> ## 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. # Bryan Woo Groundhog Day, Randy Arozarena Game of Inches Produce Disastrous Pittsburgh Rout - URL: https://www.emeraldcityspectrum.com/seattle-mariners-bryan-woo-groundhog-day-pittsburgh-rout/ - Published: 2026-06-25T11:59:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-08T06:11:15.000Z - Author: Callaghan Bluechel - Tags: News, Analysis, Mariners, Bryan Woo, Randy Arozarena, J.P. Crawford, Cal Raleigh, Julio Rodriguez, Michael Rucker, Nick Davila, Alex Hoppe \[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="5348"\] ![ Seattle Mariners first baseman Josh Naylor (12) slides into second base after hitting a double as Pittsburgh Pirates shortstop Jared Triolo (19) takes a late catch during the third inning at PNC Park. Mandatory credit: Charles LeClaire/Imagn Images ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1d/f2/1df2f77b-83dd-4bc0-a6d2-6d1bb5df89a3/content/images/2026/10/naylor-pittsburgh-format-original.jpg) Seattle Mariners first baseman Josh Naylor (12) slides into second base after hitting a double as Pittsburgh Pirates shortstop Jared Triolo (19) takes a late catch during the third inning at PNC Park. Mandatory credit: Charles LeClaire/Imagn Images \[/caption\] An exasperated Bryan Woo talked with the media after his loss on Wednesday, a game where he gave up a nuclear inning in an occurrence that has become awfully common for the team’s 2025 ace. He was frank about his struggles and the fact he isn’t sure what the source of his woes has been. “It’s baseball, you know. And it’s kicking my ass right now,” Woo said. It may have been very close for an 11-1 game. In other words, it was a perfect reflection of what happens when a winnable game snowballs totally out of the control of the losing team, with all fight and verve driven from the Mariners blow by blow as the Pirates tacked on hit after hit to pounce on every chance they had. ### Pittsburgh melted Bryan Woo in the fourth inning, handing Woo the fifth five-run start of his season. Since April 25, Woo has had an ERA of 5.31, but this doesn’t tell the full story of his struggles in 2026\. It is often broken down into home and road splits - where his ERA is 2.00 at home but 6.38 on the road - but this is also an incomplete look at the situation as it currently stands. Looking at the things a pitcher can control, Woo has struck out 40, walked 11, hit two, and given up seven homers in 48 innings on the road; at home, he has struck out 52, walked seven, hit one, and given up two homers in 45 innings. Turning those results into fielding independent pitching (FIP) numbers gives a 4.14 FIP on the road and a 1.90 FIP at home. But the big note from it all is that the damage is coming in the form of big crooked innings. As soon as teams get a man to second, the wheels fall off the bus and fast. That’s what happened on Wednesday as Woo fell apart in the fourth inning. Coming into that frame, things were looking pretty good for the Mariners. Despite a throwing error from J.P. Crawford in the bottom of the third and a walk in each of the first and second inning, Woo had brought down plenty of Pirates with little but his four-seam fastball. The fourth inning initially looked similar, as although he gave up a leadoff single (Pittsburgh’s first hit), a groundout to short looked to get him back on track. Ryan O’Hearn got under a fly ball and floated it down the line in left, a fairly routine play for Randy Arozarena. But Arozarena, perhaps influenced by an ongoing hamstring recovery, slowed up as the wall approached, and the ball fell barely fair for a ground-rule double. Eight pitches later, the Pirates had four runs on the board. Woo had gotten ahead of Endy Rodríguez with heaters, but a not uncommon issue arose for the hurler as he needed to find a way to get past him the second time through the order. Woo’s near-total dearth of secondaries in the first three innings had meant that he didn’t find his feel for the sweeper quickly enough to prevent a big hit as the Pirates’ Rodríguez lined a double into right, the breaking ball having stayed over the middle of the plate knee-high. Unlike in his first couple of blowup starts, when Woo mentioned the importance of confidence and had a clear plan of action for getting back into the swing of things, he was left grasping at air as he took questions. The sentiments had a restrained fire to them, though perhaps that fire was directed inwards. “Feels like I’m making good pitches. Feels like I’m trying to stay pitch-to-pitch. When I’m at my best, that’s what it feels like I’m doing, feels like I did that today. In one inning it’s like \[...\] ball down the line, good pitch for a double,” Woo said amongst raw pauses and sighs. “I’m sorry, I wish I had better answers for you. I just don’t.” The confidence Woo had talked about earlier in the year appeared well and truly shot through, a self-esteem as porous as St. Helens pumice. “Honestly, I don’t know. If I had answers, I’d have answers for myself and I just don’t right now,” Woo said. “I’m digging, I’m trying, I’m looking everywhere. I just don’t know. I wish I had better answers for you and I just don’t know.” The hurler was letting his four-seamers travel too far southwards by this point in the game. The O’Hearn double cracked him, but it was Rodríguez’ two-bagger that broke him. Tyler Callihan ripped a first-pitch triple into right center to make it 3-1 for the hosts and Jake Mangum drove one through to put the Bucs up by a trio of runs. Woo won an eight-pitch battle with Jake Triolo for the second out, but once Mangum stole second, the RISP curse went right back into effect as Esmerlyn Valdez knocked him home with a single of his own. The Pirates led 5-1\. The fourth inning took Woo 40 pitches where the previous three took him 46 combined. He didn’t go out for the fifth. Woo is well aware of his current brokenness, as even though the process going into these road games doesn’t feel different on a conscious level, there is probably something in his subconscious that is causing the doors to fall off after one shove when he’s outside of T-Mobile Park. The RISP stats are especially stark: when facing opposing batters with runners in scoring position on the road this year, Woo has a .529 opposing average. An average that ridiculously high is a mix of bad pitching and bad luck, of course. A 44.8% opposing hard-hit rate in those situations isn’t ideal, but it wouldn’t suggest the degree of loss of game control that has happened; a 7.7% strikeout rate there is heavily diminished from Woo’s full-season 24.6% strikeout rate, but it only hints at the problem. Hitters’ .516 batting average on balls in play (BABIP) in these situations is unsustainably high in any event, but there is still clearly an issue with Woo. The problem seems to be a combination of a bunch of different things, from telegraphing to in-game atrophy of his secondaries to lack of confidence to bad luck. It’s clearly weighing on Woo’s mind at the halfway point. “They all keep me up late. Yeah, it’s not a good feeling, putting your team in a hole game after game,” Woo said. “I wish I could say I’m just gonna wipe it off and get to the next one, but I’m not.” ### Randy Arozarena was inches from a game-changing early homer in the first. Back in the top of the first inning, before Woo took the mound, the Mariners had one of their sparse opportunities. Facing Pirates starter Braxton Ashcraft, the M’s started pouncing early, with Crawford, Cal Raleigh, and Julio Rodríguez each knocking singles to begin the game and tack on the first run. Josh Naylor became the first of many Mariners to get completely fooled by Ashcraft’s curveball, but Arozarena torched a 1-0 pitch right down the line and over the fence. Were it a homer, it would have been a 4-0 lead for the Mariners right then and there, and the team’s streak of being unable to score four runs in a game would have ended at nine contests. But it went the slimmest of hairs foul, and a few pitches later, Arozarena struck out. That not-homer was just about as close as that not-foul ball from O’Hearn in the fourth inning. Were those items reversed, the game may have ended up going in the Mariners’ favor; they would have had a tremendous advantage and, with a Woo blowup likely out of the cards, the Pirates may have never gotten their snowball rolling. Ifs and buts, candy and nuts. The M’s had a few more chances in the early frames thanks to doubles by Cole Young in the second and Naylor in the third, but the top of the fourth marked the frame when Ashcraft truly got into a groove. By the time his outing was done after six, he had struck out 10 Mariners and walked none. Once Woo lost the fourth, the Mariners lost the game. A more mentally fortuitous team might have found it within themselves to make it interesting and stem the bleeding, but such an internally tough squad exists more often than not in the realm of imagination where the 2026 Mariners are concerned. The M’s didn’t get a baserunner until the top of the ninth. ### Pittsburgh piled on and made it a laugher as the hosts climbed to 40-40. Just one Mariners pitcher could walk away from Wednesday’s game with his head held high: Michael Rucker. In his fifth appearance of the year for the M’s, Rucker kept the Buccos off the board for two consecutive innings, the score held at 5-1 until the bottom of the seventh when he no longer had the ball. This was despite the Pirates getting a pair of one-out singles in the fifth; Rucker’s mix of heaters and curveballs did the job in both frames. Nick Davila was up next as the low-leverage man for the team. Despite having made his MLB debut earlier in the year, Davila had opened the season with 12 straight scoreless outings. It relied incredibly on luck - hitters had a .156 BABIP against him in these appearances - but even with miniscule whiff rates, he had managed to get enough weak contact to make him effective. Not on Wednesday, however. Black and gold filled up the bases in the first three batters thanks to a single-walk-single sandwich, and the Pirates made solid contact for several batters more as they jumped on Davila’s early-count offerings. With a double, a single, and a sacrifice, four runners came home. Alex Hoppe’s eighth was another rough outing for a fellow Mariners rookie reliever; Hoppe’s ERA jumped to 5.87 as he gave up at least one earned run (this time two) for the ninth time in 20 appearances. Like the rest of the game, there wasn’t a home run to be found: the Pirates mixed singles and doubles to score two runs and close out a score of 11-1. ### The Mariners’ lack of fight continued the team’s bad omen going into the second half of the year. The first half of the season (that is, time before the All-Star Break) is still a ways out from coming to pass, but Wednesday marked the end of the mathematical first half, the initial 81 games of the year. The M’s are 41-40 through those games, hardly anything to write home about for a team that had World Series aspirations at the beginning of the year. They still have those aspirations, though perhaps that says more bad things about the league, the expanded playoffs, and year-round interleague play than it does anything good about the Mariners. Even if they get into the playoffs on the backs of a mediocre division and a well-timed hot streak, a team that fails to claw back into games when things begin to go wrong is hardly primed to do well in October. Unlike the hungry championship-hunting team of 2025, the listless team of 2026 seems perpetually stuck in the same fishbowl. Manager Dan Wilson’s first three words of his postgame presser were the same as they have been after each night loss of the year: “tough one tonight.” Does that speak to a manager and clubhouse blinder than they should be to the problems they face? Not by itself. Words are one thing, and over a 162-game season, there’s only so much to be said about any particular loss, especially from the managerial side of things. But there is a danger that a team can begin to habitually wave away their losses as each individually insignificant, taking the optimistic side of the proverbial view from 10 feet, and lose sight of the greater 10,000-foot view of a season getting ever more constricted and perilous. If the M’s aren’t careful, they might become the boiling frog, only realizing their peril and atrophy once it is too late. Regular season slogs like these, after all, are tests of a team’s mettle. The good teams still lose a third of their games, but rarely do they go limp and lifeless and lack baserunners for four straight frames as soon as they face a four-run deficit. Instead, these teams fight for every run, and in so doing prepare themselves for higher-stakes battles in the autumn.