized by paraphrasing the Sumerian King List: “Who was in first? Who was *not* in first?” But you don’t need a familiarity with 4,000-year-old Mesopotamian literature to see how the Mariners have dropped the ball and allowed the Rangers, then the Astros, to climb into first place. The bats have gone awfully quiet in the nearly 50 games since, with a .225/.297/.352 team slash line from June 3 to July 30\. By the time the M’s faced off against the Twins on Friday, they were 53-57 and uncomfortably close to falling out of the race entirely.

When Mitch Garver struck out and finished a 5-3 loss, the situation declined even further. The M’s are now three games back of the division-leading Astros, two and a half games back of the Rangers for second place, and three games back of the Twins and Guardians for the third wild card spot. They are guaranteed a losing season record against the Guardians and Rangers - effectively making them a game further behind those teams - while one more loss to the Twins would lock in that same losing tiebreaker with them, too.

### The bats fell asleep for six innings and missed opportunities throughout.

If the Mariners ever got the chance to wish into existence one simple change to their team, it might be prudent to choose the ability to punish mistakes. Underneath much of it, Seattle has a remarkably bad performance against pitches right down the middle: against pitches in the middle square of the strike zone - imagine it split like a tic-tac-toe grid - the M’s went into Friday night with the lowest batting average (.275), fifth-lowest slugging (.552), and sixth-lowest hard-hit rate (49.1%). These become even more stark when sorting for just fastball-type pitches: the lowest batting average (.279), third-lowest slugging (.522), and fifth-lowest hard-hit rate (51.9%). 

Part of it is due to some bum luck, with a .234 batting average on balls in play (BABIP) on such pitches; one might imagine it would coalesce towards the .306 leaguewide middle-middle BABIP. The following graph shows the difference in spray locations between the Mariners and the team with both the highest batting average and highest slugging on pitches down the middle, the Phillies:

\[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="2000"\]

![  It’s subtle, but it’s clear that the Phillies get more balls in the gaps and less grounders directly to fielders than the Mariners do against down-the-middle pitches.  ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1d/f2/1df2f77b-83dd-4bc0-a6d2-6d1bb5df89a3/content/images/2026/10/mariners-phillies-middle-middle-format-original.png)

It’s subtle, but it’s clear that the Phillies get more balls in the gaps and less grounders directly to fielders than the Mariners do against down-the-middle pitches. \[/caption\]

But at a certain point, is it all luck? Is it luck when it continues indefinitely with no end in sight? That was the case on Friday, though it didn’t start out that way. A first inning rally saw Randy Arozarena, Dominic Canzone, and Josh Naylor load the bases on a walk-double-walk sandwich. Cal Raleigh kept his discipline against Twins starter Zebby Matthews, as despite an early 0-2 count, he fouled off a few tough pitches and laid off the same kind of high heat that has been fooling him all season. Now, there were a couple of hittable pitches that he fouled off, but that still kept him alive long enough to lay into a changeup down the chute for a two-run ground-rule double.

Weston Wilson quickly struck out to end the inning. Cole Young seared a homer in the bottom of the second for the Mariners’ third run, but from then on, the Mariners went 1-23 for the rest of the game with two walks and one hit batsman. Those two walks were in the ninth inning, when the team was already down two runs, and though the team was a hit away from knotting it back up.

But all that space in between saw the M’s lose their discipline, expanding the zone far too much while finding themselves off-balance for hittable pitches down the middle. Like many times throughout the year, they got themselves into an in-between approach and couldn’t hit anything as a result. Much of this was against Matthews, who came into the game with a 5.21 ERA, 5.14 FIP, and 1.316 WHIP on the season. Matthews logged 10 strikeouts against the M’s, the first time in his career he reached that figure.

“A lot of swing and miss,” said Mariners manager Dan Wilson. “Looked like some chase and getting ourselves in bad counts and not being able to get the pitch that we want, and that's what makes it difficult.”

When Wilson was asked a follow-up about whether it was more the Mariners lacking or the Twins pitchers (including Matthews) being on their game, he took a second to find his words before saying that “sometimes it can be a little bit of both,” though he did later on specifically attribute Matthews being “effectively wild” as a reason why the M’s bats struggled.

For a manager who has often defaulted to discussing opposing teams’ strengths as a reason for his team’s weakness, chalking it up to both Mariners failure and opponent success is a notable shift. As for the bats themselves, had they pounced on more opportunities - such as when Julio Rodríguez led off the sixth with a single and stole second, only for Naylor to roll one over to the right side before Raleigh popped out swinging at a pitch above the zone and Weston Wilson struck out - every other flaw in the Mariners game would have scarcely mattered.

### Bryce Miller was solid on the hill, though he exited the game unusually early.

Coming off an [uneasy start in Texas](https://www.emeraldcityspectrum.com/home/seattle-mariners-drop-game-one-texas-rangers-critical-series), when the Rangers held him to zero strikeouts and his splitter stayed up on him all game, Miller addressed his issues in his downtime, with much of his work focusing on getting his splitter back into form.

“Splitter location was better, getting it underneath. Shape on it was better. We worked on it all week,” Miller said. “Still not exactly where I want it, but definitely trending.”

Of 14 swings the Twins took against the splitter, they missed eight of them (57%); of 32 splitters Miller threw, 12 (38%) were either called strikes or whiffs. Both metrics were far and above where he had been against the Rangers and far closer to what the Mariners have come to expect from their starter.

But while his splitter returned to form, Miller seemed to lack feel for the slider, though the six starting lefties in the Twins lineup made the fadeaway splitter the better option for much of the game. Still, as the Twins were able to get plenty of contact on the heater, this meant that he only managed three strikeouts all game.

One of those pitches that very well could have been a strikeout was a 1-2 splitter to Josh Bell with no outs in the second. The pitch was down out of the zone and Bell swung, but he flicked it off the end of the bat into right field for a hit. A couple quick weak flyouts nearly got Miller out of the frame, but when he fell behind Brooks Lee 3-1, he made his only costly mistake of the night, a cutter over the heart of the dish that Lee whacked over the right field wall. According to the hurler, he minded the count a little too much as he made his offering.

“All year, it’s been a pitch that, I think I’ve talked about it before, it has cut all the time. And that one didn’t cut,” Miller said. “I think that one, I was just focused a little bit too much on 3-1, don’t want to walk him, just throw a strike - instead of like, rip a cutter. That pitch, if I stay behind it a little too much, then it ends up being a flat fastball at 91 instead of a cutter.”

The third was a 1-2-3 frame and the fourth and fifth each passed by with a walk being the only baserunner for the visitors. Miller even faced the minimum in the fifth as he picked off Luke Keaschall on first. There were a few longer at-bats throughout for Minnesota, but entering the sixth, the starter had 83 pitches. It took him four throws to get the first out, but at that point, the manager Wilson walked out to the mound and pointed to the bullpen. There wasn’t a runner on, nor had the lineup rolled over. 

“Yeah, no, I wasn’t expecting to come out at that point,” Miller said of his early exit. “But you know, throw until they tell me I’m done … I always wish I could finish the inning, finish my outing, but yeah, just throw it ‘til they tell me I’m done.”

The skipper didn’t offer much explanation as to why the move was made at that time, seemingly using the pitcher switch as the reason for itself.

“As I told him out there, this is what we were looking for from him, and our bullpen, especially the higher leverage guys, were well rested and ready to go,” Wilson said. “As we talked about, it was a good point in the ballgame to make the change.”

Had that bullpen locked things down, the M’s would have had a victory to celebrate on Friday. Instead, they found themselves five games under.

### Jose A. Ferrer and Eduard Bazardo gave up three combined, while a dearth of pinch-hitting options sealed the loss.

D. Wilson brought in Jose A. Ferrer for the rest of the sixth, where he did well, but the seventh began on a bad note. Pitching lefty-on-righty, he hung a sinker that Royce Lewis took out of the yard for a game-tying solo shot. Alan Roden quickly singled himself on, and although Ferrer got one out, Eduard Bazardo came in to finish the frame. On a 1-1 count, the right-hander tried to jam Keaschall inside with a sinker, but the Twins center fielder turned on it and sent a roaring double down the left field line and gave the Twins the lead.

Bazardo had been seeing notable struggles as of late - with an 8.10 ERA and three homers given up in his last seven appearances before Friday - and though he wasn’t charged with an earned run in the seventh, the eighth began on a hanging sweeper to Ryan Jeffers for Minnesota’s fifth run, the second straight inning to begin with a Twins longball and Bazardo’s fourth given up in eight appearances. Bazardo finished the eighth and Michael Rucker worked a clean ninth, but the ball was in the bats’ court.

With one out in the bottom of the ninth, Cal Raleigh got himself aboard with a free pass and W. Wilson followed up with an excellent 10-pitch walk of his own. Yoendrys Gómez now was in danger of blowing the save, with the winning run at the dish, but a slow roller to the left side from Colt Emerson did nothing but move the runners up. Victor Robles was due up, but with his struggles, the M’s needed a pinch hitter.

Their options were Leo Rivas, Mitch Garver, and a Luke Raley who was explicitly unavailable with a day-to-day injury. Garver got the call, but the right-handed Gómez got him to wave at sliders off the plate to end the game.

### With the season on the brink, the M’s are examining every option at the deadline.

Despite the team’s precarious position, the Mariners have, to this point, been adamant buyers in their public announcements. But though one side of their mouths speaks with belief, the other must acknowledge reality to an extent; after their Friday loss, it’s clear they must reorient towards the near future.

As for the players on the field, 51 more chances to prove themselves better than their current play exist before the end of the season, starting with two more games against the Twins and two more series to round out their current homestand.