> ## 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. # Cole Young’s Hometown Game-Winner Marks Early Career Highlight, M’s Win 3-2 - URL: https://www.emeraldcityspectrum.com/seattle-mariners-cole-young-homecoming-game-winner/ - Published: 2026-06-24T08:28:32.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-08T06:11:17.000Z - Author: Callaghan Bluechel - Tags: News, Analysis, Mariners, Cole Young, Cal Raleigh, George Kirby, Luke Raley, Jose A. Ferrer, Eduard Bazardo, Andres Munoz \[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="4390"\] ![ Seattle Mariners second baseman Cole Young (2) hits a two run home run against the Pittsburgh Pirates during the seventh 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/cole-young-pittsburgh-format-original.jpg) Seattle Mariners second baseman Cole Young (2) hits a two run home run against the Pittsburgh Pirates during the seventh inning at PNC Park. Mandatory Credit: Charles LeClaire-Imagn Images \[/caption\] Neither Pittsburgh nor Seattle sit directly beside an ocean (though Puget Sound of course connects quite nicely to the Pacific and gives the Emerald City a strong oceangoing port), yet these teams cleared the decks for their first of three sea battles on Tuesday night. It was a low-scoring affair, but the Mariners’ two cannonballs were enough to seal the deal as they came out ahead 3-2\. The one homer had special significance for Cal Raleigh, as it was his first big fly since returning from the IL, but it was the second that shone brightest: Seattle’s own Yinzer flipped the score from a Mariners deficit to a Mariners lead. Triumphant homecoming is one of humanity’s oldest seagoing motifs, but with a 22-year-old hitting three homers in a month for the second time in his career, the game had more to do with the beginning of Young’s odyssey than its end. ### Cole Young blasted a go-ahead homer in his Pittsburgh homecoming. Going into Tuesday, the Mariners were tied with the Twins for the second-worst winning percentage (.094) when trailing a game at the beginning of the seventh inning, having won three of 32 such contests. The only teams worse in this regard (the Giants, Angels, Guardians, Astros, Rangers, and Royals) had a combined 212-261 record and .448 winning percentage. For comparison, the two teams FanGraphs projects as more likely than the Mariners to win it all (the Yankees and Dodgers) have a combined .196 winning percentage when entering the seventh inning in a deficit. The Brewers, Braves, Phillies, and Rays - the next four teams down after the M’s on FanGraphs’ projections - had a combined .227 winning percentage in games where they entered the seventh inning losing. And when the top of the seventh began on Tuesday, the M’s trailed 2-1, marking the 33rd time they had entered that inning with a deficit in the season. Pirates starting pitcher Mitch Keller had thrown just 72 pitches, the M’s struggles continuing with the bat as they didn’t break up his efficiency or get many runs across. Keller fell behind Luke Raley 3-1, and although he filled the count with a foul ball, the Mariners right fielder slapped a screaming low liner into left center and riskily sped into second, helped out by an uneasy throw from the outfield. Young hadn’t gotten a hit in his first two hometown appearances, with a pair of ground balls to the right side that created three total outs for the Pirates defense. The right-handed Keller tried to dance around the edges with a pair of sweepers, but although the first was a ball a couple inches outside, the second leaked right over the middle of the plate and Young put a well-practiced pull swing on the ball. The team has been trying for a while to develop a sneaky power stroke with Young, looking to create a good pull-air rate and manufacture some slug, so to speak, from a guy with unremarkable raw power. This has been a mixed bag over the first year or so of his career, with plenty of rolled over grounders as he hasn’t quite figured out which pitches to pull and which to push. There’s an element of pitch recognition at play here, as he can sometimes have issues differentiating fastballs and changeups and trying to pull opposite-side run can be a fool’s errand more often than not. But this swing is perfectly geared for hanging breaking balls. Young drove a high fly ball to straightaway right, managing to easily clear the fence and knock home the two runs needed to give the Mariners the lead. Incidentally, Young hadn’t been trying for a fly ball in that appearance. “I was trying to just hit the ball on the ground to the right side to move him over,” Young said. “That was kinda the goal of the at-bat.” Think small and big things will happen. It’s the opposite proverb to aiming for the moon and hitting a star, but that swing marked one of the many times it held true in a baseball game. Young had previously mentioned a favorite PNC Park memory of going to see the 2013 NL Wild Card Game, the first playoff game the Pirates had played since the bad-kneed Sid Bream outran Barry Bonds’ arm in Game 7 of the in 1992 NLCS, the last game Bonds ever played in gold and black. But cracking a homer in his hometown yard bested seeing the Pirates get a playoff victory. “Yeah, I think this is number one,” Young said. His team, after all, won both of those games, and although it was his adopted rather than maternal team the second go around, he himself was critical in Tuesday night’s win. That window ended up wholly unfulfilling for the Pirates. The Buccos lost in the NLDS that year to the Cardinals, run support failing Gerrit Cole as he was saddled with the 6-1 Game 5 loss. Cole had pitched three days prior to the Pirates’ 2014 Wild Card Game appearance and so Edinson Vólquez got torn apart by the eventual World Series-winning San Francisco Giants. And when the Cubs’ Kyle Schwarber took his team to a 3-0 lead in the top of the third with one swing in the 2015 NL Wild Card Game, it was a sledgehammer to the Pirates’ window. They scored zero runs in the 2014 and 2015 playoffs and haven’t made the dance since. Seattle is now the ones with a championship window open for the taking, but the specter of such unopened windows throughout the league (most relevantly the Mariners’ own from 1995 to 2003) looms large over the team. If the team is to get closer than eight outs away from the Fall Classic, Young will have to play a big part. ### George Kirby hurled a quality start despite the Pirates making each frame difficult. A walks and hits per innings pitched (WHIP) figure of 1.667 over the course of a full season wouldn’t be very kind to a starting pitcher. That is roughly the WHIP of 2025 Thomas Hatch, a reliever who had a 5.82 ERA in 34 ⅓ innings last year. Yet with enough grit, luck, and perseverance, a pitcher can weather five walks and hits per every three innings. That’s what George Kirby did in his quality start on Tuesday, as he gave up eight hits and two walks and yet kept the Pirates to two runs (one earned) over six innings. “Furious George” started out 2026 as a lockdown ace-quality starter, but over his six appearances before Tuesday, he had given up three or more runs every time and had a 6.27 ERA over those outings as his season ERA ballooned from 2.84 to 4.10\. He had a 1.576 WHIP during that time, pretty much all on one hit after another falling past the defense. It’s worth noting that his opposing hard hit rates and barrel rates increased during his slump and his ground ball rate plummeted; hitters legitimately began to see his pitches better. Part of this was that Kirby found the zone too much with his fastballs over his slump and didn’t create separation between his sinker and four-seam. \[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="2000"\] ![ Split heatmaps showing locations of George Kirby’s sinkers (yellow shade) and four-seamers (pink shade) between his first nine starts (top row) and his following six starts (bottom row). ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1d/f2/1df2f77b-83dd-4bc0-a6d2-6d1bb5df89a3/content/images/2026/10/kirby-pitch-locations-format-original.png) Split heatmaps showing locations of George Kirby’s sinkers (yellow shade) and four-seamers (pink shade) between his first nine starts (top row) and his following six starts (bottom row). \[/caption\] The hurler sidestepped this issue on Tuesday by leaning heavily on his sweeper, throwing the pitch 42 times out of 91 total pitches. Kirby consistently found the low gloveside edge of the strike zone with the pitch, but even with it hitting the plate time and time again, the Pirates didn’t manage a hit against it, though they only managed to get it in play four times. Kirby had a 32% whiff rate on 19 swings against the sweeper and 36% of his 42 sweepers were either called strikes or whiffs. All five of Kirby’s punchouts were on the sweeper. \[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="800"\] ![ Three bar charts showing George Kirby’s pitch mixes during his first nine games (top), his following six games (middle) and Tuesday’s game (bottom). Note the increased percentage of the sweeper on Tuesday. ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1d/f2/1df2f77b-83dd-4bc0-a6d2-6d1bb5df89a3/content/images/2026/10/george-kirby-pitch-mix-format-original.png) Three bar charts showing George Kirby’s pitch mixes during his first nine games (top), his following six games (middle) and Tuesday’s game (bottom). Note the increased percentage of the sweeper on Tuesday. \[/caption\] But a pitcher can’t throw one pitch all the time, and though the Pirates got some sideways contact against Kirby’s sinker, they squared up his four-seamer and knuckle curve plenty. Kirby worked around two hits in the first but got tagged for a run in the second on an Endy Rodríguez double and a Marcell Ozuna single. A third inning J.P. Crawford throw to first with two on and one out sliced right past Josh Naylor at first and the lead runner was able to score. With runners on the corners and the M’s at risk of letting in a deadly third run - the team wound up scoring three or less runs for the ninth straight game on Tuesday - Kirby had to buckle down. He got Ryan O’Hearn to pop out for one, but it was his strikeout of Rodríguez that stabilized the ship going into the fourth. Raleigh’s homer cut the deficit to one in the top of that inning and Kirby struck out the side in spite of a two-out walk in the bottom half. But the Bucs roared back in the fifth, with Brandon Lowe floating a leadoff double and Bryan Reynolds taking the closest of close full count ball fours to put a second man on. Kirby gained some breathing room as Nick Gonzales topped a sweeper to short for a tailor-made double play and although Josh Naylor bobbled a two-out liner in the air, the first baseman recovered to put the inning away with no more runs across the board. Though the sixth was relatively calm, Jake Mangum blew up Kirby’s pitch count with a 10-pitch at-bat, and six innings was all she wrote for the Mariners hurler. Young’s go-ahead homer came in the last possible frame to give Kirby the official win. ### Seattle’s bullpen had a largely clean finish, though the Pirates made it interesting in the eighth. The Mariners had a chance to beat the curse of three runs right after Young’s homer. Victor Robles took a walk and stole second to get himself in scoring position, but the outfielder nearly got himself out on the basepaths *twice* in the ensuing plays: once by dancing well off the second base bag and nearly getting picked off, the other by misreading J.P. Crawford’s ground ball into right - he seemingly thought it was in the air and froze in place - before rounding third anyway due to a bad throw and nearly getting himself nabbed at that base. Still, with the chaos of the play, the M’s had runners on second and third with one out. Neither Raleigh nor Julio Rodríguez put a single ball in play and the score remained 3-2. Jose A. Ferrer had a 1-2-3 seventh, the first clean inning anyone had put together for the M’s all game, but a one-out O’Hearn single against Eduard Bazardo in the eighth became a double thanks to a stolen base by pitch runner Billy Cook. It initially appeared that Bazardo got out of the inning two batters later as Ozuna took strike three on a full count, but Ozuna challenged and the ball was outside. Mangum missed a middle-middle sinker by a hair. Disaster was averted once more. And when Andrés Muñoz smoked Pirate after Pirate out of the hold for his 14th save, the Mariners got their 41st win of the season. Muñoz’ save was particularly impressive and was emblematic of his emphatic upturn as of late. The closer threw triple digits seven times with his fastball and reached 102 miles an hour with two outs. Raleigh simply called for the heat time and time again, sensing that a flamethrowing upgrade meant the fastball was the best weapon. Over his past six appearances, Muñoz now has five saves. ### On Deck The Mariners have two more games against the Pirates in their midweek series, with Bryan Woo and Bryce Miller due to pitch for the M’s. The road trip will conclude with a three-game set against the Cleveland Guardians. Castillo will have the ball on the Friday opener and Kirby will get a start on the Sunday matinee, but the big day for the team is the piggyback of Logan Gilbert and Emerson Hancock on Saturday. In a more immediate focus, the M’s need to figure out a way to score more than three runs in a game.