Wilson Departs as Manager, Rizzs Calls Final Game as M’s Finish Year 76-86
The 2026 Mariners season has come to a close. It opened with incredible and much-discussed promise, it sank visibly into the unforgiving ocean as the season went on, and it came to an unceremonious end over the duration of September, each nail slammed in the casket to the crawling cadence of an old sea dirge.
The story of our latter-day Edmund Fitzgerald ended with the long-telegraphed departure of manager Dan Wilson, who informed his players before the final game that it would be his last as skipper. In response to a direct question about whether he had left of his own accord or whether the decision had come from above, Wilson merely left strong hints.
“This was, you know, I've been in baseball a while, and this is what happens,” he said. “Managers shoulder the blame and shoulder the responsibility. And this is obviously difficult, and my family and I are still processing it.”
In spite of it all, there was a bit of fanfare on the final Sunday of them all, but despite the 7-3 team win, it was for a series of individuals; the collective spirit had been drained to the uttermost depths long before Logan Gilbert took the hill for his final start of 2026.
Gilbert indeed had his flowers as he passed 200 strikeouts in a season for the second time in his career, finishing his year with 205 punchouts and moving up to 1,089 for his career. So did Randy Arozarena, who capped off a career year batting .281 with a .381 on-base percentage and .484 slugging. J.P. Crawford, the longest-tenured member of the team, went 1-3 to finish the year. Both Arozarena and Crawford are free agents after this season and both are unlikely to return to Seattle.
Legendary broadcaster Rick Rizzs, however, was the most notable departure. He addressed the crowd at length after the final pitch, thanking them for their support over 41 years broadcasting the team’s games.
“I am retiring, not expiring,” Rizzs playfully reassured the fans. “72, I’m still okay.”
Having announced before the season that 2026 would be his last, the extent of Rizzs’ remaining on-air career would be determined by the play on the field.
And that play, regardless of what happened on the final day, was not up to snuff.
The division-winning Astros went 81-81 and became the only playoff team in history without a winning record. All the Mariners had to do was win more games than they lost and they would be in the playoffs hosting the Chicago White Sox in a best-of-three Wild Card series.
They only had to be as good as the 2026 Pittsburgh Pirates or 2023 Cincinnati Reds and they would have made the postseason. Put another way, every single Yankees team for the past 31 years would have won the 2026 AL West. And because the M’s had the tiebreaker over Houston, that’s even an overestimate - all they in truth had to do to come away with the AL West was match the Astros’ even record.
Gilbert, the starter on Sunday, was the only member of the rotation to pitch a full season with an ERA under 4.00. The only other starter with an above-average ERA was Emerson Hancock, who had to be shut down with a left adductor injury in late August.
The injuries and the decline in starting pitching are the two things the team has to dive in on during the offseason. Each issue raises its own question: has the league figured out the tricks? Has the training regimen gone askew? And even if the answer to both of these questions is “no”, the M’s cannot afford to be cavalier about them.
But Gilbert has indeed been a bright spot. Going into the final game, he had a 3.81 ERA with 197 strikeouts and had pitched somewhere between 5 ⅔ and six innings per start. The ability to go deeper into games was his biggest improvement, as he had struggled quite a bit with five-and-dive ruts in 2025.
Gilbert’s stuff was clearly playing well as he took down one Angel after another for four innings on Sunday. Take the first inning, when the right-handed Zach Neto chased a 2-2 slider low and away for the first out in the first, the lefty Wade Meckler went hacking at his splitter for the second out, and the strikeout of the side was complete as Gilbert painted a 3-2 heater on the bottom rung. That was strikeout no. 200.
Every pitch in Gilbert’s arsenal made the Halos look like fools. The splitter danced yet with control, the slider’s late break caught many an ill-advised swing, the sweeper zoomed from nowhere to somewhere and to nowhere again, and the fastball had some notable extra zip to it. He didn’t need to throw any one pitch more than another as he channeled “Walter” as purely as in some of the best outings of his career.
The air began to stir as the fifth inning dawned; Gilbert was yet to give up a baserunner. But as soon as that idea could be conjured, it dissipated. The hurler walked Moisés Ballesteros to begin the fifth, and even though he was only on 61 pitches by that point, Wilson went out to pull him from the game.
That was the first standing ovation. The second was Crawford, who left at the beginning of the sixth. Arozarena, of course, was the third, tipping his hat to the crowd in the top of the seventh and entering a cheerful yet solemn dugout.
By that point, the M’s had a 6-1 lead over the Angels. Arozarena had just delivered two of them in the bottom of the sixth with a very sun-assisted double over Jose Siri’s head, and like that two-run two-bagger, all the other runs the M’s had in the final game were manufactured.
When Cooper Criswell finished out the ninth, the season ended for both the M’s and Halos. For the visitors, it became the first 100-loss season in their history.
Of course, by this point, the results were irrelevant in the greater scheme of things. That Rizzs got to finish his career with a win was, in some respects, a footnote. But with his velvet voice bellowing out over the radio for the last time, 44,761 fans in attendance for the matinee, a gorgeous summer sky overhead even in late September, and the departure - not official, but very clearly telegraphed - of the longest-tenured Mariner on one hand and their best player this year on the other, there were ways in which the game could be made the end of an era.
That end was of course a somber one. Rizzs had no ability to control the fact that the team he covered for half an age had one of the most disappointing histories in North American sports, but just as Dave Niehaus did before and alongside him, Rizzs painted the pictures so adeptly and regularly that scores of people in the Northwest hopped aboard the Mariners’ ship in spite of it all.
“I'm so grateful that I've had the chance to share it with you,” a teary-eyed Rizzs said of his broadcast career. “All these years together, I rekindled the joy of that little 12-year-old boy on the south side of Chicago in his basement doing a Cubs game. So thank you to my mom and dad, Don and Julie Rizzs, and my brother Donny for instilling in me the love of this great game of baseball. And now I look around the ballpark and I see so many moms and dads with their kids here right now, and I know the game of baseball is in great shape and will be forever.”
That last sentence will be tested this winter.
