Old Mariners Bugbears Continue Biting in Opening Day Loss to Guardians
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Seattle Mariners designated hitter Dominic Canzone (8) celebrates in the dugout after hitting his second home run of the game against the Cleveland Guardians during the seventh inning at T-Mobile Park. Mandatory Credit: Steven Bisig-Imagn Images. [/caption]
The more things change, the more they stay the same. It’s hard to say there wasn’t an air of that feeling in T-Mobile Park after the Mariners dropped their Opening Day contest 6-4 thanks to some shoddy relief work, unimpressive defense, and one-trick offense.
Four solo home runs were all the production the M’s could muster, and in a lot of games against the Cleveland Guardians, that might be enough (they scored slightly less than four runs per game last year). But Logan Gilbert once again struggled to go deep, outfielders lacked urgency on fly balls with men on base, and Gabe Speier caught the bad end of some J-Ram magic with men on base.
But for all the lingering of long-lamented woes, the newest guy on the roster burst his way onto the scene in a big way.
Brendan Donovan made the best first impression possible as the M’s new leadoff man.
The Mariners franchise is entering its 50th season this year, having notched its first game in the books all the way back on April 6, 1977. In all that time, no leadoff Mariner had hit a home run in his first at-bat of Opening Day. Not Dave Collins all the way back in that first season nor Harold Reynolds in the late ‘80s nor Ichiro in his Hall-of-Fame Mariners career. Of the 49 season-inaugural batters, not one had left the yard in that first at-bat.
That makes Brendan Donovan the first. The former Cardinal utilityman-turned Mariners third baseman was one of Mariners president of baseball operations Jerry Dipoto’s biggest offseason splashes, completing the team and setting the boys from T-Mobile Park as early AL West favorites going into Spring Training. With a .361 career on-base percentage and incredible consistency across seasons in his four years with the Redbirds, he easily slotted in as Seattle’s new leadoff hitter ahead of the 2026 season.
Guardians starter Tanner Bibee came into the bottom of the first with a one-run lead and proceeded to fall behind the Mariner leadoff man 3-1. Donovan saw a nice juicy four-seamer at the top of the zone from Bibee and corked it down the line, curling the ball around the foul pole to open Seattle’s run tally for the year.
Donovan’s day brightened in the bottom of the fifth as he shoved a double to set up a good opportunity for Cal Raleigh, but the star catcher whiffed on a painted heater and Bibee got out of the jam with Donovan still on second.
Gilbert looked little changed from 2025, for both good and ill.
Of all the hitters in Cleveland’s opening day roster, 24-year-old rookie outfielder Chase DeLauter was not the one the Mariners pitching staff was spending the most time on. But perhaps Logan Gilbert and company might have been wiser to be a little more careful about the Guardians’ number two prospect.
With one out in the first, Gilbert got into a full count against DeLauter, whose minor league hitting had been well regarded with a 55 hit grade and 60 power grade according to Baseball America. The Seattle hurler tried to dot a slider low and in to the rookie (it was the first regular season at-bat of DeLauter’s career, though he made his debut in last year’s wild card series), but it backed up on him a little bit and wound up in the perfect low and inside wheelhouse for the left-handed batter.
DeLauter didn’t get all of it on a two-strike count, but on a surprisingly clear March evening, his 358 feet was just enough to clear the wall in straightaway right, about five feet above Luke Raley’s glove. If making his debut in the postseason wasn’t enticing enough, getting a homer in his first regular season at-bat made for as nice a gift-wrapped “welcome to the Show” as anyone could hope for.
Gilbert wasn’t rattled. His next opponent was none other than perennial MVP candidate José Ramírez, yet Gilbert got him to chase a pitch a foot outside for strike three and punched out Kyle Manzardo to end the inning.
Aside from a one-out Rhys Hoskins double in the second, it was smooth sailing for Gilbert until the fifth. His splitter was as nasty as ever across the middle innings, falling off the face of the earth as Guardians missed four of 11 swings against the pitch during his 5 ⅓ innings of work.
But much of the mettle of a starter is not when all his stuff is working well, it’s when his best deliveries are landing in the outfield grass and the opposing team is on the knife’s edge of putting up a crooked number.
Rhys Hoskins squibbed an inside splitter through the hole on the left side, turning some not-great contact into a leadoff baserunner for the visitors. Daniel Schneemann went down and golfed a 2-2 slider in the air towards the left center field gap. It wasn’t an easy catch to make, but it was one that Julio Rodríguez might have No Fly Zone’d had he gone after it with gusto. But he seemed to leave some in the tank, and Gilbert now had to deal with runners on second and third with nobody out.
Those runners scored. Gilbert got one away before hanging a 1-0 cutter to Brayan Rocchio, a pitch that became a 107.9 mile an hour hotshot down the right field line and a two-run double. The Guardians were out in front at the midpoint, and with Rocchio standing on second and the top of the order up for the third time, the nail-biting wasn’t over for Gilbert.
Although Steven Kwan softly popped out to short, Gilbert got in a long battle with DeLauter, a full count developing as Gilbert’s splitters lost some of their edge. After trying and trying again with his main out-pitch, though, the hurler trusted the heater and dotted a called strike three to end the inning. Gilbert got an easy popout from Ramírez, but with a string of lefties coming up and 86 pitches in the tank, manager Dan Wilson went to the bullpen.
It was a night that would have fit perfectly into Gilbert’s 2025 season. His goal of getting back to longer outings will have to wait until Tuesday against the Yankees despite his clean sheet where walks were concerned and seven punchouts.
Gabe Speier’s World Baseball Classic struggles continued on Opening Day, as José Ramírez put two seventh-inning runs on the board.
“Relievers are fickle” is a baseball analytics mantra that you may have seen before, and there’s real wisdom in that phrase. Aside from the true elites of the craft, such as Andrés Muñoz, there’s a lot of ups and downs. Guys that seem to break out one year fall right back down to earth the next, and for Gabe Speier, that’s something to consider after his 2.61 ERA in 62 innings last year as the Mariners’ lefty specialist.
Over two innings for Team USA in the World Baseball Classic, however, it was the Gabe Speier that showed up in the last couple games of the ALDS, giving up two home runs, one of them to Bo Naylor (Josh’s younger brother, incidentally the starting catcher for these Cleveland Guardians), and his little time in Spring Training was similarly shaky.
Some of that can be chalked up to simply getting a slow start, being away for the WBC and all. But a rough seventh inning for Seattle did little to quell any budding worries about the lefty.
It started with a one-out Rocchio single and continued as DeLauter punched one into left to create a two-out chance for José Ramírez.
Now, when it comes to Cleveland’s game plan on offense, “get a couple guys on for José Ramírez” is about as concise a summary as could be. It has been about the only functional part of their batting strategy for years on end, and even when the rest of their hitters heated up on Thursday, the old tried and true held firm for Cleveland.
Ramírez walloped a double into the left center field gap on a 1-1 low slider - this one truly didn’t have a shot at being caught - and the go-ahead run scored as a given. The second runner, DeLauter from first, might not have been given the sign against 28 other organizations in the game. But against the Mariners, whose outfield throwing and relay game seems to fall apart even when utilizing good arms like that of Julio Rodríguez, there are a lot of free bases. DeLauter made it home ahead of an offline throw to the plate and Cleveland led by two.
The silver lining for Speier is that his process during Ramírez’ at-bat was sound, the Guardians’ third baseman simply beat him. Where he faltered was allowing the ever-present threat some traffic in front of him.
Cleveland-area Mariners mashed the visitors from Cleveland, but the offense fell short in the end as Cleveland took Opening Day.
Going into the season, Dominic Canzone seemed like half a clear regression candidate - a .354 batting average on balls in play is almost certainly not going to be repeated - and half a clear breakout candidate, with a ton of top-shelf underlying batted ball data that screams 30-homer contender. He’s always had memorable five o’clock power, with some of the loudest batting practice nukes of anyone on the roster, but his playoff stick was as quiet as a church mouse and expectations seemed muddled.
One game doesn’t tell you about a player’s whole season, but Canzone made about as loud a case as anyone could hear on Thursday. Bibee left a second inning sinker down and in to Canzone for his first shot, which rang out clearly around the ballpark on its 419-foot path to the grandstands just right of dead center.
Canzone’s second shot was even more majestic, and that’s not just because it was the last true hope spot for the Mariners in their Opening Day defeat. It was Guardians reliever Shawn Armstrong’s first pitch of the bottom of the second, right in that down-inside corner of the zone where Bibee had found all barrel from the Team Italy outfielder, and Canzone mashed it to just about the same part of the yard as he had his first; only this time, it flew 444 feet, more than halfway up the crowd.
The home run party also saw action from Canzone’s fellow Ohioan - indeed, fellow Cleveland metro area native - Luke Raley. Playing right field for Seattle, he misplayed what should have been an out during the sixth inning, but since Ferrer got out of the jam anyway, Raley’s impact on the game came from the dish.
Raley saw 11 pitches, swung at nine of them, missed six of them (he struck out twice), and fouled off one of them, leaving two batted balls. One was an easy flyout, but the other was a fifth inning frozen rope down the right field line. It was the hardest hit ball of the game from either side, coming off the bat at 113.8 miles an hour, but it came in at a low angle with a topspin that nearly relegated it to double status. And yet it cleared the fence by just about five feet, just like DeLauter’s first home run (but in a much greater hurry).
But when it came to the very end, these hitters were alongside the rest of their teammates in making quite little noise. Raley’s second strikeout came on three pitches against Guardians closer Cade Smith and Canzone ended the game with an easy lineout to the glove of Cleveland shortstop Gabriel Arias.
Still, in a game where much of the team wasn’t on its best stuff, it’s hard to assign blame to the two guys with three RBIs between them. Had there been some people on for these shots, the M’s would have walked away 1-0 rather than 0-1. But now that it’s the regular season, the team will need to be results-oriented; a loss in April counts just as much as a loss in September.
Change or continuity? The answer, at least for Opening Day, was quite clear in Seattle.
Seattle’s offseason had a couple of focuses: adding more grounder-heavy relievers to the staff and getting bats that could make things happen outside of the longball. Jose A. Ferrer did his job off the mound and worked around a pair of sixth inning singles, but when it came to diversifying the run game, it was all crickets.
Donovan, of course, led off the game with a homer and augmented his 2-4 night with a double the other way to try build a fifth inning rally, but with the big stars like Cal Raleigh and Julio Rodríguez all but absent at the dish, the rest of the lineup - Canzone and Raley notwithstanding, though they also fell silent in the ninth inning to end the game - didn’t manage to squeeze much together.
Josh Naylor, who came into last season at the deadline with the bonus of often zagging when the rest of his team zigged, went 0-4 with four groundouts, one of them being into a double play. Despite Cole Young’s excellent spring training, his performances on Opening Day consisted of a lot of passive strike-taking, the exact hole in his approach from last year.
From Dan Wilson, there was the continuation of iffy bullpen management decisions. The team is looking for reps for Casey Legumina, sure, as there’s a lot in his profile to suggest he has been underperforming for the team, but Wilson put him in the game with his team only down by one. A reliever with as much struggles as Legumina is the kind of “up by four or down by four” arm that comes in during uncompetitive games, not when the team is only down a run. Unless, of course, being down at all in the late innings sapped all the fight out anyway - in which case the M’s have much bigger issues.
Legumina, for his part, struggled with his control and faced a bases-loaded, two-out situation against Steven Kwan, but he buckled the high-contact Guardian outfielder with a changeup beneath the dish. He seemed to increase his feel once Ángel Martínez struck out; that sounds bizarre given that he proceeded to hit Rocchio on the knee with an overcooked fastball, but as far as general trends go, he was more confident and less overly-crafty from that point forward.
The loss, ultimately, was one that all sides of the game shared some blame for. Players could have put more effort into their glovework, batters could have tried to throw some sticks in Cleveland’s spokes during the home innings, and there were quite a few too many juicy meatballs to Cleveland’s bats.
Especially to Chase DeLauter, who mashed a second homer off the tarp in deep right center (422 feet!) against a Cooper Criswell hanging cutter. DeLauter went 3-5 with two homers in his non-playoff MLB debut, and the sellout Mariner crowd at least got a glimpse of why his prospect stock is so high.
On Deck
The four-game set against the Guardians continues on Friday night at 6:40 p.m. Pacific. George Kirby will take the mound for the Mariners while Gavin Williams will be on the bump for Cleveland.
