Mariners’ Gutsy Series Win Offers Team Last Lifeline for 2026 Season
When Andrés Muñoz got Taylor Trammell to chase a changeup for strike three on Sunday, he yelled with a ferocity rarely seen even from a man called “Señor Smoke”.
It was an angry, happy catharsis. Had he made slightly better pitches to Jose Altuve or Daulton Varsho two days prior, the Mariners would have swept the Astros and put some real heat on the once and future AL West champions; they would have been two games back of their rivals with the tiebreaker long since clinched.
Instead, the M’s are four games back with 37 left to play. But there’s no use crying over spilt milk, and Muñoz made sure to redeem himself in the bottom of the ninth in the Houston rubber match.
“To be honest with you, that - especially here - hurts a lot when those things happen, because you feel like you let the team down,” Muñoz said. “But I’ve been through these situations a lot, and I’m able to just flush those things easier, especially with the outing that I had.”
Getting to that one-run lead wasn’t as simple as it might have been based on the way the M’s offense had been playing earlier in the series. Unlike the first two contests, when the team got it done with runners on, it was a return to regular programming on Sunday night as they went 1-11 with runners in scoring position.
The M’s, regardless, logged a badly-needed 3-2 win.
Cal Raleigh recorded the mother of all Crawford Box jobs in the sixth, a much-needed stroke of luck.
The winning run on Sunday was a 327-foot fly ball that left the bat at a 45-degree angle. Since the beginning of the StatCast era in 2015, there have been 57 such batted balls - and Raleigh’s was just the second to become a hit (the first was this Yandy Díaz deep fly in a minor league stadium).
Luckily for Raleigh, he was playing in Daikin Park, where an incredibly cozy left field fence allows such hits to scrape the wall. A three at-bat day with a walk, a strikeout, and two pop-ups isn’t unusual for 2026 Raleigh, but it’s quite the sight to see one of those pop-ups leave the yard. But so was it that he hit his 13th home run of the season. It made the score 3-1 in Seattle’s favor, but as it turned out, the M’s would need it.
Raleigh also needed it. Several great tomes will be written about his fall-off from 2025 to 2026, and his .556 OPS going into the game wasn’t where that number had been hanging around during the down year; it was 15 points worse, give or take.
“Great to see that from him, great to see the smile coming around the bases there,” said M’s skipper Dan Wilson. “A huge run, I think we did a good job of answering back at times tonight. One run can mean so much in these games, and tonight that was a big run for us.”
Randy Arozarena and Dominic Canzone knocked in the previous two runs, but the M’s left a fair bit more on the table.
Seattle got the scoring started with another inexpensive homer, though it was hardly as dime store cheap as Raleigh’s. With one out in the first, Randy Arozarena took a high Hunter Brown fastball into those very same Crawford Boxes, and although it went a few rows deep shaded to left center, it was still a Houston special.
Missed chances with runners on rather immediately gathered for Seattle. Dominic Canzone cracked a double into right, but neither Julio Rodríguez nor Josh Naylor could bring him home and it was off to the bottom of the first.
The only time the M’s scored without a homer on Sunday was in the top of the third. Brock Rodden and Brendan Donovan both walked with nobody out, but Arozarena grounded into a force at second and got caught stealing second soon after. Were it not for Canzone’s second scorching hit of the game, the inning would have concluded without a run.
Chances piled up nonetheless. The M’s loaded the bases on two-out walks in the fourth but Brendan Donovan watched some paint from Brown fly by for strike three. Naylor singled in the sixth and stole second, but got caught stealing third as Raleigh was taking his hacks - yes, were it not for Naylor getting gunned down, Raleigh’s homer would have been a two-run shot - and a pair of two-out baserunners after Raleigh both were left stranded. Seattle once again loaded the bases in the seventh before Raleigh popped up again, and this time, it didn’t find its way over the wall (or out of the infield, for that matter).
Were it not for a quality start for Bryan Woo, the game would have been a soul-crushing affair defined by those missed chances. But even with that game-winning outing, there was some notable unease for Seattle.
Bryan Woo left with shoulder soreness after six, though he said it was nothing he was “concerned about”.
Coming into Sunday’s game, Woo’s most recent injury had been in Daikin Park, as he left his Sept. 19, 2025 outing early with pectoral inflammation. Before any specter of that knock reared its head, however, Woo went out wheeling and dealing his way to a quality start.
The last time Woo had logged a quality start on the road was on May 12. In all his road starts since, he had either given up a bunch of runs, failed to go six innings, or both. These struggles had been eating away at him, especially with the team sitting where it is in the standings.
“It’s been a frustrating year for all of us, especially for me,” Woo said. “Obviously, a lot of really tough ones on the road, and just putting it on myself to come out with some energy and some fire these last two starts. Looking myself in the mirror, ‘if we’re gonna do it, then I gotta step up.’ Big series, especially today, wanna come out and bring my best.”
Woo faced the minimum in the first three innings, only giving up a baserunner in the third to a single that was erased in an ensuing double play. While he had started the game off using all the pitches in his arsenal, he began to lean on the four-seamer and sinker in the second and third, with a notable velocity jump as he played in his rivals’ ball yard.
“I feel like that’s when I’m at my best, is when I kinda just get into that zone, you know?” Woo said. “A little bit of that alter ego when you get back out, just kind of a ‘take-no-prisoners’ type of mentality of, you gotta bring your best when you come here.”
Jeremy Peña took advantage of a mistake in the fourth, however, rocking a middle-middle sinker over the right field wall for a leadoff solo homer. Woo quickly worked around it, however, surviving an Altuve walk with some meaningless surrounding outs. The fifth was once again smooth sailing - by this point he was incorporating more sweepers and sliders - but a second Broadway sinker became a second leadoff solo shot in the sixth, this time off the bat of Nick Allen.
Still, when he left the sixth, he had given up just two runs while striking out five and walking one. But despite being on just 75 pitches, he didn’t go back out for the seventh.
Wilson, who had already gone out to check on Woo with two outs in the sixth, called it a precautionary measure.
“He’d had a little bit of shoulder soreness, and we wanted to make sure he was okay,” Wilson said. “Obviously, he’s a big part of our starting rotation, so as a precaution, we went to the bullpen there.”
Woo didn’t seem too fazed by it on Sunday.
“It’s nothing I’m concerned about,” Woo said.
But the team’s bill of health this year - which includes players taking big downturns as they try to play through injury - doesn’t make that much of a comfort. His pectoral issue was supposedly minor in late September last year, but it put him out of commission until some very truncated outings in the ALCS.
Despite some little league play in the eighth, the bullpen closed out the game and the series for the Mariners.
Eduard Bazardo handled the seventh for Seattle without issue and Gabe Speier got two quick outs in the eighth, but singles from Yordan Alvarez and Isaac Paredes made Wilson grab Seranthony Domínguez from the bullpen.
One pitch in, it appeared Domínguez had gotten himself and the Mariners out of the jam. Jose Altuve popped up weakly to the infield, a routine play for someone to make and get the game to the ninth.
No Mariner got to the ball. Everyone was safe as the ball fell on the grass with two away, the bases now loaded for Daulton Varsho.
“I mean, crazy,” Wilson said of the play. “You have to keep pushing through that stuff, and our guys did that tonight. When you line out and then a ball like that drops, it’s tough. But that’s where Seranthony really stood up to the moment and went after it.”
Wilson hadn’t been considering bringing Muñoz into the game instead of Domínguez, with the closer on a one-inning limit after his tough first game. The eighth was the game, however, and this was a lesson that apparently remained unlearned from Game 7 last year.
In any case, Domínguez fanned Varsho on five pitches. Muñoz walked LaMonte Wade Jr. with one out in the ninth but otherwise locked the ‘Stros down and finished the save.
The M’s closer said that, although his Friday disaster was disconcerting in the moment, recontextualizing it as the luck of the draw wound up helping him.
“When I have tough outings, I look it up to see what I could do better,” Muñoz said. “In the other outing, there was not too much to see, because I executed my pitches, I did my best, I threw good sliders. So basically, that gave me more confidence to (say), ‘ok, it was just bad luck.’ We’ve been through tough situations a lot of times this season, but that gave me the mentality of, ‘ok, I didn’t do anything wrong. It was just part of the game, they were better than me that day,’ but that just gave me the confidence to just go back out there and try to do the same thing.”
This mentality is not to be overused, lest accountability for bad appearances defined by actual mistakes go unaddressed, but the ability to see what’s your fault and what isn’t - and keep a balanced view of the two - does a world of good for a big league pitcher.
Plenty of Mariners expressed belief and hope in the future, in spite of it all.
Seattle is still 59-66, seven games under .500 and well below the division lead. The third wild card is more attainable, but even still, they’re somewhat at the mercy of any team that gets particularly hot. To get that third wild card spot, they would have to outpace the Twins, Guardians, Tigers, Blue Jays, Rangers, and Orioles.
If there’s anything this M’s team has been good at this year, however, it’s defeating the Astros. The team is 9-2 against Houston and 50-64 against everyone else. Despite having won the division in 2025, there’s still a chip on the shoulder of plenty of Seattle’s guys when it comes to the ‘Stros.
“Obviously, they’ve had so much success in the division for so long that it feels like every time you come here, you feel like you’re gonna get a really good opponent. You know you’re gonna get a good crowd, a good atmosphere,” Woo said. “It’s always just good battles with them; if you can come out on top, win this series, it says a lot about where you’re at. I think everybody brings their best in this series, and so if you can win this series, it proves something to yourself that there’s something there.”
After all, the M’s went to task on the Astros in late 2025 to seal their division championship and set themselves up for a first-round bye before facing the Tigers in the ALDS. The team believed in themselves then, and though they have often been dejected, lethargic, and defeatist during much of the 2026 season, Woo described a semi-aspirational buy-in among his team as they go into their final 37 contests.
“I think it’s just buying in altogether. We’ve talked about the fact that the year hasn’t really gone the way we thought it was, either as a team or individually,” Woo said. “And I think it honestly makes it easier for everybody to let a lot of the beginning of the year go and buy into, ‘this is what we got now, this is what we got as a group.’ Everybody’s in it together.”
There is no more time to waste, however, and no easy team to play. The Milwaukee Brewers, who are the class of the National League at 77-48, host the M’s from Tuesday through Thursday, and like essentially each series to follow, it’s a must-win or must-sweep.
The Mariners have had plenty of opportunities to build upon and try get themselves out of their current rut, but they have squandered every one. Despite their resurgent belief, there is urgency: the series win has provided another lifeline, but it is almost certainly the final one.
“If there’s any place for us to get going,” Woo said, “it was gonna be here.”
