Mariners Give Big Goose Egg against Fried, Continue Defensive Woes
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Seattle Mariners catcher Cal Raleigh (29) strikes out against the New York Yankees during the first inning at T-Mobile Park. Mandatory Credit: John Froschauer-Imagn Images [/caption]
As might be expected for a team 3-3 out of the gate early in the season, the Mariners’ supposed new-look offense has looked a lot more like a lateral shift. Perhaps it’s the cold weather, perhaps it’s lack of adjustment to the batter’s eye, perhaps it’s lack of momentum for key stars who played in the World Baseball classic - but this is a ball yard that has seen a whole lot of “slow starts that will even out” turn out to be the tone set for the entire year.
And when teams like the Yankees, Blue Jays, and Astros clearly have all their ducks in a row on the first weekend, putting up a goose egg at home against one of the league’s best teams isn’t the best of signs.
Gilbert’s splitter looks limited in his outing against New York, but a better middle-inning pitch mix offers a way forward.
Despite being Seattle’s opening day starter, it doesn’t quite look like Logan Gilbert has yet reached the ace potential billing he has long come with. The first inning didn’t look good for his efficiency slump, with the hurler trying and failing to fool the Yankee hitters with buried curves and splitters on his way to 28 pitches and two runs in the frame.
Gilbert mistakenly made a good pitch to Aaron Judge to strike him out in the first that displayed some of what he can be if he sequences his splitter more effectively. After tossing a slider in the zone for strike one, Gilbert tossed some junk down and away, getting a chase on the one splitter that wasn’t fully in the dirt. He then let his splitter out just a bit early with the 2-2 count, floating it to the top of the zone - and twisting Judge into a knot.
That’s not to say burying his splitter might work a lot if he buries it some of the time or even most of the time, but because he tries to do that with every one, it allows the batter an easy prediction.
The top of the fifth ended on a similar pitch, this one to freeze the left-handed Ryan McMahon on an 0-2 splitter over the inside edge of the plate. From the second through the fifth, Gilbert mixed a heap of cutters, sinkers, fastballs, and sliders to keep the visitors to soft contact, only bringing in the splitter very occasionally.
Under pressure from a leadoff Trent Grisham double in the top of the sixth, he reverted back to his usual “early heat and buried splitters” game plan, trying to force swings and misses. He managed to get Judge once more with this strategy and made a good pitch selection of a high 1-2 fastball to Cody Bellinger, but instead of throwing it three inches above the zone, he clipped the top of it and Bellinger lined the ball into center to put runners on the corners.
The wheels fell off the bus from there. A truly hanging splitter - not just in the zone, but well over the middle of the plate - to Giancarlo Stanton became a run-scoring double to left. Cole Wilcox came on to relieve Gilbert, and although he got out of the frame with just a hit allowed, that knock by Jazz Chisholm drove in the Yankees’ fifth run of the game, all of them charged to Gilbert.
The Mariners defense is still filled with holes, with plenty of bad plays to go around on Tuesday.
Wait, where was the third run? That came with runners on first and third after Bellinger’s single. Bellinger took off for second, testing Raleigh’s arm for the second time in the ballgame. The Mariner catcher had thrown a beautiful dime right into Rivas’ glove to end the top of the third, helping Gilbert through those clean middle innings.
But in that much more important situation in the sixth, Raleigh chucked it wide of Rivas at second and, thanks to Cole Young being in a bad spot to try and back up Rivas, the ball floated into center.
Defensive miscues didn’t stop there. That Stanton double, for example, should have been cut off well before it reached the wall, but Randy Arozarena’s steady jog in left wasn’t enough to get to the roller and it became a worse hit than it could have been.
Nor was that the beginning of the Mariners’ bad defense, as the very first run of the game came thanks to a bad play from the usually solid Víctor Robles in right field. He took a little too long to get to a Ben Rice double with the speedy Bellinger on first, forcing him to make a good throw home to prevent the Yankee tally. It was up the line.
The second run was also a little bit on Robles, as he took it a bit slow to get to a floater from Stanton that fell in for a run-scoring double, but perhaps he can be forgiven for taking it a little easy early on into the season after his 2025 injury.
For what it’s worth, Young also displayed his improved range with a great diving play earlier in the ballgame, so it wasn’t all bad from the gloves.
With how anemic the offense was, all the defense did in the end was add a couple meaningless tallies to the Yankees’ top line. But there was no way for those defenders on the field to be able to tell that their teammates would be silent at the dish, and a loss in April matters just as much in the standings as a loss in September.
Cole Wilcox and Casey Legumina offer lone bright spots for Seattle, locking down the back end of the game and (theoretically) giving the hitters the chance for a comeback.
In a game otherwise filled with bad pitching, bad defense, and bad hitting, the two guys at the very back of the Mariners bullpen held their own. Wilcox, in for six outs, struck out three of the eight batters he faced and only allowed his inherited runner to score, keeping his ERA at a clean 0.00 for the season. Legumina also maintained his erstwhile clean sheet during 1 ⅔ innings of his own, not allowing a single hit or walk while striking out one.
Wilcox mixed all four of his pitches effectively, getting swings and misses on each and keeping the Yankee batsmen on their toes. Better yet, he dotted his pitches towards the edge of the zone, looking like a veteran hurler despite Tuesday night being his third big league outing.
Legumina kept things more central in the plate and relied mostly on his fastball, but that low arm slot and smaller vertical approach angle kept New York’s barrels from squaring it up. After his massive underperformance and control issues in 2025, Legumina’s 3 ⅔ innings of zero-run work with four strikeouts and one walk this season have been a shot in the arm for a guy who was very nearly about to be out of a job at season’s start.
These solid frames from Seattle’s lower-tier bullpen arms gave the offense the chance to stage a dramatic comeback. But on the other end of the ball, the overall offensive pulse was as slow as Cal Raleigh has started the season out of the gate.
Seattle’s best opportunity to get back in the game was in the bottom of the seventh, with Julio Rodríguez and Brendan Donovan whacking singles and Randy Arozarena getting hit by a pitch from a tiring Max Fried. But a Josh Naylor grounder into a double play erased Rodríguez’ base knock, and a Robles flyout with two away sent the game to the top of the eighth.
Like a lot of the league - Seattle’s .687 OPS thus far is still 14th best in baseball - the M’s have opened 2026 slowly with the bat, slashing .205/.308/.379. But the three of Raleigh, Rodríguez, and Naylor have put up just a paltry .091/.211/.106 slash line, all of them various degrees of lost at the plate. Though Raleigh has the slightly better numbers of the three (.143/.250/.190), Rodríguez’ process has looked the best. Though he is overswinging on some pitches and making a few bad chases, his overall decent-but-unlucky approach is far more threatening to opposing pitchers than a Naylor that twists himself around on every hack or a Raleigh who can’t seem to make contact on anything.
And there’s only so much the rest of the lineup can do to shore up the slumping stars. The lower-order guys against right-handers, such as Canzone and Raley, have done their work, but it has so far been crickets from Robles and Rob Refsnyder. Cole Young continued his solid work at the plate with an eighth inning single, but that was all she wrote when it came to Mariners threats late in the game.
Early in the game, facing the Mariner-hunting Fried, things were even bleaker for the sticks, who scraped together one hit and one walk over the first six frames.
On Deck
The Mariners’ first rubber match of the young season on Wednesday will feature youthful Yankee sensation Cam Schlittler, who made his big league debut against Seattle back in July last year (throwing 5 ⅓ innings of three-run ball), suiting up against the M’s once more. George Kirby will be taking the hill for Seattle.
