Sleepwalking into the All-Star break
A moribund Mariners season continues on unabated. Or maybe it is abated? Whatever.
This sucks, man.
No other way to put it. This sucks.
Every time the 2026 Mariners look like they’re ready to emerge from the fog they’ve been playing under, they wander their way into another bank of dark gray Seattle clouds.
Honestly, these clouds, these stretches of lifeless ball that have become more consistent than any lively play, they all have the taste of riding your bike behind a city bus. It’s not like running a car in a closed garage, but best to hit the brakes and avoid any short- or longterm ill effects.
The Mariners, instead, have hit the skids.
These lead-ins to the All-Star break are weird no matter what. It’s kind of the end of the first half but we’re closer to game 100 than we are to game 82 now. Barring dramatic changes, which these Mariners will need, teams are who they are.
On top of that, the Mariners pulled a hell of a road trip for leading into a couple days of vacation.
You’ll find out how focused and committed your team is real fast when you fly the diagonal of the continental United States to play two series in Florida before the only consecutive couple off days in eight months.
Spoiler alert: it’s not looking good.
Monday set the tone. Specifically, how Monday ended set the tone.
Things weren’t looking so swell in the early going, it was same slow song we’ve heard from these Mariners time and again. And then it wasn’t.
A three-run eighth-inning rally turned a 4-2 deficit in a 5-4 lead and the M’s looked like they’d continue the upward trend established on a 5-1 homestand.
Not quite.
Gabe Speier came in, the Marlins went to their bench for righties and the Mariners’ lefty couldn’t climb out of the three-ball count he fell into before Heribito Hernandéz leaned on a 3-2 fastball to the tune of 110mph out to left for a game-tying leadoff solo shot. Stanton-esque.
The Fish fought from there, even putting runners on the corners with one out, but the Mariners didn’t falter. Not there.
They took it to the ninth, where in the bottom half, Andrés Muñoz followed a leadoff punchout of Kyle Stowers with getting the following two batters on six pitches total—and only ten for the frame.
To extras.
Dan Wilson summoned Weston Wilson—who I forget is on the roster on an almost daily basis—to pinch run for Dom Canzone, the zombie at second.
Leading off, Cal Raleigh rolls a ground ball to short, Wilson takes off for third and…game’s over.
Josh Naylor and Mitch Garver would follow Wilson’s TOOTBLAN with more traditional outs and then the game was really over, even to one of the people still very much capable of influencing the outcome. And influence it he did.
With the game still in the balance, still available to turn from a likely loss into a resilient win, Dan Wilson chose to pitch his ~worst reliever, Michael Rucker, instead of his best one.
Tough to fight back off the ropes doing that.
And I get it. It’s a challenging predicament to be in.
With nobody out and Xavier Edwards on second as the walk-off run, it’s all stacked against you. It is. For sure.
But you’re also….one dominant relief outing away from putting the game back into coin-flip territory and oh hey look, you had a dominant reliever already in the game.
One leadoff strikeout, just like the one Muñoz had to lead off the ninth, and the Mariners are right back in business.
But nah. Punt this one, thought Dan Wilson.
When this team’s back is up against the wall, when the odds are slim and they really need to lean on their best dudes to pull them out of the fire, they….pack it up and hope for better luck tomorrow.
They chalk this game up as a loss because maybe, just maybe, Andrés Munoz’s availability will be the difference between a win and a loss the next day.
Muñoz hasn’t thrown a ball since those ten pitches on Tuesday. Michael Rucker got in again for mop-up duty last night.
I’m not going to sit here and tell you that, undeniably and unequivocally, Wilson’s punt in game one led to the lifeless play and eventual sweep that’d follow. We don’t know.
But this blog is for the things I think and I think punting winnable games is loser shit and if you keep doing loser shit, that’s your identity.
We think we’re pissed off with this type of thing? Man I am pushing 40 and listened to Tuesday’s game while out on a walk with my dog—and I was furious when they went to Rucker.
Imagine how the dudes in the clubhouse feel when Wilson pulls that and follows it with “Tough, tough way to start the road trip” in another softly spoken presser that sounds like a shy kid at his first Catholic confession.
Think they’re fired up to go to battle the next day? Didn’t look like it.
This is bad stuff, man. I have no idea what changes it but I know it isn’t soldiering on and hoping it happens on their own.
Someone needs to grab the reins—or their teammates by their shirt collars—and wake everyone the hell up.
The American League is bad, we get it. And nobody’s worse than the American League West.
But let’s be clear here: a playoff berth alone isn’t good enough. Another American League West title isn’t good enough.
Anything short of the pennant is a failure of a season.
These guys are playing like they’ll be able to flip the switch when they need to. Well, if they wait until September or even October to do it, it’s hard to see those lights turning on.
Maybe they reverse course in Tampa. Maybe, with fans already talking about an embarrassing 0-6 roadie, the M’s go the other way and have us all feeling great again before we take a couple days off from this hellacious rollercoaster.
Sure. But we’ve all been doing the “Maybe, starting now, they…” bit since April.
At this point, we’ll believe it when we see it. If we see it.
The Mariners morphing into the World Series contender they were supposed to be is no certainty. And it’s definitely not going to be something that happens on its own.
The Mariners have to make it happen. Whether it’s the clubhouse, the skipper or the front office—or all of the above—someone has to go ahead and make this season as special as we all wanted it to be.
Because it’s still there for the taking. Much more than a game in extras where you blow it in the top-half of the tenth.
So let’s cut that loser shit now, win a series before the break and go on a tear in the second half.
Go M’s.