Bryan Woo Burns Through Baltimore Lineup, Mariners Win Series
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Seattle Mariners starting pitcher Bryan Woo (22) throws against the Baltimore Orioles during the first inning at T-Mobile Park. Mandatory Credit: Joe Nicholson-Imagn Images [/caption]
The Mariners scored three runs in each of their games against the Baltimore Orioles as they began a two-series homestand against a pair of East Coast teams, a tally of runs that is seldom enough for consistent victory. And yet thanks to some incredible pitching - from Logan Gilbert on Tuesday and from Bryan Woo on Thursday - they won two of their three games and took their first series against the Orioles since 2022.
Seattle is now two games above .500, 39-37, after playing a series without Randy Arozarena or Luke Raley and having missed Josh Naylor for two games and Julio Rodríguez for one. In spite of all their hardships over the past couple of weeks, they have kept their heads barely above water as the days of June tick forward and the halfway point inches closer.
Bryan Woo struck back on Thursday, pitching seven scoreless innings with nine strikeouts.
This year, Woo hasn’t benefited from the incredible consistency of his 2025 campaign, coming into the game with a 4.28 ERA thanks to a newfound tendency to give up scores of hits with runners in scoring position. With a 1.037 WHIP, 3.25 FIP, and 5.27 strikeout-to-walk ratio, this ERA pace marks a significant outlier. Still, it takes a certain amount of mental fortitude to keep tough innings from becoming disasters, and Woo had given up five or more earned runs in a start four times out of his most recent nine outings. Interspersed among those games were four quality starts and one “Felix quality start” of seven innings, no earned runs, and nine strikeouts.
That seven-inning outing was repeated in style on Thursday as Woo did all three of those things once more. His ERA dipped back down to 3.94 as he mowed down the Orioles inning after inning, catching them off-guard with fastballs well above the zone and using an effective two-strike mix of heaters and breaking balls. A greater unpredictability in his pitch mix was the thing Woo cited as his main adjustment, though he said that he is always trying to bring each pitch into the circuit.
“Just using all five pitches was the main message that I wanted to bring to Woody [pitching coach Pete Woodworth] and to Garv [catcher Mitch Garver],” Woo noted. “Don’t box yourself into, ‘you can only throw this to this guy,’ or whatever it is. Feel like I’m in a good enough spot with pretty much all five, where, I don’t care who it is or what count or what situation, I wanna use all five.”
Woo had four strikeouts through two innings and Baltimore’s first hit came in the top of the third but didn’t result in any runs. He racked up another strikeout in the fourth and the efficiency of his outing continued.
“It was almost 100% what I wanted to do, adjustments that I wanted to make,” Woo said of his performance. “Falling behind, I got into a lot of predictable counts [in previous outings] … just doing a better job of the controllables today.”
The O’s finally started to time Woo better in the fifth inning, getting some early contact on the fastball, but it was one of the cases when the cavalry charge of aggressive heater-hunting ran into the caltrops of well-placed gloves. As the sixth and the seventh rolled round, Woo rediscovered his groove with a paper-thin pitch count in tow, striking out Gunnar Henderson on three pitches to end the sixth and getting two punchouts to begin a 1-2-3 seventh. Baltimore kept looking for ways to fight the Mariners off - it took seven pitches for Adley Rutschman to go down - but the visitors were running out of outs while the home hurler was six outs away from a complete game shutout.
Woo doesn’t have the best of track records in the eighth inning, however, only ever recording one out in that frame at any point during his career (incidentally, in a game the M’s lost), and even though his velocity didn’t drop, he missed a few too many spots and the Orioles led off with a one-pitch single and an eight-pitch walk.
Mariners manager Dan Wilson went out to the mound and pulled Woo from the game, not looking to risk any real damage.
“Tough to take him out on 90 pitches there, but I felt like that was a good time to hand it over to the bullpen which was fresh and ready to go,” Wilson said.
Having a seven-inning, no-run outing was the biggest key to Seattle’s victory, but with a slim lead, they needed Eduard Bazardo to keep as many runs as possible off the board.
The bullpen finished out the Orioles’ first shutout loss of the season.
Bazardo immediately got to work as the Mariners’ stopper, getting a quick force out at third on a weak grounder and a weak fly ball to center. The M’s wound up barely averting disaster as Victor Robles lost the ball in the sun and Miles Mastrobuoni sprinted over to assist him, risking a collision, but Robles got the ball back in his sights just in time to make the second out.
Taylor Ward fell looking to Bazardo’s running sinker to end the frame, bringing Baltimore to its final three outs.
Andrés Muñoz wasn’t nearly as sharp as Bazardo or Woo had been, failing to get a single first-pitch strike against five batters, but he held his struggles to two walks only. Colt Emerson managed to get a quick tag for the first out on a grounder up the middle, though his throw bounced off the batter Rutschman’s head and it didn’t become a double play.
A two-out walk to Samuel Basallo brought Leody Taveras to the dish as the tying run, but despite his propensity for bad misses in that frame, Muñoz got Taveras to chase a 1-2 slider that nearly hit his back foot.
With the ninth shutout inning completed, it sealed the win using only the runs the Mariners scored in the span of three batters. It also marked the first shutout loss of the season for Baltimore, who entered the game as the only team remaining to have scored a run in every game of the year.
Seattle got all their runs in the first before their hitting woes reasserted themselves.
After two days of offense that ranged from generally lethargic to dead and buried, the M’s wasted little time getting things going and giving Woo a little run support. Josh Naylor marked his return with a two-out liner into the gap and Dominic Canzone took a four-pitch walk, setting up the Cole and Colt show as Cole Young slapped a double down the left field line to score Naylor and Colt Emerson rocketed a 106-mile an hour single through the right side hole and Seattle was up 3-0.
Things appeared to keep moving as the second inning began. Robles and Mastrobuoni both knocked no-out hits off starting pitcher Shane Baz, and though J.P. Crawford popped out, Cal Raleigh got a 3-0 count and some chances to tee off.
But Mastrobuoni's knock was the last hit the M’s managed all game, as for the third straight game, the team scored exactly three runs. Raleigh’s strikeout in that frame was the third of 11 total strikeouts suffered by Mariners batters, while only getting four hard hit balls and one batted ball over 100 miles an hour.
The Mariners have scored three runs each in three straight games and, in their last five contests, they have scored exactly three runs four times and have knocked home 13 runs in those five contests (2.6 runs per game).
Offense that lethargic isn’t going to sustain winning for very long, though it worked well enough on Thursday afternoon.
The rehab streak appeared to take a break as Cal Raleigh got a golden sombrero in his third game back.
Cal Raleigh made waves during his rehab outings in Triple-A as he mashed five home runs for the Triple-A Tacoma Rainiers, but in his time back with the MLB team, the catcher hasn’t gone yard since coming back from his oblique issue.
Raleigh had, however, gone 2-6 with two walks, no strikeouts, and two big Tuesday RBIs in his two games back with the Mariners. That fell to 2-10 on Thursday as he struck out four times, twice swinging and twice looking and never on a pitch outside of the strike zone. Raleigh saw 20 pitches and 11 in the zone, of which he swung at five pitches over the plate and one pitch out of the zone. And yet he made contact on just one swing.
It isn’t terribly surprising, given Raleigh’s tendencies, that the one piece of contact - a foul ball - was on a pitch on the low outside corner. Meanwhile, four pitches essentially right down Broadway found big whiffs from the Mariners catcher.
That does make the swing decision (it’s unclear whether that was Raleigh’s or whether it was the dugout’s) that he take the 3-1 pitch from Baz in the bottom of the second, a pitch that was a fastball down the chute. Raleigh waved badly at a curveball over the heart of the dish to finish off that particular strikeout, seeming to get stuck in between the two pitches timing-wise.
Raleigh was playing as a DH on Thursday, with the team managing his load coming off injury. It’s unclear how exactly his lighter schedule will pan out, though one can expect more catching days for Garver.
On Deck
The Boston Red Sox will come to town for a three-game series to round out the homestand and take the Mariners 79 games into the season. Friday will be a fair bit hectic in T-Mobile Park and nearby, with the USMNT taking on Australia in a FIFA World Cup match next door before the game and Bryce Miller and Luis Castillo set to have the first of the team’s late-first half piggyback games.
With a southpaw on the hill for the Red Sox each of the next three games, there’s a distinct possibility that the series represents a make-or-break series for former Red Sox player Rob Refsnyder, who hasn’t had a true hot streak to chop up the long burns of bad play and doesn’t usually get the regular playing time to get into a groove.
