> ## 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. # Mariners’ Plan Finally Functions, but Questions Linger from Walk-Off Win vs. A’s - URL: https://www.emeraldcityspectrum.com/seattle-mariners-plan-finally-functions-questions-walk-off-athletics/ - Published: 2026-04-23T03:46:19.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-08T06:11:54.000Z - Author: Callaghan Bluechel - Tags: News, Analysis, Mariners, Josh Naylor, Logan Gilbert, Mitch Garver, Rob Refsnyder, Dominic Canzone, Luke Raley, Cal Raleigh, Julio Rodriguez, J.P. Crawford \[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="4568"\] ![ Seattle Mariners first baseman Josh Naylor (12, left) celebrates with center fielder Julio Rodríguez (44) after hitting a walk-off RBI-single against the Athletics during the ninth inning at T-Mobile Park. Mandatory Credit: Joe Nicholson-Imagn Images ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1d/f2/1df2f77b-83dd-4bc0-a6d2-6d1bb5df89a3/content/images/2026/10/josh-naylor-julio-rodriguez-format-original.jpg) Seattle Mariners first baseman Josh Naylor (12, left) celebrates with center fielder Julio Rodríguez (44) after hitting a walk-off RBI-single against the Athletics during the ninth inning at T-Mobile Park. Mandatory Credit: Joe Nicholson-Imagn Images \[/caption\] For better or for worse, the Seattle Mariners haven’t wavered from their game plan after losing 15 of their first 25 games. All across the team, the players have bought into the plan that the organization built, trusting the process to get them out of their current rut. “I really rely on the hitting coaches to help us out every day, and they do such an incredible job, but I think it’s just staying on the process and having fun while playing, knowing that failure is your friend, and learning to accept it,” first baseman Josh Naylor told Mariners TV’s Ryan Rowland-Smith after hitting a walk-off single to salvage a 5-4 win in the team’s three-game series against the Athletics. In a team sport, this stubbornness can be beneficial. The best laid schemes of mice and men, to translate Robert Burns \[1\], often go awry. “No plan survives first contact with the enemy” goes a similar phrase often misattributed to 19th century Prussian general Helmuth von Moltke the Elder. But trying to tweak a plan that is veering a bit off course can just end up making things a whole lot worse. For a baseball team, there are always going to be good and bad spells. The most effective plans have an inherent flexibility \[2\] - and if Seattle’s plans go fully off the rails, it will be because they are inflexible - but in the absence of anything else, believing in the process can end up being the best a struggling team can have. Friction built up immediately for the Mariners on Wednesday afternoon. Leadoff hitter Nick Kurtz worked a walk to begin the first inning, Shea Langeliers singled him over to third and Gilbert got struck with an incredibly bizarre, incredibly unlucky occurrence: Carlos Cortes’ line drive up the middle got stuck in Logan Gilbert’s jersey. Though it may be a bit unintuitive, the MLB Umpire’s Manual is pretty clear that an out cannot be made if a ball is lodged in a piece of player apparel and it is up to the umpire’s judgment to place the runners where they would have gone otherwise (with no outs being possible). Home plate umpire Alfonso Márquez sent Cortes to first and Langeliers to second, though Kurtz remained at third. A sacrifice fly by Tyler Soderstrom put the A’s up a run and a Jeff McNeil single tacked on another. Seattle found itself down early. Though it all worked out in the end, the game produced several questions for the Mariners ahead of their six-game road trip. ### Can Logan Gilbert tap into his ace potential? Logan Gilbert went into Wednesday’s game with a 4.03 ERA, 2.90 FIP, and 3.12 xFIP, suffering from the bad luck of a .351 opposing batting average on balls in play but otherwise performing well if you look at a lot of the top-line stats: he had struck out 27.8% of batters faced while only walking 4.3% and giving up less than one homer per nine innings. But when it comes to doing all this stuff *quickly*, Gilbert has had much more issues. Batters have been making more contact on pitches in the “shadow” (around the edges of the zone) and “chase” (outside the shadow zone, but not extremely far) year-over-year since 2025, and though they are still below league average, it’s still a decline based on earlier years. Gilbert’s 44% whiff rate on splitters in the shadow and chase zones is higher than the league average of 41.7% and batters’ 54.3% swing rate on such splitters going into Wednesday was slightly lower than the league average 55% swing rate, but those are both roughly around league average. Where things diverge is by looking at counts. With hitters behind in the count, they have swung at 62% of league splitters in the shadow and chase zones in 2026 with a 40.2% whiff rate, but against Gilbert, they have swung at 55.2% of splitters in those zones with a 37.5% whiff rate. Now, with such a small sample size, there’s no indication that Gilbert’s splitters are anywhere different to the league average. But even in 2025 - and that was a year when hitters *improved* against his splitter - his much higher swing rates and whiff rates on splitters in the shadow and chase zones were very much indicative of a splitter that was more tricksy than the league average, with statistically significant differences in swing rate and whiff rate in those zones \[3\]. Gilbert’s splitter declining to league average wouldn’t be good for his chances of being a true cream-of-the-crop pitcher. He has still been solid for the Mariners in 2026, but that has been because of his development of the curveball and changeup and he has adopted a kitchen sink approach to pitching. Despite keeping that kitchen sink going - with his most used pitch on Wednesday, the four-seamer, accounting for a hair under a fourth of all his pitches - the A’s had a fairly solid beat on Gilbert, getting runners on base in three of the four innings they had against him. Granted, a bad throw from J.P. Crawford was one of the runners in a second inning where he otherwise dealt well and made a mistake to Kurtz that wound up as a base hit, but Gilbert had trouble mixing eye levels at points and hung a splitter to Jacob Wilson that became a run-scoring third inning double. It must be said that Wilson’s double would not have scored anyone had Leo Rivas made the play at third on Carlos Cortes’ earlier hit, but Gilbert left a pitch out over the plate and got punished for a third A’s run. Another splitter fell out of his hand later in the frame to hit Max Muncy and Lawrence Butler walked the bases loaded as Gilbert couldn’t locate his stuff aimed for the top of the zone, but he managed to get out of it without any further damage. Still, he had thrown 73 pitches through six innings. His pitch count was 89 after four, and Jose A. Ferrer trotted out to the mound to begin the fifth. Compared to some of their hitting and back-end bullpen issues, Gilbert maybe not being an ace is a good problem to have. But it is disheartening to see a pitcher plateau or even decline after a stellar entrance to the bigs, and in-MLB development (aside from infield defense) has seemed to be an issue for the Mariners in the past few years. Gilbert still has the potential to go from good to great, but his efficiency issues stand in the way. ### What is the line in the sand when it comes to sixth inning platoon switches? Most strategies in sports - the ones that aren’t prevent defense, at least - are implemented because they work. Platooning can sometimes be implemented wrongly, with the trigger pulled in the wrong inning. This happened on Monday as they brought Rob Refsnyder in for Luke Raley in the sixth during a one-out, nobody on situation. The effectiveness of platoons was obvious on Wednesday. Until the sixth inning, the A’s three runs had been answered partially by a first inning Randy Arozarena sacrifice fly with the bases loaded and a third inning solo home run by Cal Raleigh, but the M’s still trailed by a run going into the bottom of the sixth. Josh Naylor led off with a single, and after Randy Arozarena popped out, two platoony left-handers were due up in Luke Raley and Dominic Canzone, and the Athletics went to Brady Basso in the bullpen. The M’s brought in Mitch Garver for the DHing Raley, and after he cracked a double into right center field, Rob Refsnyder pinch-hit for Canzone. Refsnyder tied the game with a sacrifice fly of his own, drilling a cutter to center field. Although it wasn’t as good as if he had managed to pull the ball or if Cole Young had managed to tack on another hit, it did the job and brought Seattle up. The result was good, but was it the right process? Well, maybe. Assuming a run environment of 4.15 runs per game scored by one team, any given team scores an average of 0.461 runs in any given inning. From a one out and man on first situation, that run expectancy only increases to 0.489\. Any sort of 8th inning situation for that part of the lineup would involve at least a runner, though if it came with two outs, it would either have to be bases loaded or men on second and third to be a more fruitful situation than the one they had at the moment. Perhaps run expectancies of between 0.4 and 1.0 in the sixth inning are more judgment calls than anything else - and so there is no true line in the sand (sorry Walter!) - but there is surely a break-even point somewhere from an expected value standpoint. Basso hadn’t pitched at all in 2026, something that should have factored into the Mariners’ decisions. Given that Refsnyder was already set to pinch-hit for Canzone before Garver did anything, the M’s were probably sticking to a platoon-bot approach (always deploying the platoon at the earliest moment), a worrying sign that they aren’t interested in learning from some of their mistakes. Had Garver made an unproductive out, the resulting 0.214 run expectancy would have been much lower than a random inning situation, and making the Refsnyder switch would have been foolish. That can go with the territory of the whole “sticking with the plan” idea, but adjusting the specifics of platoon deployment is very much under the umbrella of things that a flexible plan should account for. Regardless, it worked out on Wednesday. ### What is the meaning of Andrés Muñoz’ struggles? Another productive out brought a man home in the seventh. Crawford and Raleigh set the table with a single and a double, respectively, and Julio Rodríguez knocked Crawford home with a grounder that A’s shortstop Jacob Wilson had to dive to get to. That set the table for the bullpen to finish it out. Although Ferrer had logged two innings and Matt Brash had only needed 10 pitches to get through the seventh, the M’s evidently aired on the side of caution and took Brash out for the eighth, with Cooper Criswell in his stead. Criswell did well, but closer Andrés Muñoz suffered his first official blown save (his disaster against the Padres not counting because he didn’t enter in a save situation) as he left a slider over the dish for Kurtz, who torched it out of the yard to tie it up at four apiece. For whatever reason, Muñoz has had feel issues with his slider to begin the 2026 season, and it is being hit harder with greater frequency (a 45.5% hard hit rate in 2026 compared to a 26.1% hard hit rate in 2025). Even with the small sample sizes, the difference in hard hit rate is already statistically significant \[4\]. Muñoz’ slider is meaningfully worse than it was last year, though whether he will regain his feel is of course unknown. He’s a major league closer with a proven pedigree, so he probably will return to form, but it’s far from what the Mariners were hoping for. ### Is the Mariners’ plan going to work? Having a plan is always a good idea, but there are good plans and bad plans. A bad plan can have disastrous consequences. The aforementioned Helmuth von Moltke the Elder - the one who didn’t say the phrase “no plan survives first contact with the enemy” despite the common misconception - had a nephew named Helmuth von Moltke the Younger. Upon getting a big job promotion back in 1906, Moltke the Younger inherited an extremely bold plan from that new job’s previous occupant, and although he made modifications to the plan, the big bold idea remained the same. That was the Schlieffen Plan, by which the German Empire invaded Belgium and dramatically widened the First World War. For pretty obvious reasons, no sports team - no, not even the New York Jets - can devise a plan as horrible as that. The good news for the Mariners is that their game plan relies on a set of generally well-established StatCast era conventions: building a starting rotation around good fastballs, tapping ground ball pitchers for a bullpen, building relievers around a sinker/slider combo, using the home run as the key element of offense, getting home runs by having guys pull the ball in the air, and so on. The bad news for the Mariners is that their game plan relies on a set of generally well-established StatCast era conventions. A breakthrough or sea change in league approach that exploits a general weakness of such conventions would leave that element of the M’s exposed. But over the course of a single season, such a sea change can only have so much of a negative effect, much less than the disastrous risk of an outside-the-box, bold, and completely wrongheaded idea. Whatever may be said of president of baseball operations Jerry Dipoto, his tenure with the Mariners suggests he wouldn’t come up with the idea of going to war with the British Empire at the peak of its power for the purpose of somehow speeding up the invasion of a completely different country. Perhaps to the chagrin of Silicon Valley’s greatest ideologues, teams built around conventional ideas have won many championships before, even in the recent past. It’s all about the execution of said ideas, from the manager to the players to the player development crew to the front office. The Mariners still trust the plan they have set forth. After all, being 11-15 on Earth Day is far from a death sentence for a baseball team. Cal Raleigh, Julio Rodríguez, and Josh Naylor are starting to get back in the swing of things. Whether they can make everyone forget the first few weeks of the season has yet to be decided, but if they can’t, the onus will probably fall more on the execution than the plan itself. Raleigh, Naylor, and Rodríguez are among the many with a lot faith in the Mariners’ plan of action, and among the few who had been executing it well during the team’s series against the Athletics. Even after extra innings looked all but assured upon a Crawford ground ball into a double play, the first two attacked the sinkers from A’s reliever Joel Kuhnel and each sent singles into the outfield. Kuhnel adjusted and went to the cutter, but instead of trying to kill it, Naylor put an inside-out swing on the ball and knocked it the other way for a walk-off single. “They (Raleigh, Naylor, and Rodríguez) continue to do the work. They continue to put the effort in,” Mariners manager Dan Wilson said after the game. “Today was a good day to get some of the reward from that effort.” \[1\] John Steinbeck used an English version of the phrase, but Burns’ original Scots is as follows: *The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men/Gang aft agley*. \[2\] In addition to operational freedom for those on the ground, so to speak. This requires that the plan-builders have a great degree of trust in the plan-doers to understand the spirit of the plan and make impromptu decisions in the face of adverse circumstances. \[3\] In statistical jargon, the *p*\-value of the null hypothesis of Gilbert’s shadow and chase splitter swing rate compared to the league (with the alternative hypothesis that Gilbert’s swing rate was greater) is 0.01427 for 2025\. The *p*\-value of the null hypothesis of Gilbert’s shadow and chase splitter whiff rate compared to the league (with the alternative hypothesis being that Gilbert’s whiff rate was greater) is 0.00002188 for 2025\. Both of those values are below the general convention of *p* < 0.05 marking statistical significance. In layman’s terms, the *p*\-value refers to the probability of something expressed as a portion of one (0.05 meaning 5% probability), with the “null hypothesis” being that two given datasets aren’t actually different. In this case, the “null hypothesis” is that the performance of Gilbert’s splitters in 2025 aren’t unexpected for a random subset of the league splitter performance. The very low *p*\-values indicate that it is very likely that Gilbert’s splitters in 2025 were meaningfully different. \[4\] The *p*\-value of the null hypothesis of Muñoz’ slider hard hit rate in 2026 compared to 2025 (with the alternative that it is greater in 2026) is 0.002522 without Yates’ continuity correction and 0.004161 with it. Again, well below 0.05.