Canzone Clinches Comeback in Texas, Keeps Mariners Season Alive
When Julio Rodríguez popped a two-on, one-out, right-down-Broadway cutter haplessly into center field, it looked like the moment when the downfall was obvious. This downfall, like many, was perhaps better conceptualized as a calque of the word’s German equivalent: going under - a slow process that takes a while to materialize after it is set into motion, but which becomes ever clearer until there is a point when it is undeniable.
On the flip side, the decision seemed easy for the brass. A Mariners loss would put the team three and a half games underneath the division lead right before the deadline, at a time when many teams would be looking for the likes of Randy Arozarena or even George Kirby or Logan Gilbert.
If Dominic Canzone failed to reach base, it would be the culmination of multiple wasted opportunities; the M’s had two men on with one out in the fourth and the same amount of baserunners with no outs in the sixth, all with nothing to show for it. The Texas Rangers’ two-run lead was a number not insurmountable but that seemed hard to overcome for an offense whose approach could scarcely have been called Fabian over the course of the year, because the Fabian Strategy actually worked.
Rangers reliever Cole Winn fell behind Canzone 2-0 and hung a splitter right down the pipe, a little below the middle of the zone. For the first time in more than two weeks, Canzone walloped a homer, putting the Mariners in the lead.
“I got him 2-0 pretty quickly, and with first and second there, he’s gotta come in the zone with something, and they’d been throwing me soft pretty much the whole series,” Canzone told Mariners TV’s Brad Adam. “Not that I was necessarily sitting on it, but just trying to get something elevated and get it in the air.”
Seattle, who had been looking for the game to latch onto as a starting point, clung to their lead for the rest of the game, winning 6-4 and preventing - for now - calamity.
Logan Gilbert kept the Rangers low enough for the M’s to be in striking distance.
Neither Mariner starter over the first two games of the series managed to log a quality start - with Bryce Miller leaving with one out in the sixth in game one and Bryan Woo barely recovering from an early shelling to go five innings in game two - and Logan Gilbert continued the trend on Sunday when he left the game with two outs in the sixth.
But unlike Miller or Woo, Gilbert gave up three runs, not five. These runs, like his predecessors, began going on the board before Seattle had any runs to speak of.
Especially early on in the game, Gilbert left plenty of his fastballs down in the zone, and Joc Pederson slashed a double on the first such pitch the Mariners starter threw. Wyatt Langford fought off a splitter to put himself on first and Pederson on third and Ezequiel Duran knocked the run in with a sacrifice fly on the next pitch.
The second and third were quiet for the Rangers, but when Brandon Nimmo hit a single off Logan Gilbert’s foot with one out in the fourth, it threw the hurler off for a bit.
“Yeah, that was probably the worst stretch, I think, right after that happened,” Gilbert said after the game. “So, not ideal, but it’s all good. It wasn’t that serious, just needed to find a way to settle back in, make good pitches.”
Gilbert walked Jake Burger on some pitches that weren’t particularly close and left a fastball up for Evan Carter to single in the lead runner and bring Burger to third. Nicky Lopez got a hold of another mistake, this time a splitter, and grounded it to Young’s right. Although he stopped the ball, his glove-shove missed Emerson and everyone wound up safe.
That was the last run the Rangers managed against Gilbert, with the next seven Rangers falling in order. Burger became the fourth batter to strike out against Gilbert and rounded out that streak as the second out of the sixth, but Gilbert went out the same way Miller did: going up 0-2 on a batter in the sixth and walking him.
M’s skipper Dan Wilson brought in Gabe Speier to get the final out of the inning, keeping Gilbert’s line to 5 ⅔ innings pitched, five hits, three runs, two walks, and four strikeouts in 93 pitches (60 strikes).
Cole Young continued his hot streak with a 2-5 day, though his run was all the M’s could get against Jacob deGrom.
Perhaps the term “hot streak” isn’t as applicable to Cole Young’s recent performance as something like “warm spell”: going into Sunday, Young had slashed .254/.293/.535 since June 29, with his slugging buoyed by six home runs during that spell despite a lower on-base percentage than the .315 he had logged up to that point.
Young, hitting out of the leadoff hole on Sunday, launched a 1-2 slider from Rangers starter Jacob deGrom to deep right center in the top of the third, making it to third base for the second triple of his season. Julio Rodríguez found a hole in the left side to knock Young in and tie the game.
But with the heavy-hitters - Rodríguez, Cal Raleigh, and Josh Naylor - otherwise dormant, deGrom managed to keep four other full clean innings and work into the sixth. There were certainly opportunities for Seattle, and an excellent running catch from Wyatt Langford in the fifth prevented a man in scoring position in that frame.
Young’s flyout, however, came on the 10th pitch of the at-bat. Rodríguez’ ensuing out was on the eighth pitch of his at-bat, and by the beginning of the sixth, deGrom was on 86 pitches.
“I thought the game plan with deGrom was really good,” Wilson said. “It was pretty quick in the first inning, but then after that, we put some pitches on him and put ourselves in a good spot and then finally get to the bullpen."
The Mariners knocked deGrom out of the game four pitches into the sixth as Canzone and Arozarena both cracked singles. But the left-handed Robby Ahlstrom got a lineout from Naylor, struck out Raleigh on four pitches, and when Weston Wilson laid off two middle-middle pitches, getting the third strike was trivial for the reliever.
Seattle had outlasted deGrom, but they would need real heroics to actually score and take the lead back from their divisional rivals. While Canzone knocked the men home in the seventh, the rally started with Emerson and Young, who hit a pair of one-out singles.
The M’s decision-making finally displayed a sense of urgency as Gabe Speier was called on to pitch across innings.
Canzone’s homer was the moment that gave the Mariners a rope in the dark, murky depths, but his teammates tacked on.
Arozarena’s addition was rather immediate, as he walloped the very next pitch over the wall in right center to make it 5-3. The M’s threatened in the eighth though failed to score, but in the ninth inning, they gave themselves a little more breathing room as Rodríguez got hit by a pitch and Canzone doubled him home.
But it was the decision from the dugout in the seventh that was surprising. For most of the Jerry Dipoto era - through the managerial tenures of both Wilson and his predecessor Scott Servais, though the two have many notable differences in managerial style - the M’s have been reluctant to have relievers pitch across innings, even if they were only called upon for a few pitches and one out to finish up an earlier frame.
In teams with deep bullpen cores, this tendency is less likely to exhaust the team of quality relievers, but with the Mariners’ bullpen injuries, the team had four arms available before having to turn to the likes of Michael Rucker, Nick Davila, or a recently-recalled Alex Hoppe. It would have been possible, but had a single one of the higher-end guys had an off day, the team would have had to rely on someone shakier if Speier exited after one batter.
Wilson called on Speier to go back out on the mound for the seventh, and when the lefty dealt with his Rangers opponents in order, the M’s could breathe a little bit more. Ezequiel Duran hit a solo homer off an oddly struggling Eduard Bazardo, but even though Andrés Muñoz hadn’t pitched in six days, he easily blew over the final three Texas hitters and notched the save.
Not the beginning of the end, but maybe the end of the beginning?
These things can be mirages; the Mariners could just as easily lose the next five games and relegate Canzone’s heroics to nothing but a dead cat bounce.
But the team has been looking for a win to latch onto for quite some time now. They had opportunities to take advantage of momentum after three straight wins at home (including the first game of the series against the Reds), but they let one loss, even a decently well-fought one, derail their play for half a week.
Perhaps there is an overly-perfectionist bent to the Mariners’ desires, an idea that they have to win a whole bunch in a perfect row rather than just consistently win two of every three. Of course, they’ve had problems with letting their foot off the gas plenty of times in the season, and perhaps perfectionism is the antidote to that.
But that attitude can be detrimental when a failure inevitably occurs. It can cause those failures to compound. It’s how addicts fall off the wagon, and it’s just as easy to see a baseball team who is too attached to the idea of an extended winning streak subconsciously think, “we already broke our streak today and lost one, what’s five more?” A healthy degree of perfectionism must be paired with a mature recognition that going on a tear involves a couple losses here and there, even while always trying to win.
The 2026 M’s haven’t shown an ability to maintain winning ways for very long. They haven’t strung a whole bunch of series wins together. Their win on Sunday gives them a chance to finally do so in the final two months of the season.
“Offense can be contagious, and that’s the hope, that this sparks a fire. The at-bats were quality today, and coming from behind, I think, is huge. That’s a team that’s been able to hold us down here, but these guys kept fighting and came from behind and won a ball game today,” Wilson said. “Important to follow it up again tomorrow.”
