[Ed. note: if you don’t know the show Derry Girls and the wonderful character Sister Michael, I suggest you remedy that forthwith. It’s much more entertaining to watch than this game, I promise.]
Well, apparently you have some atoning to do, because somehow you’ve arrived here at the 2026 Mariners season, watching a fruitless game between two eliminated teams. The Angels, staving off a 100-loss season, managed to come out on the upper end of this particular tug of war, beating the Mariners 7-5. At
this point you might be asking yourself:
And you would be right. The 2026 Mariners: putting the wake in Wake Me When September Ends.
Bryce Miller looked pretty hittable in the first, recording no whiffs and giving up some hard contact. He got stung on a Wade Meckler triple that rolled down the right field line just out of Josh Naylor’s reach; Meckler would then scoot home on a wild pitch, a splitter Miller buried in the dirt. However, the hard contact he gave up did allow for a chance for Dominic Canzone to make an eleventh-hour submission for his best catch of the year. If you read last night’s recap, you know that when I share defensive highlights, that means things are Not Going Well. MLB didn’t see fit to clip this one as a highlight, because they have apparently not watched as much of Dom Canzone playing right field as I have.
Unfortunately, the baseball gods punished Canzone by allowing Bryce Teodosio to make an equally excellent leaping grab to rob him of extra bases in the bottom of the inning, making it a 404-foot out and turning hte Mariners away without an answer-back score. Aside from an eighth-inning home run from Zach Neto off Eduard Bazardo, the other two furthest-hit balls tonight were that one from Canzone, and a 401-foot flyout from Cole Young in the fifth. Ah. So it would be one of these games.
(They were all one of these games.)
In the second inning, Miller finally was able to start getting some whiffs, getting a strikeout on his curveball and one on a nice elevated fastball up and out of the zone he got Josh Lowe chasing after. But the at-bat with Lowe consumed nine pitches, to add to an eight-pitch at-bat he’d had in the first.
To be fair, Miller pitched better than his line tonight, even if he went to some deeper counts than you’d hope. Miller led off the inning by walking Mike Trout on seven pitches, damaging both his pitch count and his FIP, and then tried too hard to get back into it, leaving a first-pitch slider in the middle of the plate for Meckler, who had already tripled off him. Meckler kept it to a single this time, but Vaughn Grissom also swung at the first pitch he saw, a splitter, for an RBI single to make it 2-0 Angels. Thankfully, because this is the Angels, they then made three straight outs to cap the damage there, including back-to-back three-pitch strikeouts; both came on well-executed fastballs up from Miller. It’s nice to see Miller working the top rail fastball again after it’s so often been low and uncompetitive this season.
“I gave up three [sic, it was two] hits in a row on first pitch and was like, all right, they’re gonna come out swinging, let’s be a little more aggressive here. So we went first pitch slider under to Lowe, got a swing and miss out of it. Those are the situations where you have to be a little more aware of what they’re doing, what’s our approach, and then adjust on the fly.”
Canzone finally broke up the no-hitter in the fourth, sending a ball to Teodosio that this time he couldn’t catch, but it turns out you generally need other players to make contact with the ball in order to score runs, and Canzone was left stranded. As someone who had to recap last night’s game, is recapping tonight’s, and will recap tomorrow’s, I have never related to Dominic Canzone more.
The Mariners did get a little traffic on in the bottom of the fifth thanks to Michael Arroyo—on base for the second time—leading off with a line-drive single and swiping second base. Fun player is fun! Cole Young then put a charge into a ball (the aforementioned 401-foot flyout) but unfortunately to the wrong part of the park, and Jhonny Pereda worked a nice nine-pitch walk, but Weston Wilson and Leo Rivas couldn’t pick up those runners.
As so often happens, the missed chance immediately bit the Mariners. The Angels broke things open in the sixth, as the Rube Goldberg machine of embarrassment that is the 2026 Mariners finally got up to full power. You’d look at the Angels scoring three runs in the sixth and think “typical, Dan left Miller in an inning too long,” but it actually wasn’t entirely Miller’s fault. Things started off badly when Miller coaxed a lazy fly ball off the bat of Meckler that dropped between Leo Rivas, Michael Arroyo, and Julio Rodríguez in a trio of futility: Arroyo couldn’t get to the ball, Rivas couldn’t make the basket catch, and Julio was slow to pick up the ball, allowing Meckler to reach second. Miller then walked Vaughn Grissom on eight pitches, again with the problem of the long at-bat. Miller, trying to be less inattentive to baserunners then he’s been, attempted to pick off Meckler at second, but Rivas let the ball squirt out of his glove, allowing both runners to advance. A lineout to Cole Young that could have been an inning-ending double play was missed when Rivas was slow to get to the bag. Then, in the most predictable sequence of events possible, in an 0-2 count Miller tried to go top rail with the fastball again to Christian Moore – not a bad plan, as he’d struck out Moore on that exact pitch the previous at-bat. This time, though, Moore got on top of it for a three-run homer.
“I’ve beat a lot of really good hitters with that pitch,” said Miller. “I don’t know how he got to it but credit to him, good swing. We struck him out on it in the second-at bat, and then first pitch of the at-bat he swung and missed and I actually missed a little bit too much in the zone there. Then got a foul ball and then…yeah. It kind of sums up how the second half of my year’s gone. It’s 0-2, two outs, sixth inning, and I thought that was a good pitch and he got to it.”
While it’s possible to argue pitch selection – maybe Miller should have tried a sweeper out first before going back to the top rail – he also didn’t have a ton of whiff tonight on anything that wasn’t the four-seamer. Attacking Moore, who strikes out over 30% of the time, with a fastball up is a solid plan. The bigger problem is that was a three-run homer and not a solo shot because of the walk and sloppy defense.
The Mariners continued not to do anything against Reid Detmers and the Angels, while Zach Neto added some insurance in the form of a home run off Eduard Bazardo. That’s the fourth homer Bazardo has given up in 5.1 innings pitched in September for a home run rate that ranks…oh who cares, I don’t want to calculate it.
The Mariners did claw back two in the bottom of the eighth against the Angels bullpen – and it was a claw, starting with pinch-hitter Lazaro Montes working a one-out walk. A pair of singles from the top of the order loaded the bases, and then Angels reliever Sam Bachman hit Julio with a pitch, forcing in a run. Michael Arroyo came up with a clutch two-out infield single, hustling down the line to scrape another run on the board. Cole Young couldn’t come up with another big two-out hit against a lefty, old friend Tayler Saucedo, who speedily dispatched Young to quell the threat.
In the ninth, realizing he hadn’t yet done his Earn A Big Payday play of the game Randy Arozarena scored the Mariners’ most ethical run of the night, lacing a triple into right field and scoring Weston Wilson, who had walked. Dom Canzone, my fellow strongest soldier, finally got revenge for that robbed home run, reaching for a slider away and muscling it out onto the netting over Edgar’s in left. That man is strong. That brought the Mariners into a garbage-time score of 7-5 that looks a lot more respectable in the box score than it was to watch, so between that and Bryce Miller, no justice was had in the box score tonight.
“His fate was – it should have been better,” said Dan Wilson about Miller’s outing.
So should it have been for us all, Dan.
