It took almost a quarter century for Mariner fans to celebrate a playoff victory in their home park. Lookout Landing employs multiple staff writers who weren’t born yet the last time it happened. Over
those 24 years, fans have watched the Mariners play ten seasons in which they won at least 85 games but missed the playoffs. No other team in MLB had more than five such seasons over that stretch. When they finally broke their postseason drought in 2022, they only managed one home playoff game out of it, in which they couldn’t score a single run over 18 innings. Last night, they lost in extras again. It’s the kind of waiting that can harden a fan into stone, unable to imagine the possible. But physics teaches us that even in the things that seem the hardest, the atoms don’t touch. There’s space for something else, for new ways of seeing and believing, for new ways to be.
The 2025 Mariners are helping those most hardened fans by showing them the possible before their very eyes. The franchise has broken the postseason drought. They have won the division. And tonight, they won a home playoff game. To be sure, there’s a lot about the game that you could have scripted better, but having the two faces of the franchise combine for the winning run on eighth-inning back-to-back doubles? That’s the sort of too-hacky-for-Hollywood moment that the 40,000 attendees will carry with them for the rest of their lives. Cal and Julio. Julio and Cal.
Julio Rodríguez and Cal Raleigh are the Seattle Mariners. For this iteration of the team, these two home-grown stars define the franchise: They’re the Mariners who have played in the most games since 2022; they’ve been there in the biggest moments; and they’ve put up the most value. At nearly equal 21.2 and 22.9 fWAR, they’re both top-10 players in MLB over the past four seasons, and they both jumped into the top 10 in franchise history to boot.
Their moment was the one the whole game had been leading to. After Detroit stole Game 1 in 11 innings, the pressure was on. That had been the game that was the most winnable for Seattle, at least on-paper. With Tarik Skubal slated to pitch Games 2 and if-necessary 5, the Mariners would have to beat the best pitcher in baseball at least once in order to advance to the ALCS. And things did not start out promisingly.
Luis Castillo labored through his first two innings, with a little extra zip on his fastball but trouble locating. In his pregame interview, he said, “[The Mariners] teach us the importance of throwing Strike One here, which has really helped me.” He proceeded to go Ball 1 to his first five batters of the night. Taking more than 50 pitches to record six outs, walking three Tigers along the way, the Mariners looked to be in trouble.
Skubal responded by efficiently dispatching the Mariners hitters. A Randy Arozarena single and a Víctor Robles walk were the only interruptions as he mowed through the line-up. To the hitters’ credit, they were mostly making good swing decisions. Against a lot of aces, the name of the game is patience, trying to work counts and get to the bullpen. But Skubal’s one of the exceptions. He’s in the zone so much that you have to swing early or else you’ll end up watching two strikes sail past you and have to go to work in an 0-2 count. The result was a lot of whiffs and bad contact.
But Castillo got himself together, taking just nine pitches in each of the third and fourth innings to retire the Tigers in order. And in the bottom of the fourth, the Mariners finally struck against Skubal, as Jorge Polanco muscled a ball into Seattle’s bullpen to make the score 1-0.
When Castillo returned to the mound, he made the forgivable mistake of going too far outside the zone to Javier Báez, who will normally swing at anything put between the dugouts. He recovered by getting the double-play ball from Parker Meadows, but Meadows was too fast and beat it out and a Gleybar Torres single put runners on the corners. Mariners’ manager Dan Wilson found himself in an eerily familiar spot.
Nursing a 1-0 lead, Wilson looked at a starter who’d been struggling with command as he allowed traffic ahead of Kerry Carpenter, coming up for the third time with two outs in the fifth inning. Last night, when that starter was George Kirby, Wilson left him in to try to get out of the inning and was rewarded with Carp pulling a Trout. Tonight, when that starter was Luis Castillo, Wilson pulled his starter in favor of lefty reliever Gabe Speier. With the leverage index climbing to 2.65, Speier punched Carpenter out on four pitches. He slammed his glove and Castillo gave him the flex in salute from the dugout. “This is what you play for,” Speier said after the game. Watching him, you believe it.
Speier would return for the sixth to retire the side in order with another strikeout, despite the Tigers bringing in a pinch hitter to get the platoon advantage. That brings Gabe Speier’s postseason debut to eight batters faced and eight batters retired on just 30 pitches, with four strikeouts. It makes one wonder why the Mariners don’t just build the whole airplane out of Gabe Speier. Cal bemoaned his lack of recognition, saying, “He’s quietly been one of the better left-handed relievers in the game. . . . If he flies under the radar, it’s because he’s a reliever, but what he does for us is super-important.”
MLB may not be putting enough respect on this man’s name, but the Mariners themselves will. According to Matt Brash, “He’s always had the stuff, and I feel like this year he just attacks guys. Best lefty reliever in the big leagues right now I would say.” Talking about Speier’s ability to work ahead, Brash called him “the example, and we’re all just trying to follow it.” He’s the easy choice for tonight’s Sun Hat Award for making a notable individual contribution to a game.
Polanco rewarded that performance with his second home run of the night off Skubal to give the Mariners just a little breathing room. We may dig into the counterfactual more seriously in the offseason, but as an offhanded take, I think if Houston had signed Polanco this offseason (they were reportedly the runner-up), the Astros probably win the division. As a little wedding present to staff writer Connor Donovan, Eduard Bazardo kept the score at 2-0 through the seventh with minimal drama.
But that left Matt Brash to cover the eighth, which he opened by issuing a leadoff walk, the cardinal baseball sin. He almost cleaned it up with a double-play ball hit to Josh Naylor, but the ball bounced off Naylor’s glove, putting two runners on for Spencer Torkleson. If a leadoff walk is the cardinal baseball sin, a middle-middle fastball is still pretty high on the list, and Brash served one up that Tork took down the right field line to drive in both baserunners and tie the game.
Even through the TV, you could hear the air go out of the crowd. Against all probability, the Mariners had gotten to Tarik Skubal for the third time this year. After losing a game they should have won, it looked like they might pull back even by winning a game they should have lost. Until that moment, when it all seemed to be crashing down for the second night in a row.
But we don’t have to believe the worst will happen. Scripture tells us that we can take our broken hearts and put them in a drawer. So not a soul left T-Mobile Park, not when Cal and Julio were due up second and third in the bottom of the inning. After Seattle has seen a parade of superstars come through town without much to show for it, Julio and Cal are the ones coming through. After racking up all six of the Mariners’ hits in Game 1, they strung doubles together to give them a lead that this time they’d keep and send the crowd into a frenzy.
For the long-suffering, the Mariners are showing us enough that the wounds are starting to heal. And for an entirely new generation, they are making their formative baseball memories right now, in this moment. This is the Julio Generation, learning that baseball might just be joyful rather than something that hardens you. This is the Cal Generation, watching him shatter records so forcefully that it forces you to rethink what you’d understood to be your own limits. This, if you can believe it, is Mariners Baseball. Cal and Julio. Julio and Cal.
