It doesn’t look great for Dan

The Mariners’ manager is struggling

You want your best pitchers pitching in the biggest spots. It’s a simple concept. It’s really one of the oldest SABR debates, too—but not so much a debate anymore because it’s so matter of fact.

It’s like how, before the 2000s, OBP wasn’t a thing but once someone pointed out “Hey, not making outs is a pretty big deal!” you can’t go back to not seeing it.

You want your best pitchers pitching in the biggest spots. Hell, you want them pitching at all before you go and blow a game.

It wasn’t great that Dan Wilson went to Michael Rucker to hold the lead in the 8th inning of a 4–1 game. The route to getting there involved throwing Eduard Bazardo all of ten pitches after he hadn’t thrown one all weekend but, hey, it was the bottom of the order and still three runs.

But once it started going sideways on Rucker—by the way, who is Michael Rucker? Don’t worry about it, you have the gist of it—Dan, please, go ahead and smash the “Best pitcher NOW” button.

Instead, there was wavering within the waver. It was waverception. Wilson had lefty Josh Simpson—the team’s third lefty, bottom-rung guy—ready to go once the lineup turned over to Steven Kwan and two more left-handed hitters. But no, he stuck with Rucker through Kwan, who walked.

That ensured that if things went off the rails, and of course they went off the rails, it’d be the lefty Simpson facing the right-handed Rhys Hoskins.

And there was your kill shot.

Hey Dan, any thought about just going to Andrés Muñoz? Yeah, he’s had his struggles but he’s your best arm out there.

“He’s more of our ninth inning guy and we want to get the ball to him there,” Wilson told reporters postgame. “We just weren’t able to do that.”

Ah geez, yeah, if only there was something that could’ve been done to get your best reliever in there to stave off another rubber match loss but nope.

Had to get to the ninth with the lead.

This is just such silly stuff. It’s such basic stuff. It’s beyond comprehension that it’s the type of thing we’d be talking about in 2026 with regards to the individual tasked with leading the on-field component of what’s supposed to be a golden era in Mariners Baseball.

In Andrés Muñoz’s last ~full season under Wilson’s predecessor, 2024—but one where Muñoz was still the full-time closer—the right-hander entered the game before the ninth inning 18 times.

In the 2025 regular season, Muñoz entered before the ninth only twice.

He entered before the ninth inning in the Mariners’ final playoff game, though. Still, it was too late. The game had been decided.

It’d be one thing if this in-game ineptitude or inadaptability were Wilson’s only obvious fault, were everything else running as it should.

The “everything else” part is less easy to tie to the skipper job but none of it looks good regardless.

The general vibes have been in the gutter for most of the season, fans tapping their fingers on their thighs waiting for this team to take off and the team doing everything but that.

Over the last month or so, we’ve had multiple times where starting pitchers are basically breaking down, their souls shattered, in media availability.

Injuries have hurt this team because they hurt every team but the club’s still performing well below their talent level. They’re less than the sum of their parts, even when you do account for those parts missing.

Finally, when you do sit down and watch this team, what a pure joy that is.

It’s not a particularly clean brand of baseball, is it?

I’m not even sure it is a brand of baseball. The 2026 Mariners have no identity. There’s no soul, no heart, not that we can see.

I don’t like writing these types of posts. I don’t love manager talk in general because there’s only one thing you can do with a manager and “Fire him!” cries make anyone sound like a boomer hack.

But man, there’s just nothing that looks good on the part of Dan Wilson. The in-game stuff played a major role in killing the season last year and it’s done a good job chipping away at the stability of this one.

And if the soft side of managing were his carrying tool, the vibes wouldn’t be this bad.

Still, do you expect anything big to change? Absolutely not. The Mariners aren’t doing anything with Dan Wilson during the season. It’d be shocking if they even did anything after the season.

The Mariners will probably trust the bulk of this core’s championship window to Wilson’s stewardship.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t talk about it—and how, right now, it isn’t looking too good.