Mariners Fall Lifeless for Shutout No. 11, Loss No. 60; Team Once Again at Brink
Less than 24 hours after another game that seemed like a potential jumping off point for the streak Seattle has sought all year, the team found themselves turned into a semi-liquid mass of pulp as the Tigers delivered one of the worst beatdowns all year: an 11-0 loss and the 11th time that the team has been shut out in the 2026 season.
The game was notable for being managed by bench coach Manny Acta, with Dan Wilson suspended one game due to Gabe Speier’s intentional hit-by-pitch on Wednesday. But it didn’t look like any sort of turned page for Seattle, who fell asleep at the dish after falling behind the Tigers early on, grounding into four double plays and failing to get an extra-base hit.
It was the 34th time this season that the Mariners have gone without an extra-base hit, most in MLB by three games. They’re on pace for 47 such games this season, which would land them in a 13-way tie for 34th most in the integration era. It would be the most ever in the 21st century.
Those extra base hits were the difference in the series against the Tigers, as the one game they managed to get more than singles, they scored four runs and logged their 56th win of the season. In the two games they didn’t, they scored zero runs in total. Thursday’s loss in particular came as a gut-punch, on the heels of benches-clearing near-fireworks on Wednesday.
The Mariners offense came crashing down to earth on Thursday, failing to score any runs.
For much of Wednesday’s game, the M’s were as scoreless as they had been on Tuesday and would be on Thursday. The scoreless tie was broken by a three-run homer from Julio Rodríguez in the sixth and Colt Emerson rocked a bomb in the eighth to cap off Wednesday’s 4-2 win, but that turned out to be all the runs the team scored in the series.
Tigers starter Framber Valdez had some control issues early on, walking Randy Arozarena in the first and Cole Young in the second. But the M’s couldn’t get under any of his pitches, with plenty of weak grounders and lineouts throughout the game, and Young’s walk was erased as Weston Wilson grounded into the first of the team’s four double plays. Taylor Ward got the team’s first hit (and first hard-hit ball) of the game with two outs in the third, but nothing came of the opportunity.
Rodríguez logged Seattle’s first batted ball of more than 100 miles an hour, a one-out single in the fourth, but the Mariners’ second such batted ball became a double play off Cole Young’s bat to end the inning. The fifth was the only inning where the team didn’t have a baserunner, but in the sixth, the team finally got two men on.
Down 4-0 at this point, time was running short to turn the game and the series around. Emerson and Arozarena both logged singles while Ward and Dominic Canzone both struck out looking, leaving a two-out, two-on situation for Rodríguez. Valdez missed the first three pitches, and everyone on the Mariners seemed to be expecting heaters.
Valdez threw Rodríguez a middle-middle curveball that the Mariners center fielder watched go by, and the hurler did the same thing on the 3-1 pitch - to the same lack of reaction. Valdez went to the low-and-in corner with a third straight curveball, and when Rodríguez rolled it over for an inning-ending groundout, the game slipped away from Seattle for good.
“He had the ability to throw that breaking ball at any time in the count. Especially that at-bat when we were trying to put something together [with] Julio. He was able to come back and threw three breaking balls for strikes. It made him very effective today, because he kept us off-balance all day.”
The difference between a lethargic loss of the ordinary variety and what happened on Thursday was, as on Tuesday, a bullpen collapse - but the first blow came in the first inning as Bryce Miller’s late struggles continued.
The Tigers nearly knocked Bryce Miller out of the game in the first, and the runs knocked the wind out of the Mariners’ sails regardless.
Going into Thursday’s game, Bryce Miller had a 2.80 ERA, 3.77 FIP, and 0.919 WHIP, but he had been struggling in his more recent outings. Over his previous four starts, he hadn’t once escaped the sixth inning and had given up five homers and 13 earned runs. And while he had struck out 62 batters and walked five in the nine outings to begin the season, he had struck out just 12 and walked eight in his previous four.
Detroit made sure to put another blemish on Miller’s record on Thursday. Kevin McGonigle took a leadoff walk and Dillon Dingler belted a one-out homer to make it a 2-0 game early. Riley Greene took a 2-2 high fastball down the right field line for a double and Colt Keith cracked a hanging splitter to a similar spot for the Tigers’ third run. Spencer Torkelson took a six-pitch walk and when Miller finally got out of the frame, he had already thrown 40 pitches.
Miller iterated and reiterated after the game that he didn’t feel that most of his pitches that inning were unusually flat or bad, but that the Tigers had managed to do some damage on good deliveries.
“It was a really weird inning. I felt like I had some bad pitches mixed in, but the balls they hit, besides the splitter that stayed up to Keith, I felt like I had a lot of good pitches that inning that just didn't go our way.”
The hurler specifically noted the cutter that Dingler homered off as a well-placed pitch, but whether he misjudged the quality of his early pitches or not, Acta said he came close to relieving Miller in the first.
“Pretty close,” Acta said. “And that's where he deserves a lot of credit, where he righted the ship and was able to get five innings, because he was very close to putting our bullpen in a really tough spot.”
Of the 40 pitches Miller threw in the first, 22 were strikes; of those strikes, four were called strikes and three were whiffs. Of the 53 pitches he threw in the following four innings, 40 were strikes, among them 19 called strikes and seven whiffs. He ended the outing with five strikeouts and two walks in five innings, having given up four runs.
Taylor Ward didn’t have a great day as a right fielder, though his usage in that position is something the M’s have decided to live with.
That fourth run came in the second inning, as despite the frame taking place over 11 pitches, McGonigle knocked an early single, got to second on a grounder, and scored on a single to right.
Had the M’s been playing Canzone in right field, they would have had a better chance at either getting McGonigle at the plate or keeping him at third when Dingler singled to right. The ball reached Ward fairly quickly, but his throw home was unremarkable and McGonigle scored relatively easily.
As Mariners president of baseball operations Jerry Dipoto noted in his post-deadline press conference, the main reason Ward is slotting into right field is because of Canzone’s lingering hamstring issues. But it will be a balancing act between having a better arm in right and making sure Canzone can be an everyday player.
Canzone’s arm had made a notable difference in Wednesday’s game, when he held Gleyber Torres to a single with a strong throw from the outfield wall. That only kicked off a series of strong defensive plays, as Arozarena gunned Torres down looking to go first-to-third on a Dingler single (a hit that surely would have scored Torres had he been on second) before robbing a wall-ball double from Keith to keep Detroit off the board against Bryan Woo, who became visibly ecstatic. After that game, he struggled to find words to describe how important the play was.
“All of them (defensive plays). I mean, Randy’s was unbelievable,” Woo said. “Going back, anything going over your right shoulder as a righty is tough. Ball was carrying. That’s a tough play. Obviously, with however many runs it saved, just the timing of it, that was awesome.”
Such recent heroics made the whiplash of Thursday’s blowout ever more pronounced.
In any case, that was the last run the Tigers scored against Miller. But although Michael Rucker pitched an uneventful sixth inning, once the seventh began, the M’s collapsed utterly.
Cole Wilcox got the first man out, but things quickly spiraled as Zach McKinstry walked and McGonigle ripped a two-run homer to make it 6-0. Torres and Dingler both singled, but as Torres rounded second on Dingler’s hit, Ward overthrew everyone and both runners advanced a base. It was now 7-0 with a man on second, and a hit from Keith brought home Detroit’s eighth run before Josh Simpson cleaned up the mess.
Acta’s intention had likely been to have Simpson pitch two full innings to complete the game, but after he needed 27 pitches in the eighth alone, the acting manager was out of options. In came Victor Robles, a position player on to pitch.
Batting practice had fully returned even within the confines of nine innings. James Outman led off with a single, followed by Keith and Torkelson to load the bases. Max Clark and Javier Báez each singled for a combined three runs before the Tigers finally let off the gas. Robles exited with a newfound 27.00 career ERA.
The Wilson-for-Acta swap was hardly noticeable on the field, though Acta gave different insights after the game.
Just as they had been all year, the Mariners all but played dead outside of one inning even when down by a manageable tally of runs, and Detroit’s four-spot in the seventh put the last nail in the coffin.
Perhaps (though perhaps not) this lack of fight had something to do with the lineup, given the circumstances surrounding Wednesday’s game. With Jhonny Pereda catching and Cal Raleigh’s monumental struggles making an appearance as a DH less than advisable, the 2025 near-MVP sat out Thursday’s game. But the day before, Raleigh had been a key instigator in a benches-clearing moment between the two teams.
In the top of the eighth on Wednesday - seemingly in retaliation for Raleigh being hit by a pitch in the bottom of the seventh, though in turn the M’s may have seen that as retaliation for Woo’s three hit batsmen (none of which seemed a lick intentional) - Gabe Speier very obviously tried to plunk Torres with two outs. “Tried” is an operating word here; it took him two attempts, and everyone in the yard could tell that, regardless of the intentionality of the previous four hit batters, this one was deliberate.
The benches cleared. No punches were thrown, but umpiring crew chief Mark Wegner tossed Speier from the game and, after an argument with Wilson ended in the manager getting ejected too.
“It was a situation where they felt one way and I didn't, and that's kind of the way it went,” Wilson said, keeping his description characteristically brief.
Juvenile or not, the incident fired up the Mariners team, and it seemed going into Thursday like they had as real a reason as any for some momentum.
Like every previous potential season-changer, however, the swing scarcely lasted more than a day. The energy in the dugout was gone by the first, even with Valdez, a noted instigator par excellence, on the hill for the Tigers. It might have been different with Raleigh in the lineup (and maybe the broadcast booths would have even gotten a chance to call some boxing for a change), but based on the way the M’s had reacted every other time they faced hardship on the heels of heroism, Thursday’s game was all too ordinary for Seattle.
Acta was asked how frustrating it was to see this play out time and time again with the team. The acting manager gave a response with a bit of unusual flavor.
“Actually I don't use that word in my vocabulary, and I had people get mad at me in the past for saying it,” Acta said. “But I think we have a different lineup now, and it's just a matter of time, these guys taking off. I think adding Brendan Donovan and getting Taylor Ward, I think, is going to do wonders. It’s just not going to happen overnight.”
It’s unclear whether he means people got mad at him for using the word “frustrating” or for not using the word. He certainly didn’t express any Bob Katter-esque anger at hearing it from a reporter, but the anecdote is a bit bizarre no matter how Acta meant it.
Whether the word is taboo or not, however, frustration as an emotion is permeating everything the 2026 Mariners touch. A chorus of boos could be heard in the seventh as Wilcox fell apart and again in the eighth as Rodríguez lost a ball in the sun. It’s beginning to be clear they (probably) won’t figure this out.
On deck: the gauntlet begins.
The Tigers series was the easiest set of contests the Mariners will have in a while. In order, the M’s now face the Rays, Yankees, Astros, Brewers, Cubs, and Phillies - six teams with a combined .566 winning percentage.
Seattle, meanwhile, became the fifth team to 60 losses in the American League. In a 15-team league with so many bad and mediocre squads, the M’s are the fifth worst.
