There is not much on the line at Coors Field this weekend.
The Colorado Rockies enter tonight’s series opener at 56-97, three losses away from their fourth consecutive 100-loss season. They are 4-11 in September and 7-23 over their last 30 games, turning another difficult year into an ugly finish.
The Seattle Mariners reached the ALCS last season and entered 2026 looking poised to build on it. Instead, they arrive in Denver at 71-82, six games back of first place in the AL West and even further back in the Wild
Card race.
Seattle remains a much more competitive team than Colorado, but several parts of last year’s formula have slipped. The pitching has been roughly similar, the defense has been among the worst in baseball, and the offense has fallen from a 113 wRC+ in 2025 to a roughly league-average 102 this season.
The biggest drop has come from Cal Raleigh and Julio Rodríguez. Raleigh went from 60 home runs and a 161 wRC+ last year to a 96 wRC+ this season, while Rodríguez has fallen from 126 to 102 — turning what began as another hopeful season in Seattle into something much different.
The grind continues tonight.
Rookie Gabriel Hughes will make his 13th major-league start. He remains in search of his first win and enters 0-8 with a 6.37 ERA over 59.1 innings.
Against the Yankees on Sept. 8, Hughes generated 13 whiffs and struck out six over five solid innings. Five days later, Detroit repeatedly extended at-bats and forced him to throw 70 pitches in two innings. He allowed five runs and two home runs while generating just six whiffs.
Hughes has held hitters to an 87.2 mph average exit velocity (82nd percentile), a 29.9% hard-hit rate (96th percentile) and a 5.4% barrel rate (84th percentile), while his 4.04 FIP sits well below his ERA. The larger issue has been finishing hitters.
Seattle counters with Bryan Woo.
Woo is 12-9 with a 3.88 ERA and 163 strikeouts, including a 1.93 ERA and 0.76 WHIP over his last seven starts. One six-run outing against Philadelphia accounts for most of the damage during that stretch; across the other six starts, he has allowed just three earned runs in 38 innings.
Woo works from a lower arm slot, around 24 degrees, and changes his mix by handedness. He leans on the four-seamer and slider against lefties, with a sinker and changeup mixed in, while right-handers see a heavier four-seam/sinker combination with the sweeper as his primary breaking ball.
Both fastballs sit around 96 mph, with the slider around 89 mph, the changeup around 88 mph and the sweeper dropping into the low 80s.
Woo’s whiff rate is 24.7% (48th percentile), while he has walked just 5.3% of opposing hitters (95th percentile). Still, he has allowed some firm contact — an 89.3 mph average exit velocity (31st percentile) and a 42.0% hard-hit rate (20th percentile) — and much of it has come in the air, with a 38.1% ground-ball rate (28th percentile).
That makes his first career start at Coors Field especially interesting.
TJ Rumfield and Jake McCarthy enter play fifth and sixth in the National League in batting average, with Rumfield at .301 and McCarthy at .295. Cole Carrigg has slugged .633 with three home runs over his last 30 at-bats, while Hunter Goodman, with his 38 home runs, returns to the middle of the lineup.
The Details…
First Pitch: 6:10 pm MDT
TV: Rockies.TV
Radio: KOA 850 AM/94.1 FM; KNRV 1150 (Spanish)
Mariners SB Nation Site: Lookout Landing
Lineups:
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