Naylor Bombs, Kirby Strikes Finish Mariners’ Four-Game Sweep against Astros
How quickly things can turn around for a baseball club. Just four days prior, the Mariners took a badly-needed rest day as they came off a five-game skid to round out an opening baker’s dozen contests where each series had been worse than the last: a four-game split, a three-game series loss to a good team (the Yankees), a three-game series loss to a bad one (the Angels), and a three-game sweep at the hands of the Texas Rangers.
And then an odd thing happened: the M’s got handed a get-right series by the Houston Astros of all teams. The same Astros that had tyrannized the division for a decade, with a philosophy of a never-ending window and an organization that seemed to churn out All-Stars like butter. But early in April, Houston’s arms have been either banged-up, straight-up bad, or both.
With that and a bit of mental fortitude, a Mariners offense who had scored 40 runs in their first 13 games finished up a 29-run four-game set with a 6-2 victory over their rivals on Monday, completing as big a sweep as an April series can offer.
Josh Naylor finally broke through his early-season slump, mashing two homers and knocking in five.
For much of the beginning of the year, even during the sparse games when the offense put up strong numbers, the bulk of the production had been coming from the bottom of the lineup. Even in the turnaround game on Friday and the thunderous comeback on Saturday, it was Randy Arozarena and bottom of the order that got the party started.
This somewhat continued on Sunday afternoon, when it was only Julio Rodríguez among the 2-3-4 battery that knocked in runs, with Josh Naylor’s early-season struggles continued and his batting average fell to .102, still without an extra-base hit.
But the 2026 M’s got their first glimpse of the big trio truly working together in the first inning on Monday. With one out, Cal Raleigh dunked a ball into left center and Rodríguez skipped a double off Correa’s glove at third.
Astros starter Mike Burrows plated an 0-1 heater down the pipe for Naylor. Though Naylor had rattled off quite a few batted balls at around 100 miles an hour off the bat earlier in the year, many of them had become simple groundouts. This time, he hit it on a line to straightaway right field, clearing the fence to get his first extra base hit in big style.
That’s pretty much what any team wants from the players hitting second through fourth in the lineup, and the M’s obviously hope it’s the first of many instances of three straight hits and two extra-base knocks for the trio in 2026.
Houston’s evident early mental lapses were most obvious as Burrows stopped before getting to the first base bag on a Raleigh dribbler in the third, leaving ‘Stros first baseman Christian Walker with nobody to throw to and Raleigh on first base. Burrows tried to dig in against Naylor, but for the second time, he let his fastball run out over the middle of the plate.
Naylor’s second home run was anything but cheap, as he torched a 111.5 mile an hour fly ball to center field. Taylor Trammell could do nothing but watch it sail halfway up the seats and give the M’s a 5-0 lead.
The first baseman provided nearly all the RBIs, though traffic continued at other points and Luke Raley (who went 3-4) knocking Rodríguez home from second in the bottom of the fifth.
“Furious George” burned up the innings once more, keeping the Astros off the board and his own pitch count low.
Coming off one of the least-deserved losses of his career - an eight-inning, three earned run game against the Rangers with an “earned run” tally inflated by subpar defense - George Kirby dealt similar gas against the Astros on Monday afternoon, once again working into the eighth inning and notching his second win of the season.
Kirby worked primarily with his fastball early on, getting a lot of contact in the first that became quick outs for the visitors. Unlike at the beginning of the series, however, Houston’s aggression lacked proper discernment, that aspect of the game seemingly affected by the seven straight losses they brought into Monday afternoon. Carlos Correa dribbled one past a shaded infield in the second and found himself promptly erased from the basepaths by Cam Smith’s double play grounder to Cole Young. Kirby only had 30 pitches through three innings.
Houston began to change their approach in the fourth, taking a few more pitches and trying to start something on their terms. Isaac Paredes indeed knocked his second single of the day, but Correa seemingly didn’t get the memo and swung at five straight pitches, the last being a slider in the left handed batter’s box for a strikeout.
The visitors finally got something going in the fifth. Cam Smith took the first three pitches he saw before shooting one down the right field line for a leadoff single. Kirby’s curveball to Taylor Trammell backed up belt-high and the former Mariner outfielder shot it the other way. Houston’s recovered discernment meshed well with their returned aggressiveness as Kirby hung a slider in the zone for Yainer Diaz, who singled in the Astros’ first run.
Kirby’s sinker, like many non-elite sinkers in the game, can be something of a double-edged sword. While it can get a lot of ground balls, it can also get touched up quite a bit compared to his other stuff. In 2025, for example, 13 of the 36 extra base hits (36.1%) batters had against him were off the sinker despite it making up 26.8% of his total repertoire. But needing a double play, he plated a sinker to Nick Allen - and it worked, with Allen chopping a tailor-made pitcher’s best friend to Cole Young.
And the Mariners starter was still efficient through five frames, with just 59 pitches under his belt going into the sixth. As Houston waffled semi-aimlessly between aggression and passivity, Kirby found himself able to rack up strikeouts with four-seamers, sliders, and even some well-located sinkers. Kirby was able to work into the eighth for the second straight start, this time with a lead, but the Astros put together another threat in the frame as Joey Loperfido reached base and Yordan Alvarez came to the dish two batters later.
Wilson trotted out to the mound, Kirby’s day seemingly done. But as the infield meeting commenced, J.P. Crawford made it be known he wanted Kirby to stay in. Wilson asked Kirby what he felt, and as Kirby wanted to go after Alvarez, the starter stayed in. Though Wilson’s tendency to let a hurler stay in during an inning sometimes goes sideways - especially in closer games - the pitchers themselves evidently take well to the confidence he puts in.
“Dan’s the best, and he believes in us. Sometimes you just gotta vocalize that and he’ll let you go out,” Kirby said after the game. “You know, we all want to go out there and keep throwing as long as we can, and so when we get the chance to do it, it feels good. Confidence booster.”
It’s obviously a balancing act, however. In that situation, with the M’s up by four and only one guy on with two outs, letting him in to face one more batter made sense, even with one of the best hitters in the game stepping into the box.
“I mean, it’s a tough situation there,” Wilson said. “But you know, I think George really wanted it, and you’re in a situation where you can let George go and let it all hang out.”
Kirby didn’t get the final out he was seeking, falling behind Alvarez early and walking him on four pitches, trying the high cutter, backdoor slider, outside sinker, and high four-seam to no avail on any.
“I knew he was probably gonna be swinging there and just trying to get ahead, just one of those weird situations where you can’t throw a strike,” Kirby said about Alvarez’ last appearance. “We game-planned well against him, so I was prepared for that at-bat, it just didn’t really go the way I wanted.”
That was it for Kirby, as Wilson came out for the second time and called for Matt Brash from the bullpen. A lineout to left from Isaac Paredes neutralized the threat and finished Kirby’s line of 7 ⅔ innings pitched, seven hits, two earned runs, one walk, and six strikeouts. Of the 99 pitches he threw, 69 (70%) were strikes.
Cole Wilcox had another shaky outing against the Astros, but he got out of it without the M’s having to go to the firemen.
The M’s didn’t have the luxury of resting their high-leverage arms on Friday or Saturday, and although they got a much-needed break during the M’s 6-1 win on Sunday, the home crew certainly wanted to get them another day off before going to San Diego to face the red-hot Padres.
Cole Wilcox entered the game in the ninth. He had already come on in mop-up duty once before in the series on Friday, but that outing had gone sideways like a rickety old house in an Oklahoma tornado as two men got on and Alvarez sent a hanging slider to Wenatchee.
Things didn’t look great for Wilcox in the ninth on Monday, but they went better than they did on Friday. Despite having some life on his fastball, he didn’t seem to trust himself to punch hitters out with it up and the zone and ended up pitching around Christian Walker and struggling to get swings and misses from the following batters.
Andrés Muñoz got warming up in the bullpen just in case, but a couple of loud flyouts - one kept an out with a good defensive recovery after an odd jump from Luke Raley - snuffed out the Astros’ flame and an easy groundout from Trammell ended things and completed the sweep.
Although Seattle’s offense looked a lot better, they will have to continue these newfound ways against a good San Diego team.
In truth, the Mariners had help in their batting rebound. The Astros pitching staff had gone from uneasy at the beginning of the season to one of the most unmitigated disasters in MLB by the time they came to Seattle. Tatuya Imai’s (apparently injury related?) collapse on Friday took away the last high-ceiling starting pitcher the Astros had, and against the likes of J.P. France and Cody Bolton, the M’s had the perfect opportunity to set their bats right.
And yet they still had to take that opportunity. There were points in the first couple of games where Seattle’s bats tried to do too much all the time and didn’t let the game provide them with the opportunity to excel. But when push came to shove, enough guys up and down the lineup let their own elite talent do the work for them and kept their thinking small.
The Padres will provide less room for error. With the fifth-lowest team ERA (3.41) and eighth lowest team WHIP (1.214), their arms are more than capable of taking down even the best hitters in the game. Seattle will face Michael King (3.24 ERA, 3.75 FIP), Germán Márquez (5.54 ERA, 7.53 FIP), and Walker Buehler (4.97 ERA, 3.86 FIP) during their three-game series, with Márquez the only Padre pitcher with unremarkable expectations.
Seattle had one thumping victory after another, but the M’s are still 8-9 and have to continue this momentum to get themselves in the spot they need to be in.
