> ## 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. # M’s Beat Cards 11-9 in Bizarre Back-and-Forth Battle Despite Woo Blowup - URL: https://www.emeraldcityspectrum.com/seattle-mariners-win-bizarre-battle-st-louis-cardinals/ - Published: 2026-04-26T00:54:23.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-08T06:11:52.000Z - Author: Callaghan Bluechel - Tags: News, Analysis, Mariners, Leo Rivas, Connor Joe, Mitch Garver, Cole Young, Julio Rodriguez, Will Wilson, J.P. Crawford, Dominic Canzone, Randy Arozarena, Cal Raleigh, Josh Naylor, Bryan Woo, Jose A. Ferrer, Cooper Criswell, Matt Brash, Andres Munoz \[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="4861"\] ![ Seattle Mariners first baseman Josh Naylor (12) celebrates with third baseman Leo Rivas (76) after the Mariners defeated the St. Louis Cardinals at Busch Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Jeff Curry-Imagn Images ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1d/f2/1df2f77b-83dd-4bc0-a6d2-6d1bb5df89a3/content/images/2026/10/leo-rivas-josh-naylor-format-original.jpg) Seattle Mariners first baseman Josh Naylor (12) celebrates with third baseman Leo Rivas (76) after the Mariners defeated the St. Louis Cardinals at Busch Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Jeff Curry-Imagn Images \[/caption\] Whatever happened between the Mariners and Cardinals on Saturday afternoon in Busch Stadium, it was one of the most beautiful examples of the chaos and unpredictability inherent in baseball. Perhaps it was fitting that all nine innings were played in the sun, what with the pastoral pastime unfolding in such a way as it did. This was a game where Connor Joe knocked a game-tying single and Will Wilson drove in two of the Mariners’ runs, while Bryan Woo got smacked around for four homers and seven runs in just three innings pitched. Cole Young was a triple away from the cycle, while Mitch Garver had a multi-hit game even while getting a would-be homer robbed by the glove of Redbirds left fielder Nathan Church - who in turn mashed two big flies of his own but made the final two outs of the Mariners’ 11-9 victory. And it was Leo Rivas, the same man who came into the game hitting .141, who delivered the go-ahead hit in the top of the ninth. Unlike many of the previous games, Rivas started on the bench on Saturday, logging two appearances. But in a game full of inflection points and twists, Rivas’ two appearances were some of the biggest moments of the game. ### Julio Rodríguez set the tone with a second deck shot in the top of the first and Will Wilson launched his first career homer in the second. Coming into Saturday, Julio Rodríguez had logged a hit in 16 of his past 48 at-bats, but 12 of those had been singles. Still, his process had been very sound after the slump of his first couple weeks, with Rodríguez driving stuff up the middle, drawing walks, and limiting strikeouts. With Cal Raleigh on first, lefty Cardinals starter Matthew Liberatore tried to bury a slider low and inside to the Mariners center fielder, but it backed up on him just enough for Rodríguez to golf a picture-perfect nine iron arc into the upper deck in left field. The Mariners, of course, would go on to score nine more times in their second game against the Cardinals, but a Rodríguez homer was something of a good omen. Seattle’s center fielder himself logged two more hits in five more at-bats, but it was a whole team effort to get to 19 hits on the day. While the Redbirds had answered back with two homers of their own in the bottom of the first, newly-minted Mariner Will Wilson put his own name in the impromptu home run derby hat with a blast to left field, again a two-run shot thanks to a previous hit from Mitch Garver. Seattle can often be a team that lives and dies by the home run, and early on, it was looking like two big swings were the big difference with Woo needing to settle in against his opponents. ### Bryan Woo got lit up like a Christmas tree as the Cardinals hunted the fastballs. Mariners ace (well, George Kirby may be gunning for that title) Bryan Woo typically gets away with fastball locations that other pitchers don’t. This is thanks to his extremely flat approach angle, so flat that it shrinks the margin of error for hitters who typically swing with a slight uppercut so that their bat is on plane with an incoming pitch. While other Mariners hurlers, like Kirby and Logan Gilbert, have a kitchen sink of breaking pitches and off-speed stuff, well over half of Woo’s pitches on any given day (especially in the first time through the lineup) are liable to be four-seamers and sinkers. The Cardinals evidently took a rather simple approach to Woo early on: attack the fastball. Woo dotted the top third of the strike zone, but unlike most of the time when the odd approach causes hitters to hit the ball at odd angles, St. Louis squared them up something fierce from the very beginning, with JJ Wetherholt launching a bomb on the second pitch he saw and Iván Herrera going back-to-back on the very next pitch. Woo quickly switched things up, going to his secondaries more often, but he still had issues changing eye level. Even when he would switch up pitch types, he would throw a fastball at the same height as a previous sweeper or vice versa. Church, batting with one away in the bottom of the second, got the benefit of a 3-1 count and sat on the smoke from Woo, drilling a high liner over the right field fence to make it a 4-3 lead for Seattle. Despite a solid finish to the rest of that frame, the Cards picked right back up where they had left off in the third. Three singles tied the game up with one away. Woo actually made a solid two-strike pitch to Masyn Winn and got bad contact, but the pop-up found its way into no-man’s land at Rob Refsnyder’s feet to score the tying run. St. Louis gained the lead on a Church sacrifice fly, but Woo’s tendency to leave pitches in the same location bit him hard with Pedro Pagés at the plate. Pagés fouled off Woo’s first sinker on the hands, but as he tried to do the same thing twice, the Cardinals catcher turned on it to send a hard liner inside the left field pole. For the first time since Sept. 17, 2024, Woo had given up seven earned runs in a start. When Woo didn’t go back out for the fourth, it marked the first time he hadn’t pitched into the fourth inning since the very first outing of his career on June 3, 2023. The M’s are surely hoping that it was just a one-off. Woo’s profile as a high-heat fly ball pitcher naturally comes with a home run downside, just one that Woo tends to avoid with the soft contact he induces (and the amount of strikeouts he got on the heater made this issue moot anyway in 2024 and 2025). But the rate at which fly balls become home runs is something that tends to be out of the pitcher’s control except at the margins, the key concept behind a stat known as expected fielding independent pitching (xFIP). Regular fielding independent pitching (FIP) uses the same scale as ERA but accounts for only the strikeouts, walks, hit batsmen, and home runs \[1\], attempting to take defense out of the equation. Coming into the game, Woo had a 2.25 ERA and 2.26 FIP, an excellent case of the two lining up almost perfectly. But Woo’s xFIP - which replaces the home run component of FIP with fly ball rate \[2\] - was 4.26\. He had been yielding quite a few fly balls that simply hadn’t been hit well enough to leave the yard, but when the Cardinals piled up good swings on Saturday, the ball kept flying over the fences. Obviously, by this token, Woo isn’t going to give up four homers every game from here on out. The real issue is that if the league as a whole figures out a way to neutralize his fastball, he will have to take a crash course in mixing his sweeper, changeup, and slider, a skill in which he has been inconsistent at times. ### Cole Young exploded for three hits and a hit by pitch while timely pinch-hitters propelled the nine and one holes. The degree of value the sophomore Cole Young has provided to the Mariners has been largely contingent on how good his defense has been. Different defensive metrics disagree on the degree of his skillset - he came into the game as the league leader in defensive runs saved (DRS), effectively tied with Pete Crow-Armstrong with eight above average, but StatCast’s fielding run value (FRV) had him at a much more pedestrian one above average - while his hitting has on aggregate been about league average. This, of course, means that whether the truth of his defensive value falls more on the DRS side or the FRV side determines whether Young has been one of the best players in the game this year or merely a solid but not extraordinary starter. It’s probably somewhere in the middle. Young has been getting better jumps on the ball in his second year in the bigs (struggling with that aspect in 2025) and his range is noticeably better, but his weak arm has also taken some double plays off the board for the Mariners. StatCast’s much lower range rating reflects the fact that he is still making up for suboptimal positioning and the occasional lingering weak jump with notable quickness once he gets going. In any case, Young had a much better game with the bat than his typical showings this season. From a process standpoint, this mainly came from his harder hits than usual. Young came into the game with a below average 38.6% hard hit rate and most of his hardest hit balls had fallen into the 95-100 mile an hour middle range that is hard enough to start affecting the success of grounders and liners but not hard enough to make homers and doubles out of fly balls. Young hit three balls harder than 105 miles an hour on Saturday. The first was a bomb to right in the fourth inning. Though with nobody on, the homer still cut St. Louis’ lead to 7-5 and brought Seattle a little bit closer to a comeback. By the time Young came up again in the top of the sixth, the Mariners had turned a leadoff single by Rodríguez into the most classically manufactured run, with the center fielder stealing second, getting moved over to third on a Josh Naylor groundout, and scoring on a Randy Arozarena sacrifice fly. But a potential game-tying homer had already been wiped off the board by Church, who robbed Mitch Garver of a four-bagger and gave the Cardinals hope that the M’s comeback could be withstood. Once again, Young stung the ball, hitting a fly ball to dead center field and missing a home run by about a foot as it crashed off the padding atop the wall. Up next to hit was Wilson, but with a right-hander on the mound, the manager Dan Wilson played the matchups and brought Dominic Canzone on to pinch-hit. In a game of failure, these platoon switches land as duds most of the time - but it’s all about who has the better chance going into the at-bat and whether it is worth taking the other player out of the game for future opportunities. Canzone laced a game-tying single through the middle. It was his only appearance of the day, with Rivas coming on to pinch-hit for him, but the Mariners had deployed him perfectly. It’s still a game of failure, and Luke Raley’s following pinch-hit appearance only resulted in a strikeout. Arozarena and J.P. Crawford weren’t able to get Naylor in from second in the seventh, and as the last two Cardinals runs came in the bottom half, it appeared that the M’s were right back in the hole. Young returned to the plate in the top of the eighth with Garver on first and came through with his third missile of the afternoon, a single of his own to set the table for Rivas. The bench third baseman laid down a bunt to move the runners over, but Raley was set to swing against lefty JoJo Romero. This is where, by all likelihood, the Mariners’ platooning should have broken down. The last man off the bench was Joe, an organizational depth player who had put up uncompetitive at-bats in his few appearances with the major league club up to that point. The Redbirds switched Romero for closer Riley O’Brien. It was slightly better having Joe up there than having Raley go left-on-left, but it was the better of two bad options. Yet Joe swung at the first pitch and found the grass in center field. Both runners raced around to score, and both squads now had nine runs on the board. The magical moment when Rivas once again put the winning runs up against the Cardinals had been building up for a while, with a Crawford hit, a Garver walk, and an errant pitch hitting Young on his back foot loading the bases for him. Rivas said after the game that he was looking for anything in the zone to hit. O’Brien gave him a sinker on the outside edge of the plate and Rivas lifted a soft liner into center field, bringing home two and putting the final bow on an 11-run offensive performance. ### Jose A. Ferrer and Cooper Criswell ate four innings with only one mistake that expanded St. Louis’ tally. The M’s were only able to stage their comeback because the bullpen kept the damage in check. Needing to get six innings out of his ‘pen, Wilson tapped the groundballer Jose A. Ferrer to try to work a double-inning outing. Ferrer had done so in his previous appearance on April 22, and the M’s needed it again to stay in the game and keep at least some of the other arms fresh. Despite letting the first two batters on in the fourth and a pair of two-out Cardinals reaching in the fifth, Ferrer settled in and dealt those two clean innings, effectively mixing fastballs, sliders, and the occasional changeup. Perhaps throwing the swing-and-miss changeup more to lefties would help him out in general, but his sliders worked like a charm as he logged two scoreless frames. In came Cooper Criswell for the sixth. Unlike the hard-throwing Ferrer, Criswell relies on locating his four-pitch mix on the edges of the plate and using the big movement on his stuff to outwit hitters. One of his changeups flew wrongly out of his hand and hit Herrera, but a double play in that sixth inning ended the chance for St. Louis. With the game tied in the seventh, however, he made his one mistake. With a tricksy pitcher like Criswell on the mound, a lot of damage can be done if the pitcher fails to trick the hitter. Winn reached base on a chopper through the left side hole with one away and Church torched a plated cutter that didn’t get enough separation from his earlier pitches. Still, the two of them had combined for four innings and two runs allowed. Criswell held firm after the bomb and finished out his inning without any extra fanfare, and once the M’s tied it again in the top of the eighth, setup man Matt Brash relieved Criswell and cleared out the second to last inning. Closer Andrés Muñoz, now with the lead, went out to the mound to begin the bottom of the ninth, a turn of events that was quite unlikely for most of the game. But as he awkwardly tumbled off the mound for three straight balls against Nolan Gorman, the chaos seemed to have some more legs. Gorman walked on five pitches, but Muñoz worked ahead of Winn and got him to swing over a slider for the first out and finished the save on Church’s double play. After all that, the Mariners took away a win. ### On Deck The improbable twists of Saturday’s game gave the Mariners their first road series win of the season and improved their record to 13-15\. Seattle has the chance to get their first road sweep of the season on Sunday, with Emerson Hancock taking the bump for the visitors. But with Matt Brash and Andrés Muñoz perhaps unavailable and Jose A. Ferrer almost certainly down for Sunday, they will need a deeper start out of Hancock than they have been getting from much of their rotation in the past few days. \[1\] The calculation is (13\*HR + 3(BB+HBP) - 2\*K)/IP + *x*, where *x* (typically called the FIP constant) is lgERA - (13\*lgHR + 3(lgBB+lgHBP) - 2\*lgK)/lgIP. Note that “lgX” is the usual notation for “league X” so that lgERA = league ERA. \[2\] Specifically, it replaces HR with fly balls multiplied by the league home run rate, a rough estimation in itself of “home runs a pitcher would expect to have given up based on only his fly ball rate.”