> ## 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. # Angels Send Mariners to Sacramento with 4-1 Loss, Series Split - URL: https://www.emeraldcityspectrum.com/seattle-mariners-drop-final-game-split-series-los-angeles-angels/ - Published: 2025-07-28T01:30:21.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-08T06:19:04.000Z - Author: Callaghan Bluechel - Tags: Analysis, Mariners, Logan Gilbert, Casey Legumina, Jackson Kowar, Cal Raleigh, J.P. Crawford ANAHEIM, Calif. – Mike Trout slugged a door-slamming shot far over the center field wall and the Seattle Mariners were down for the count for the rest of the ballgame on Sunday, suffering a 4-1 loss to the Los Angeles Angels. The first four games of a seven-game road trip were split in Anaheim, the latest missed opportunity for a Mariners team that is having trouble getting going. Although Cal Raleigh dumped his league-leading 41st home run of the season over the fence, that was all the offense Seattle got, while Logan Gilbert fell apart in his final inning of work and gave up all four runs the Halos scored. The Angels’ fifth-inning rally was capped off by a titanic moonshot from none other than Trout, who notched his 1000th and 1001st career RBIs. Sunday’s loss was yet another wasted chance for the Mariners to gain ground on the Houston Astros in the AL West and a bad loss to go into a tie with the surging Texas Rangers in the Wild Card chase. ### Early Pitchers’ Duel For four and a half innings, Sunday’s game was the very definition of a pitcher’s duel. Kyle Hendricks and Logan Gilbert traded spotless innings with each other as each side’s bats looked helpless. Hendricks fooled the Mariners with off-speed stuff and low velocity effortlessly mixed to great effect, while Gilbert struck out batters every which way as he expertly evaded the Angels’ bats all while pounding the strike zone. A strikeout of J.P. Crawford to open the game was followed by weak contact to turn the inning over after 12 pitches from Hendricks. Gilbert responded with a strikeout of his own and a 13-pitch first. The Angels starter became more efficient and blew through the second with eight pitches; Seattle’s pitcher struck out two this time but still tossed 13 pitches. The bottom three of each order went down the first time through with ease with just nine pitches for each starter. Now it was the second time through. Hendricks was as nails as ever, once again getting three easy outs on nine pitches. Gilbert, on the other hand, was the first to slip. After Arozarena kept away a leadoff baserunner with a somersaulting catch in left and Trout struck out for the second time, Nolan Schanuel cracked a ball up the middle for the game’s first hit. Taylor Ward then drew a walk on seven pitches and the Halos had a threat brewing. At this point, Gilbert was wary of finding the strike zone and fell into a full count against Jo Adell, but got him to swing over a slider low and away to end the inning with no damage. But he was now at 58 pitches. Perhaps the longer inning disrupted Hendricks’ rhythm just a bit. Josh Naylor fouled off a couple good pitches and took a two-strike bad-ball changeup into center field for a leadoff single – the Mariners’ first hit of the game. Naylor took advantage of an 0-1 changeup low to swipe second base, and now it was Seattle with a runner in scoring position. But just like the Angels in the previous frame, the threat amounted to bupkis. Hendricks worked around a subsequent Jorge Polanco walk to get out of the inning with the clean sheet intact. ### Angels Put Together Two Fifth Inning Runs Without One Hit Gilbert was on the business end of some bad luck in the bottom of the fifth and utterly failed to adjust, ending his night with a loss due to four runs given up in five total innings. What began as an excellent start rapidly imploded against the bottom of the Angels’ order. The Mariners starter was dealing against Travis d’Arnaud leading off and by rights struck him out twice; home plate umpire Charlie Ramos called two straight third strikes as balls and d’Arnaud drew a walk. But Gilbert was well off his targets against Luis Rengifo, whose six-pitch walk was well deserved, and he hit Gustavo Campero on the foot to load the bases with nobody out. Kevin Newman chopped a grounder to Crawford at short, but Newman beat out the double play and so it was first and third with one out. But a wild pitch scored Rengifo and moved Newman to second. This whole sequence was not very good for Gilbert. Pitchers need to face adversity with their chin up. The missed calls were unfortunate, but Gilbert completely fell apart once the headwinds came. The slider was missing the plate, the splitter was landing two feet in front of the plate, and the fastball was sliding right down the pipe. Falling apart once the headwinds come has been a pattern from much of the Mariners rotation this year, and if this team wants to be a real contender, they have to reign that kind of stuff in. Arozarena made an excellent running catch for the second out, but then it was Mike Trout coming up to the plate. ### Mike Trout Gets Obligatory Moonshot Following the Mariners gives you a prescient sense of the natural order of things. The Mariners being in a playoff spot by the end of the year feels like the sun rising in the west or neutrons having a charge; it’s inherently against the laws of the universe. It’s as if some supernatural force must temporarily overcome reality and make the impossible possible. But such supernatural favor is few and far between. And so I am always waiting for the shoe to drop and the collapse to begin. Any moment to inaugurate the inevitable collapse and mark the beginning of the end of another once-promising year. Perhaps that moment came with two outs in the bottom of the fifth inning on Sunday. Logan Gilbert tossed a 1-0 fastball middle-away and Mike Trout – a true Mariner-killer who came into the game with a 1.062 OPS against Seattle – demolished the baseball. The ball left Trout’s bat at 111 miles an hour and off it went into the wild blue yonder. Seemingly an eon later, it finally landed halfway up the green of the batter’s eye in center field. It would be very fitting if this ends up being the moment to begin the Mariners’ tailspin. The Texas Rangers, after winning their sixth straight on Sunday, are now tied with Seattle and Boston in the wild card chase. The M’s are facing the white-hot Athletics in their next series and probably need a sweep to keep at least a little distance. But already once this month it seemed like the M’s had been beaten so badly that their goose was cooked – and they proceeded to completely mash the Detroit Tigers in the next three games and seemingly sever the spine of that team, who have come out of the All-Star Break 2-8\. And Sunday’s game was far less of a gut-punch and more disappointing than anything. Still, the momentum is clear to see – the Rangers are surging and the Mariners are treading water. The Mariners will have to have a short memory and go into their series against the A’s like they faced the Tigers before the All-Star Break. ### Murphy’s Law There are some games where it seems everything goes wrong. It seems to happen a lot when the Mariners are playing in Angel Stadium, as Seattle hasn’t won a series there since August 2023\. But when you go down on a pitcher implosion induced by an umpire’s call and then a home run gets robbed in the next half inning, it can cement the feeling that you’re battling not just the opposing team but the universe itself. It was Jo Adell who kept the Mariners with a goose egg on the board in the top of the sixth. With one out, Crawford jumped on the first pitch from Hendricks and got one of the few good pieces of contact all game from a Seattle batter, driving it to deep center field. Adell drifted back to the wall, keeping a beat on it. His jump was timed perfectly and he brought the ball back, making the robbed home run look easy. It’s hard to say whether the robbery changed the game much. Counterfactuals are hard to do in a sport like baseball where everything hinges on the barest of inches. Maybe a Crawford homer would have awoken the offense; maybe it would have gone exactly as it did following the non-robbery, making the Mariners lose by one less run – i.e, not mattering at all. But it’s hard to get back in there mentally when everything that can go wrong is going wrong. Crawford was again on the business end of a strong defensive play in the top of the eighth. With two outs and Ben Williamson on second, Crawford chopped a grounder to the right side of the infield. Nolan Schanuel got to the ball going away from the bag, turned himself around, and dove onto the bag to tag it with the ball in his bare hand. What would have been first and third with two outs for a red-hot Julio Rodriguez became the end of the inning. ### Consolation Prizes Raleigh followed up his Saturday home run with a Sunday blast out to deep center field to lead off the seventh inning. It was his 41st home run of the season and his eighth in the month of July. It was also the entirety of the Mariners offense on Sunday. A couple more good things to see were the pitching outings from Casey Legumina and Jackson Kowar. Legumina worked two innings of scoreless ball and struck out two while walking one. He’s a bit of an enigmatic pitcher, but the low-leverage situations work well for him, and he got the Mariners through the sixth and seventh without any more damage. That’s all you can do in that situation: give it back to your bats and see if they can get something going. Jackson Kowar was a little more shaky, but he still got through his inning of work without giving up a run. Kowar relied on weak infield contact to get a double play with one out and two men on, again passing the baton to the bats. ### Lack of Adjustment, Lack of Fight Sunday’s game showed the limits of the Mariners’ hitting approach. There simply isn’t any situational adjustment from most of the lineup. Naylor showed some pretty solid adjustment to get to that 2-2 changeup low and away in the fifth and Crawford has shown some over the season, but this game shows exactly why I can’t shake the feeling that this year will end like 2023 or 2024 (other than the crushing weight of history and narrative). The approach is to swing for the fences, all the time, every time. Now, in a vacuum, trading away some singles for strikeouts in order to get more home runs makes a player more valuable. This is one of the key lessons of the statistical revolution of the millennium. But the increased value of striking out more in exchange for more home runs is true in a vacuum, *not* in every situation. When there’s a guy on second, for example, the probabilities change, and the good hitters should adjust. But the Mariners (bar Crawford) largely don’t adjust. And when the slumps set in across the order, the runs dry up and all the team can hope for is to tread water. Teams that tread water are teams that don’t win anything. And the Mariners have been treading water for a week, trading wins and losses as each successive day moves in its turn. No surprise that a team that appeared all but down and out like the Rangers has stormed back into contention while the M’s are perpetually on the edge of falling out of the picture entirely with several surging teams in the mix with them in the standings. ### On Deck With Sunday’s loss, the Mariners fell to 56-50\. They are still four games back of the Houston Astros in the AL West, but now so are the Texas Rangers, also at 56-50 and on the heels of a six-game winning streak. The road trip finishes up with three games in Sacramento against the Athletics before the Mariners return to Seattle on Thursday for a pivotal four-game set against the Rangers.