> ## 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 Bats Give Kirby Vintage King Félix Treatment, M’s Drop Winnable Contest to Braves - URL: https://www.emeraldcityspectrum.com/seattle-mariners-vintage-king-felix-treatment-loss-atlanta-braves/ - Published: 2026-05-06T08:25:01.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-08T06:11:44.000Z - Author: Callaghan Bluechel - Tags: News, Analysis, Mariners, George Kirby, J.P. Crawford, Dan Wilson, Jose A. Ferrer, Andres Munoz, Mitch Garver, Josh Naylor, Dominic Canzone \[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="2048"\] ![ Seattle Mariners starting pitcher George Kirby (68) throws against the Atlanta Braves during the third 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/george-kirby-king-felix-format-original.jpg) Seattle Mariners starting pitcher George Kirby (68) throws against the Atlanta Braves during the third inning at T-Mobile Park. Mandatory Credit: Joe Nicholson-Imagn Images \[/caption\] The names and faces change but the general concept remains the same. Gone are the days when a pitcher like Steve Carlton could win 27 games for a team that only won 59 games total; in modern baseball, such pitchers get saddled with no-decisions, a concept pioneered by a 13-12 Félix Hernández in 2010 who won the Cy Young Award on the back of his league-leading 2.27 ERA. That was still 21.3% of that awful Mariners team’s wins. They weren’t *quite* as bad as Carlton’s old side. They may have given 702 plate appearances to Chone Figgins and 278 more to Milton Bradley, but there are few teams who were ever as bad as the ‘72 Not-Really-Phightin’ Phils. Arisen during the career of that selfsame Hernández was the term “Félix Quality Start”, based on the definition of quality start (six innings or more, three earned runs or less) but narrowed in scope to seven innings or more and two earned runs or less. Hernández got plenty of those in his career. Another Mariner got such a start on Tuesday night, and like a lot of those “King Félix” outings of old, his team lost 3-2\. Whether it is an aberration or a harbinger, it is still too soon to tell. But the hour of judgment is drawing nearer than those in T-Mobile Park might like to admit. ### George Kirby put together a “Félix Quality Start” against one of the best teams in baseball. With a direly stretched bullpen, the Mariners needed their starter to go deep into the game. And with an offense once again struggling to put anything together, he needed to keep the Braves to a low score. “Furious” George Kirby, entering the game with an even 3.00 ERA, changed his arsenal up a bit. Of the 88 pitches he threw, 32 were sweepers, making that breaking ball an unusually common delivery compared to its usual 23.1% usage in 2026\. He seemed to swap out what would have usually been four-seamers against the fastball-hunting Braves, an effective piece of proactive strategy that allowed him to go deep into Tuesday’s game. Kirby settled into a groove for the first three innings, with Atlanta’s aggression allowing him to breeze through with 15 in the first, nine in the second, and six in the third, with the Braves’ getting just one hard hit ball through those frames. Inevitably, however, the Mariners defense behind Kirby failed him. The first hit of the fourth, off the bat of Ozzie Albies, was a liner completely uncatchable for anyone, but the second saw a game-changing defensive miscue in the form of an overeager throw from Raley, who airmailed it to third in a vain attempt to get Albies out there and ended up allowing Olson to second. While Kirby was able to get the second out of the frame without trouble, Mauricio Dubón jumped on a first-pitch fastball away and lined it well to the right of a shifted Josh Naylor at first, ending up at second with a double. Had Olson been kept on first, the preceding Michael Harris II groundout would have been an inning-ending double play, and even if it was just a force, Olson would have had a much tougher time scoring from first. Kirby worked right back into the game, although he started nibbling quite a bit more than he had been earlier in the game. This still worked against a Braves team that was willing to put quite a few balls in play and ended up with mostly weak contact against sweepers, cutters, four-seamers, and even some well-placed sinkers, and by the beginning of the seventh, Kirby stood at 78 pitches with four strikeouts and just one walk. The seventh took a grand total of 10 pitches, with a couple of softly hit outs followed by a lockdown five-pitch sequence of a changeup, a knuckle, curve, and two fastballs to Mike Yazstremski before Kirby froze him on a backdoor sweeper. Had Raley kept Olson at first, Kirby could very well have been on complete game shutout watch. As things stood, manager Dan Wilson decided to pull him on the early side, putting Jose A. Ferrer out for the eighth. ### The Mariners offense put together a “Félix Quality Start” of 16 strikeouts and three hits. Were it not for a J.P. Crawford home run at just about the right time, the M’s wouldn’t have had much hope at all of turning the game into even an extra-innings contest, much less a win. Seattle sent 33 batters to the plate on Tuesday. Just six reached base, three on hits. Meanwhile, 16 struck out. One batter, Luke Raley, laid down a sacrifice bunt. Of the 10 outs in the field, just two were hit over 95 miles an hour and none over 100 miles an hour. *Four* left the bat 81.5 miles an hour or slower. They still managed to get six batters to the plate with a man on second (nobody spent time at third base), going hitless with one walk. Only *once* did a Mariner put the ball in play with a man on second, and it was a weak Dominic Canzone groundout to end the game. The M’s did manage to get two runs and avoid getting shut out for the fifth-really-sixth time of the season. That was because Atlanta starter Bryce Elder walked Mitch Garver to begin the third inning, and, when he left a 2-1 fastball down the middle to Crawford, the Mariners shortstop clobbered it over the right field wall. The two remaining walks came in the fourth from Josh Naylor and Cole Young, but from the fifth to the eighth, three different Braves pitchers sent down 12 men in order. Including the final out of the fourth and the first out of the ninth, it was 14 straight batters sent down. Nine of those were strikeouts. Seattle’s bats seemed to only wake up at least a little bit once the team fell down a run in the ninth, but losing 12 outs without much of a fight had constrained them far beyond having much room to dally around in the final frame. And the threat, in truth, began and ended with Naylor, who singled and stole second; both Julio Rodríguez and Randy Arozarena waved at buried 2-2 junk they had no business swinging at. Arozarena could very well have walked had he not swung at another 2-2 junkball in the at-bat, though he managed to foul that one off. Braves closer Raisel Iglesias always has filthy stuff, sure, but he left quite a bit of it off the plate, and a team more willing to take its walks could have wound up with a bases loaded, one out situation - or perhaps the pressure would have resulted in one more meatball to Arozarena anyway (his at-bat started with one, but he overswung on the pitch) or one to Canzone, who swung on the first pitch of an at-bat for the first time since May 2 but found himself out in front of a changeup. \[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="2000"\] ![ Via Baseball Savant, the two charts show all strikes thrown by each team on Tuesday, including called strikes, whiffs, fouls, and balls in play. The Mariners’ less discerning swing decisions are evident. ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1d/f2/1df2f77b-83dd-4bc0-a6d2-6d1bb5df89a3/content/images/2026/10/atlvsseapitchers-format-original.png) Via Baseball Savant, the two charts show all strikes thrown by each team on Tuesday, including called strikes, whiffs, fouls, and balls in play. The Mariners’ less discerning swing decisions are evident. \[/caption\] Everything else, from Raley’s miscue to Matt Olson’s bomb off Andrés Muñoz in the ninth, was amplified because the M’s couldn’t get anything going at the plate. All that kind of stuff matters, but the wasted innings built up to snuff out a potential victory in its cradle. ### A late Braves run neutered the threat of a potential extra inning reliever shortage, but process questions remain. With the Mariners offense rolling over inning-in and inning-out, the game was rapidly slipping into the bucket of contests where only one form of victory existed, courtesy of the ghost runner. But given the way Seattle was hitting - reminiscent of Saturday against the Royals, when they couldn’t get that runner home in the 10th - the manager probably should have been thinking about penciling in *two* high-end extra-innings guys, just to be sure. Jose A. Ferrer worked a clean eighth inning, notably striking out two guys (including one lefty, Drake Baldwin) with his changeup. Ferrer historically hasn’t thrown his changeup much to lefties, following the general guideline about that pitch being best against opposite-sided hitters, but its ability to generate whiffs clearly plays against both sides of the plate and he is beginning to use it more. Going into the ninth with the score still tied made for another hour of decision. Wilson was asked after the game about if he thought about leaving Ferrer to face a leadoff Olson because of the platoon matchup (something they had done in the eighth on Monday), but he didn’t mention anything about if the extra innings threat factored into the equation. “We thought about \[leaving Ferrer in for the ninth\], but “Muny” threw the ball super well last night, and I thought he was the guy, and he was able to get ‘em tonight,” Wilson said. It’s a through-line of the Jerry Dipoto-era Mariners that they’re more reluctant than most ballclubs to have a reliever pitch across innings, being wary of the ups-and-downs of doing so. With the plentiful high-end relievers that the M’s had at the start of the year, this strategy made plenty of sense. But it can break down when the line of leverage arms grows thin, either because of an early exit from the starter or - as was the case on Tuesday - injuries had sidelined two key players in that bullpen. Had Ferrer pitched a clean inning, the team would have had Muñoz and maybe Eduard Bazardo available for the 10th (probably going with Muñoz to give the team the best shot of keeping a clean sheet in the inning), while if Muñoz had kept the Braves off the board in the ninth, the 10th inning reliever would have been Bazardo if available and Alex Hoppe, a man with three career MLB appearances, if not. Regardless of the daily outcome, these items of process are important, because they will come into play as the season goes on. It was all moot on Tuesday night. Olson belted a backdoor slider over the center field wall, the Mariners couldn’t score in the bottom half, and the Braves won 3-2. ### On Deck Seattle still has a chance to be the first squad to hand the Braves a series defeat in 2026\. But unlike on Tuesday, when they got a gem from Kirby to keep them in the game, there’s a good chance that Atlanta will get a lot of what they like from Bryan Woo. That is the fastball. The Braves have a .906 OPS against the fastball so far this year; for comparison, just 19 qualified hitters have an OPS higher than that so far in the season and just *six* hitters made that mark over the whole of last year. Woo has thrown his four-seamer for 49% of his pitches this year and his two seamer for another 21.2%, so if he doesn’t keep exact location or mix up his strategies, it could be a third straight blowup outing for the 2025 ace. And by the way, the highest OPS for a qualified hitter on the Mariners is Randy Arozarena’s .774, 67th highest among that category. That is bad for all sorts of reasons, even ones unrelated to baseball. But at least it’s solid for Arozarena.