> ## 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.

# Familiar Culprits Waste Kirby Complete Game as M’s Drop Fourth Straight
- URL: https://www.emeraldcityspectrum.com/seattle-mariners-familiar-culprits-waste-kirby-complete-game/
- Published: 2026-04-08T06:45:20.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-08T06:12:11.000Z
- Author: Callaghan Bluechel
- Tags: News, Analysis, Mariners, George Kirby, Brendan Donovan, Cal Raleigh, Luke Raley, J.P. Crawford, Cole Young, Josh Naylor, Dominic Canzone

\[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="1749"\]

![  Seattle Mariners right fielder Luke Raley (20) hits his head on the ground returning to first base during the ninth inning against the Texas Rangers at Globe Life Field. Mandatory Credit: Kevin Jairaj-Imagn Images  ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1d/f2/1df2f77b-83dd-4bc0-a6d2-6d1bb5df89a3/content/images/2026/10/seattle-mariners-right-fielder-luke-raley--2820-29-hits-his-head-on-the-ground-returning-to-first-base-during-the-ninth-inning-against-the-texas-rangers-at-globe-life-field--mandatory-credit-3a-kevin-jairaj-imagn-images-format-original.jpg)

Seattle Mariners right fielder Luke Raley (20) hits his head on the ground returning to first base during the ninth inning against the Texas Rangers at Globe Life Field. Mandatory Credit: Kevin Jairaj-Imagn Images \[/caption\]

The Mariners fielded their first full top-depth lineup of the 2026 season on Tuesday, but it didn’t lead to much production on the offensive side of the ball. The defense - this time, even standout defender Cole Young, though through positioning and not bad glovework per se - continued giving away runs to the Mariners’ opponents on the way to a one-run loss thanks to said baffled bats.

### Kirby worked very efficiently early in the game, but yet more hibernating hitters and letdowns on defense gave him his first career loss to Texas.

Brendan Donovan hit a home run on the very first pitch of the game. Cal Raleigh had an excellent two-out piece of hitting against a top-edge fastball, driving it into center for an RBI single. That was the only hit with runners in scoring position, bringing the team’s RISP slash line down to .216/.327/.371\. 

But with a guy on the mound with a career 1.04 ERA against the Texas Rangers, those two runs still gave them a shot.

The Rangers came out of the gate with an aggressive approach against George Kirby, a pitcher who has historically dominated them. It didn’t go according to plan early on, as hard hit and soft hit alike found the Mariners’ waiting gloves and the Rangers went down on seven pitches in the first and eight pitches in the second. 

Kirby had been tossing the Rangers a whole lot of good pitches to hit in these early frames, and Rangers catcher Kyle Higashioka torpedoed a home run barely foul before knocking one off Cole Young’s glove for a fairly cheap single - scored a hit thanks to Young being on the run when the ball kicked off the palm - and Ezequiel Duran torched one into left field to make it a two-on, one-out situation. 

Aggression with the stick can bring great rewards, especially when up against an incredibly shaky defense (as happened in the fifth inning), but it can also amplify a team’s bad luck. Brandon Nimmo chopped it right to Cole Young for the 4-6-3 double play to end the third and Jake Burger erased a bad shortstop play by J.P. Crawford with a 6-4-3 of his own in the following frame.

But you can only get so far with tons of plated meat and a horrific defense behind you. Bizarrely and tellingly, it began off the stick of Chris Young and Bruce Bochy’s greatest gift to the rest of the AL West, Joc Pederson. The beleaguered Rangers DH hit a slow dribbler to Brendan Donovan at third, a tough play to make in any case, but Donovan did Seattle no favors by completely missing Josh Naylor’s glove at first and throwing the ball out of play to put Pederson at second.

Had Cole Young been playing on the edge of the infield grass, Carter’s grounder up the middle would have resulted in a diving stop and out at first (Young has shown a definite ability to do that!), but - very predictably - he was a few steps in from the edge of the outfield grass and the ball was out of reach, scoring Pederson from second.

Trying to get a double play, Kirby appeared to let his sense of strategy slip and dished up a middle-middle sinker for Higashioka. That’s when the M’s luck ran out, and the ensuing two-run jack put the Rangers up 3-2.

With the way the M’s offense had been playing, that was game over, and everyone in the yard knew it. Despite two hits to start out the ninth inning, all-or-nothing approaches from Dominic Canzone and Cole Young squandered opportunities to punch it in before Donovan weakly dribbled it to Higashioka for out number three.

That inning was notable for Luke Raley’s decision not to go to second on a grounder down the third base line. He probably would have made it there and scored on Crawford’s liner into center, but since he missed first base as he turned, he decided to scamper back and ensure the Rangers didn’t nab him for it.

“If I hit first base, I believe I get to second relatively easily, and J.P.’s ball probably scores me. And if it doesn’t, I’m on third base with Dom and Cole coming and both of their balls are deep enough for a sac fly,” Luke Raley speculated about his decision to stay at first. “It’s unfortunate. I don’t even know what to say. It just can’t happen.”

Kirby, for his part, finished the full eight innings with 90 pitches, 68 of them (75.6%!) for strikes. He struck out four and walked one, and though the Rangers had a hard-hit rate of 54.2%, it was 31.3% on pitches that weren’t his sinker. Kirby did get lucky with quite a bit of his contact, but as has been the case for the whole of the M’s four-game skid, all the luck in the world can’t help a team that left more than half its skills in the hotel suitcase.

### ABS challenge strategy review: How did the M’s fare on Wednesday with MLB’s new system?

Very little detailed attention is being paid to the correct *process* to implement ABS challenges. Unlike a replay challenge, teams do not have access to footage to determine whether or not to challenge: a player must challenge a ball or strike call immediately. 

The process works like this: taking run expectancy by count, bases occupied, and outs (the average number of runs scored from a certain situation, which is of course a decimal number of runs that it is impossible to actually score), you can determine the difference between a ball call and strike call on a team’s run expectancy. Comparing that to the average run expectancy *lost* by not having a challenge, you can then get an estimation of how *confident* a player must be for an ABS challenge to be warranted in a certain spot. 

If the run expectancy gain is higher, a player doesn’t need to be as confident in an overturn in order for a challenge to be the correct play.

\[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="693"\]

![  This perfect strategy chart made by Tom Tango of the Tangotiger blog shows the break-even confidence level for challenging a call in each possible combination of count, runners, and outs.  ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1d/f2/1df2f77b-83dd-4bc0-a6d2-6d1bb5df89a3/content/images/2026/10/re288-abs-break-even-point-format-original.png)

This perfect strategy chart made by Tom Tango of the Tangotiger blog shows the break-even confidence level for challenging a call in each possible combination of count, runners, and outs. \[/caption\]

Doing these expected value calculations produces a perfect strategy chart such as the above, which is independent of inning since a run in the first is worth the same as a run in the ninth. So, how did the M’s fare on Tuesday, both in the challenges they made and the ones they didn’t?

**Luke Raley on offense, 1-2, two outs, man on second.**

The ball was very clearly within the strike zone, but of course the players’ don’t know the exact location and have to make an educated guess (that is, until some team inevitably gives their players hidden buzzers to instantly feed decision-making and give the baseball world a follow-up to the 2017 Houston Astros). Still, in the situation Raley had, he would need to estimate a roughly ⅔ chance of success for challenging the call to be the right decision. I don’t know exactly what was going through Raley’s head, of course, but the grimace he gave as he waited for the ABS result was a clear tell that he thought his chances weren’t especially great. Therefore, he shouldn’t have challenged.

Run expectancy change: -0.20\. This was the average run expectancy of a successful overturn in Triple-A last year and currently the average run expectancy of an overturn in MLB. By losing one challenge, Raley lost the Mariners’ buffer challenge, in turn squandering the run value of an overturned challenge. 

**No challenge: J.P. Crawford on offense, 3-2, no outs, nobody on.**

It might be somewhat unintuitive, but Crawford’s leadoff at-bat in the top of the fifth was a perfect opportunity to use a challenge. Simply put, full counts in any situation - especially with less outs on the board - are the times when challenges can be made most loosely. After working the count full on six pitches, Crawford took an Eovaldi splitter that he clearly thought was a hair low as he began his prep to go to first, but Crawford simply hung his head down as home plate umpire Alan Porter wrung him up. 

The pitch was (very slightly) a ball, but as noted earlier, the challenging process is about the hitter’s confidence in an overturn. Given Crawford’s reaction, it seemed like he very much thought it was low, and he only needed to think he had a 24% chance of an overturn to make a challenge worthwhile.

Run expectancy change: -0.63 runs. This is the run expectancy difference between a man on first and no outs and nobody on with one out.

**No challenge: Cal Raleigh on defense, 1-1, no outs, nobody on**. 

A moment (a completely unimportant one in the grand scheme of things, as Wyatt Langford flew out on the following pitch) of restraint in the bottom of the sixth was an interesting piece of process from Raleigh behind the dish. 

The Mariners catcher was clearly unhappy with a bad ball call (it caught a whole lot of the plate), but he decided not to challenge. Whether or not Raleigh knew he needed to be at least 64% sure in that spot, he decided against challenging. It wasn’t clear how sure Raleigh was, but if he was at least in the “pretty sure” camp, challenging would have been in order.

Run expectancy change: -0.08 runs. This is the difference in run expectancy between 1-2 with no outs and nobody on and 2-1 in the same situation.

**Overall run expectancy: -0.91 runs.** While it’s hard to actually determine the expected value of all the challenge opportunities in the game, since nobody but the players themselves (if it even gets committed to long-term memory) have access to their own internal estimations for each pitch, this is the closest estimate I could come to of how much Seattle gained with their challenge decisions. Those challenge decisions ended up *costing* them almost one expected run. In the real world, had Crawford challenged and made it to first, Raleigh’s single later in the inning would have scored two in a bases-loaded situation rather than the one run it knocked home with a guy on second. 

### Is it panic time in Mariners-world yet? That is to say, how much difference is there between 4-8 and 5-7?

April is always a funky time for a baseball team, with slow starts often being long-forgotten and hot jumps fizzling out long before anything real can come of them. One can think of the 2019 Seattle Mariners as a perfect example of that, starting the year 13-2 and finishing 68-94 \[1\]. But whenever a team gets off to a bad opening stretch of games, the question inevitably becomes: *is this team bad right now - or is this team bad?* The 2026 Mariners are no different, especially due to their World Series expectations going into the year. If this were the White Sox beginning the season 4-8, hardly anyone would notice.

How often do teams go 4-8 to begin the year and end up having a really good year? The Mariners will probably need 90 wins to have a comfortable chance at the division, but in all the years that the whole league has played 162 games \[2\], how often does a team that starts 4-8 win 90 games? Can you even reasonably predict the final record from the first 12 games?

The answer to the final question is a resounding no. Modeling wins over the final 150 games to wins in the first 12 games gives an r-squared value of just 0.07856, statistics-speak for there not being much predictive value in the first 12 contests.

But it is true that, on the whole, teams who start the year 4-8 tend to do worse over the rest of the season than teams that start the year 5-7\. Half of all 4-8 starts ended with the team winning between 62 and 77 games (from 66 to 81 total wins) over the rest of the year, while half of all 5-7 starts ended with the team winning between 64 and 81 games (from 69 to 86 total wins) over the rest of the year.

\[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="1500"\]

![  Density plots of team records over their final 150 games after either a 4-8 or 5-7 start. The green and red lines mark the medians (thick lines) and interquartile ranges (thin, dashed lines) of each subset. Data compiled in RStudio.  ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1d/f2/1df2f77b-83dd-4bc0-a6d2-6d1bb5df89a3/content/images/2026/10/final-150-format-original.png)

Density plots of team records over their final 150 games after either a 4-8 or 5-7 start. The green and red lines mark the medians (thick lines) and interquartile ranges (thin, dashed lines) of each subset. Data compiled in RStudio. \[/caption\]

For comparison, half of all teams that started 9-3 - which the Dodgers would do if they *lose* on Wednesday - won between 75 and 87 games over the remainder of the season, translating to between 84 and 96 total wins. 

As to the amount of 4-8 teams that won 90 games or more? One of them was the 2025 Seattle Mariners, it must be said. Of the 161 teams between 1962 and 2025 who won four out of their first 12 games to begin a 162-game season, the 2025 M’s were one of 22 (13.7%) who won 90 or more games. 

At the same time, so too did the 2023 and 2024 Mariners start 4-8, and those teams both won less than 90 games and both missed the playoffs. These starts are recoverable, but at the same time, they really do matter. 

A better way of looking at these things are projections and Elo scores. PECOTA still gives the M’s 91.2 projected wins and a 63% chance of winning the division, but FanGraphs now gives the Mariners a 45.6% chance to win the division, though all of these numbers are still higher than Houston.

The prediction markets are even lower, with Polymarket down to about a 38% true (de-vigged from a listed 42% of 110 “%”) odds of winning the AL west, though perhaps less stock should be put in prediction markets than models when it comes to sporting outcomes.

Neil Paine’s Elo model of MLB teams, however, is much more pessimistic on Seattle. The modeled Elo - that is, a comparative rating in the style of how chess players are rated - was 1520 for the Mariners, 1514 for the Rangers, and 1512 for the Astros (the Dodgers had the highest score at 1564 and the Rockies the lowest at 1426) before Tuesday’s games. Despite the M’s being modeled as slightly better than their competitors, Paine’s model gave all three a roughly equal shot of winning the division, with the Astros slightly ahead.

When Paine’s model updates early Wednesday, the M’s might have a bit of daylight between them and their competitors, but not in the direction they want. 

The worst case scenario for the Mariners in the near term is that the Rangers complete the sweep on Wednesday and the Astros do the same to Seattle over their upcoming four games in T-Mobile. That would put both teams a hefty ways above the M’s in the very early standings and give them a big leg up in tiebreakers, while teams that begin the year 4-13 win an average 67.41 games over the course of a season and half of all their end-of-year results fall between 60 and 73 wins. Of the 34 teams that have begun a season in such a fashion since 1962, just four made it to .500 and just two made it to 90 wins. 

Things will be much rosier if the next five games are wins, and even if the team treads water at 2-3 or 3-2, it won’t be time to panic. But if it’s a 1-4 stretch or a full five losses, the chances will be a whole lot better than not that the 2026 season will go in the vast dustbin of awful Mariners campaigns.

That, more than anything, would be the proper way to celebrate the 50th anniversary.

\[1\] The next-worst 13-2 team was the 1982 Atlanta Braves, who went 89-73 to complete that season.

\[2\] Not 1994, 1995, or 2020.