Out Go Vain Mariners Playoff Hopes, In Comes Mammoth Montes Might
For the first time in a half decade, September baseball in Seattle does not mean the tension of a playoff chase. Those chases were vain and doomed more often than not, but the exhilaration and anticipation of the first month of fall is not something that shall grace the cooling confines of T-Mobile Park. With the Mariners seven games back of the division lead after their 10-5 loss on Tuesday with 17 left to go, a team who had once been World Series aspirations now looks upon a wholly lost season.
Just as that fact once again became clear on Tuesday, so did another: Lazaro Montes is one of the strongest batsmen on Earth.
The rookie right fielder hit one of the longest homers in Mariners history in the bottom of the fourth against Rangers starter Cal Quantrill, the second of Montes’ career and the first at T-Mobile Park. The 474-footer was the biggest nuke most of those in attendance had ever witnessed - landing on the concourse beyond center field - but for Montes, it was another Tuesday.
“I got a couple, I think in the Dominican Republic, I have one of the long, long, long, long - more than 500 feet, easy,” Montes said. “This is not the only one; I need to now get another one.”
That moment was the sole consolation for a team that had near everything else go wrong in myriad possible ways.
Bryce Miller fell apart early and left before the end of the fourth.
Before Emerson Hancock sustained an injury late in the year, the team had planned to move Bryce Miller to the bullpen and sport a five-man rotation involving the newly-promoted Kade Anderson.
No sooner had they told Miller about the plan when Hancock went down and Miller went back to the rotation. For whatever reason, his stellar start to the season - when he went nine outings with a 1.71 ERA, 2.75 FIP, and 12.4 strikeouts for every walk - emphatically did not continue once the calendar turned over to July.
With Tuesday’s game in tow, Miller has a 6.89 ERA and 5.91 FIP in his past 10 starts. Over that time, he has struck out 1.6 batters per every walk, a nearly eightfold reduction in his strikeout-to-walk ratio. He walked three more batters on Tuesday and struck out six, but as is common for big league hurlers, those walks were deadly when paired with the Rangers’ hits.
Before that issue reared its head, however, Rangers two-hole hitter Corey Seager ambushed the first pitch he saw in the first and sent one 418 feet to deep right center. Compared to what would happen later in the game, it was chump change, but it was a long way for the fourth pitch of the game to go.
Wyatt Langford walked to begin the second inning and came around to score after a stolen base, a productive out, and an outfield blooper. But it was the fourth when Miller lost his steam completely, having emptied much of his tank in earlier frames.
“It was just too many long at bats,” said Miller. “We had a couple quick at bats, but I mean, it felt like everything was five to nine pitches: we had an eight-pitch walk to Seager, seven-pitch walk to Langford, and then multiple full count strikeouts that just took too many pitches from me.”
By the time the fourth came around, Miller was at 63 pitches. Once the Rangers loaded the bases with one out in that frame, the hurler had reached 76 pitches, and it took him eight pitches to deal with Jake Burger and get the second out. With a lefty coming up, Dan Wilson brought in Jose A. Ferrer to relieve the struggling Texan.
Searching for answers in front of the media, Miller toyed with an idea perhaps best expressed by Tuco in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. There was a certain rueful regret in his voice as he talked about how he wished he had attacked the zone more in pitcher’s counts.
“They fought off a few (pitches), but there's, I think, I don't know, maybe just messing around too much and not just finishing at bats,” Miller said. “You get ahead, and then it's like, let's throw a fastball down or something, and then throw a slider down, and then you just get deeper and deeper into the count.”
Justin Foscue, who pinch-hit for the lefty Joc Pederson, lined a single up the middle to score two and give Miller four earned runs on the day. Cole Young probably should have gotten to the ball, but it seemed like he was in a slight in-between state as he gauged whether it would hit Ferrer or not.
Eduard Bazardo’s wear-and-tear became clearer as his ERA climbed to 3.90.
Tuesday was the 67th outing of the year for reliever Eduard Bazardo, who got the ball with one out and one on in the fifth. Facing the right-handed Langford, Bazardo threw four straight sinkers near the lower half of the plate, and on the fourth, Langford launched the ball deep past the left center field wall.
Montes’ three-run moonshot had, for the most part, been counteracted. Bazardo got a quick strikeout to nearly exit the inning, but as he walked Burger and hit Nicky Lopez with an errant sinker, Texas had another chance to build on their lead.
Bazardo hung a 1-1 sweeper to Danny Jansen that became a three-run homer for Texas and brought the visitors to a 9-3 lead. Although Bazardo managed to get out of the frame soon after, his post-All Star Break ERA ballooned even further to 6.86 with a 7.19 FIP during that time. He has given up eight homers since the Midsummer Classic, nearly as many as he gave up the entirety of last year, and his decline has made obvious the Mariners’ need for a deeper bullpen.
The struggling middle reliever has had a ton of usage all year as plenty of other relievers went through injury spells throughout the season, but Wilson didn’t give many specifics when he was asked postgame about potentially limiting Bazardo’s usage.
“We're continuing to look at everything and continue to assess where we're at and what situations we want to put guys in,” Wilson said. “Obviously, it's been a tough stretch for ‘Zardo’, but you know, we'll continue to look at it and see where you know we need to make our adjustments, and we'll be willing to make those adjustments.”
Lazaro Montes’ moonshot was downstream of a fastball-first approach.
The blast that Montes lit off in the fourth was so forceful that the crack of the bat managed to shine even through T-Mobile Park’s rather muffled home plate microphone. If only it had been a national broadcast, just so that the great boom could have been preserved in its full dignity.
Lazaro Montes hit one WHERE?!?! pic.twitter.com/uYM8mtlNYD— MLB (@MLB) September 9, 2026
Montes’ majestic shot was the furthest ever hit at T-Mobile Park by a Mariner in the StatCast era, beating out certified moonshot merchant Mike Zunino and even further than Nelson Cruz’ longest M’s homer, a 469-footer in Tampa … put a pin in that, actually.
It’s comparing apples to oranges, but Montes’ homer was also longer than anything hit in the ESPN Hit Tracker era (2006-2017) by any Mariners player; first place was a 2016 Cruz missile in Minnesota and second place was a tie between another 2017 Cruz homer and a 2006 Raúl Ibañez blast in Toronto, both measured at 462 feet by Hit Tracker.
Hit Tracker and StatCast, it must be said, operated differently. Hit Tracker used human-driven video analysis with weather input, while StatCast initially made mathematical inferences based on data (without weather and with incomplete video information in its early days), both trying to arrive to the same conclusion about true distance, that being the distance a ball would have traveled without obstruction.
Because StatCast’s radar-plus-cameras pre-Hawk-Eye system was prone to errors on extraordinary home runs - it didn't properly measure a 2017 Aaron Judge blast that nearly left the stadium and was (a bit disappointingly, but probably accurately) 437 feet per Hit Tracker - the Zunino homer can be considered of perhaps indeterminate length. StatCast has since remedied many of the tracking issues with extraordinary batted balls, but that still leaves a bit of an accuracy gap in 2018 and 2019 specifically, exactly when Zunino hit his 470-footer.
The specificities of the distance-measuring aren’t that important. For Montes, the blast was resultant of a reorienting of his hitting approach around the good fastballs that he sees in the majors. Back in the minors, pitchers would be testing out various things, and so he could sit on breaking balls and react to fastballs. But up in the Show, things are different.
“In triple-A, it's more like I was sometimes late with the fastball, and they were confused a little bit and they threw me a breaking ball, and I hit homers, and I thought it was good,” Montes said. “But actually, here it's more like, if I'm not on the fastball, they still throw me that fastball, you know? And I think that’s something that I need to learn how to make a quicker adjustment.”
Quantrill had already tossed him quite a few heaters his first go-around, so by the time Montes saw him for the second time, he was on that pitch like white on rice.
It may have been the only good moment of the game for Seattle, but the physical greatness of the blast was something that the team can take into the offseason.
“You know, when you talk about home runs in this ballpark, I don’t think I’ve seen one that far,” Wilson said.
Moral victories can only do so much for a team, but with the disaster the M’s have had in 2026, that’s the best they can realistically get.
