Here we go again.
Just one short year ago, the Mariners found themselves in Game 7 of the American League Championship Series. It took them 49 seasons to figure out how to get there. Even after having had a half-century to figure it out, their path was non-linear.
Last year, the traditionally dominant pitching looked mortal, but Cal Raleigh was larger than life. Two fumbled games against Detroit backed them into a corner, but two Herculean efforts against Tarik Skubal sent them to the ALCS. What were
supposed to be two hangover games in Toronto turned into convincing wins. Hope rose to a fever pitch.
That hope proved to be ephemeral. What was supposed to be a homecoming coronation in Seattle became a nightmare. Game 7, which at one point saw the Mariners hold an 85% chance of victory, slipped through their grasp.
Instead of cigars and champagne, the locker room scene featured open tears from Cal Raleigh and Bryan Woo. There was a disembodied scream later identified as belonging to Julio Rodríguez. You only get so many bites at the apple, we all thought. Who knows when we’ll be here next?
One year later, they find themselves in the same place. They have, despite parts of their 2026 season having been plagued by bad luck and worse play, earned one more bite at the apple. Tonight, the Mariners will try once more to win a pennant. While we still stand on the precipice, I think it’s worth looking back at how we ended up here.
Spring Training, as you have likely forgotten, was inauspicious enough. The Mariners finished near the bottom of the Cactus League, a feat which wouldn’t have worried many if it hasn’t been paired with a 7.08 ERA, the worst in baseball. If the team was going to repeat as AL West champions, the pitching would have to be better this year. Then the Opening Day injured list was released: Bryce Miller would miss time, promising more Emerson Hancock. J.P. Crawford too, would start on the IL, thinning out an already-thin infield. The narrative of impending collapse was beginning to write itself.
Opening Weekend set everyone’s minds at ease. This was despite Opening Day not selling out, an embarrassment the team inflicted on itself with its insistence on charging $60 for nosebleed seats. In front of a 44,000, Logan Gilbert held the Guardians to one hit over six innings. Julio doubled in Ryan Bliss. Josh Naylor homered. Gabe Speier, Matt Brash, and Andrés Muñoz closed it uneventfully. Were it not for the 42 °F temperature, it could have been September again.
The fervor of the crowd and the emotion of the players carried the team to sell-outs over the next three games, all of which the Mariners won. George Kirby went seven. Bryan Woo struck out 10. Emerson Hancock touched 97 MPH. The games were fun. It was like the universe had suddenly registered each Mariners fan’s request over the years for, just once, an easy win, and granted them all at once.
After a 2-1 series win over the Yankees, the Mariners found themselves at the top of the AL West with a 6-1 record. Unlike last year, unlike 2024, unlike 2023, unlike 2022, unlike 2021, they didn’t dig themselves into a hole. Their AL West lead was going to be wire-to-wire.
Except, we have our logo here at Lookout Landing for a reason. A seven-run ninth inning meltdown in Anaheim mirrored the infamous 2017 game. The Astros, who were supposed to finally be bad, swept the Mariners in a four-game series in Seattle. One of those games was Humpy Plushy Night, further fueling allegations that the team marketing department had started a Humpy Curse last ALCS when they followed his historic ALDS victory with the hack-job that was a second victory. By the off day on April 30th, the team had cratered to a 16-16 record and found themselves looking up at both the Astros and Athletics in the standings.
That same off day was when the news of Matt Brash’s flexor injury leaked. It was the vague sort of injury news that preceded Robbie Ray getting shut down for Tommy John in 2023. It was also the same sort of news that only ended up holding out Logan Gilbert for less than two months last year. Despite the uncertainty, the fanbase was in no mood for optimism, especially with Crawford and Miller still out with injury.
At a crossroads between utter collapse and stabilization, the Mariners managed to steady the ship. The month of May began with Randy Johnson shedding an actual tear as he watched his number get retired, the team righting a previous front office’s wrong. Ichiro, to whom Randy had given his blessing to wear 51, squeezed the Big Unit’s first pitch. Their handshake turned into an embrace; their legacies were now forever interlaced. Dom Canzone hit a grand slam, delivering merciful victory to punctuate Randy’s celebration.
Crawford and Miller finally returned the following week in Chicago. Bryce’s debut saw him labor through five innings in that looked uncomfortably reminiscent of his painful 2025, but he came away with a win. J.P. doubled in two runs and had a diving stop to save two more, giving Bryce a win in his debut and the Mariners a sweep of the White Sox. Though it was followed by another series loss to Houston, Josh Naylor delivered home runs on each of his back-to-back bobblehead nights, again against the White Sox, to bounce the team back once more to 26-25. Though we didn’t know it, they would stay above .500 for good this time.
The 10-0 road trip in early June was perhaps my personal favorite part of the season. It was a run of success the likes of which the Mariners hadn’t seen since 2002. After Brendan Donovan ambushed Tarik Skubal with a first-pitch dinger in Detroit, the floodgates opened. Over a month of frustration poured out of the Mariners. Cal Raleigh doubled. Julio singled him in. Randy Arozarena hit a second home run off Skubal, who ended up lasting just two innings to Logan Gilbert’s eight. George Kirby followed up that effort with the first complete game shutout of his career. Leo Rivas had his walk-off single in Baltimore. José Ferrer assumed Matt Brash’s role with nary a misstep, even pitching an immaculate inning against his old team in Washington to the audible delight of Aaron Goldsmith and disbelief of Gary Hill.
Much like last year, it became a question of not if, but when the Mariners would answer each small deficit. The hits flowed from their bats. It was Cole Young one night, Victor Robles the next. When the All-Stars were announced, the Mariners had six. After the initial wave of declinations and injury holdouts, they had two more. The eight they sent to Philadelphia matched the eight that represented the team in 2001, a fact with which a beaming Dan Wilson opened his next press conference.
Cal Raleigh may not have won the Home Run Derby this time, but I think we were all just as happy to see him get some rest after Nick Kurtz put up 25 on him in the semifinals. The next day, Kirby and Muñoz got the win and save for the American League, just as Freddy García and Kazuhiro Sasaki had a quarter-century before them. I still have the Seattle Times that had the team photo from that day plastered over the front page.
Brash, who had ended up with a mere grade I flexor strain, returned shortly thereafter. The series wins stacked up through August. So did both Gilbert’s and Kirby’s Cy Young odds, as the two found themselves as frontrunners for the honor of being named the American League’s best pitcher. Logan matched Kirby’s earlier complete game shutout with one of his own. Despite Logan’s near-perfect performance, his effort was overshadowed by the single run scored in the game. I’m talking, of course, about Julio’s home run.
I’m still not sure how he did it. His swing has always been crisp, and he certainly hit a few balls far in Spring Training. 450 feet in the Arizona heat is one thing, though. 490 feet in Seattle is unheard of, even if it was on a blistering Sunday against the Cubs. He connected with a fastball, then just stood there. The ball carried and carried. The fans in Edgar’s Cantina rose. The ball carried some more. The fans in the left field bleachers rose. Necks craned, then twisted. Somehow, the sound of the ball hitting the pavement on Royal Brougham Way was audible on the broadcast. For the first time ever, a ball had been hit out of T-Mobile Park (during a game, at least).
The Astros, while playing better than most people expected them to, were never going to be able to keep up. As they made short work of the dregs of the AL West, the Mariners went ten games up, finally clinching the division in Anaheim and the bye in Denver. The Mariners never did get their regular season revenge against Houston – even their last series meeting in Seattle ended in a 1-1 stalemate as Hunter Brown outdueled a Bryan Woo who was clearly unhappy to be on a pitch limit, regardless of how meaningful the game wasn’t.
The revenge came eventually. The Astros cut through the Royals in the Wild Card series. Brown who had had Seattle’s number all year, was tabbed to start Game 1 of the ALDS at T-Mobile Park.
It’s a game I’ll remember forever. Inning after inning, Gilbert and Brown traded scoreless frames. Logan grunted as he heaved a 98 MPH fastball over the zone to strikeout José Altuve, then screamed and pointed at the sky after a splitter fooled Carlos Correa. For their part, Cal and Julio looked lost against Brown. The atmosphere at T-Mobile grew tenser. The crowd barely paid attention to the Salmon Run, perhaps not wanting to tempt the looming potential curse of the year before.
Finally, in the seventh, Cole Young had his moment. Young had a good year – he’d capably manned second base, a stalwart through J.P.’s absence and occasional slump. Still, his 15 home runs were short of our most starry-eyed dreams for him. His growing pains manifested as a perplexing swing-and-miss here, a bobbled grounder there. With the team sitting at one hit against Brown and Logan likely done for the night with 106 pitches, Cole Young dug into the batter’s box.
What followed was one of the most impressive at bats I think I’ll ever see. In an 0-2 count, Young fouled off a pitch, then a second, then a third. He took strike three off the corner, prompting Brown to shout with glee. Young didn’t hesitate to tap his head. Five seconds later, the call was overturned. Frustrated, Brown missed twice more. He took his time with the payoff pitch. It was a fastball up and in. Young turned on it and hit it over the Hit-it-Here Café, higher and farther than even Dan Vogelbach’s in 2018.
That was all the Mariners needed. Matt Brash tied a string around Jose Altuve’s loose baby tooth, and Andrés Muñoz slammed the door so hard that, rather than extract the tooth, the yank turned it into a fine powder of calcium and pulp. We all desperately needed Games 2 and 3 to be less competitive, and they were. The lefty platoon of Dom Canzone and Luke Raley each hit a home run off Cristian Javier in Game 2. Their righty counterparts, Victor Robles and Rob Refsnyder, embarrassed Josh Hader with back-to-back jacks in the sixth inning of Game 3.
The Mariners got their champagne and cigars after the ALDS, just like last year. Only this year, the celebration seemed more restrained. Each of last year’s celebrations were of trails blazed. This year’s have been of paths retraced. Every fan, player, and coach knows that the goal isn’t to get to where we are now.
So here we are again. Again, it’s Toronto. It always had to be Toronto, led by John “Just Gotta Execute” Schneider. Somehow, it’s an even better Toronto. It’s a Toronto now featuring the terrifying Kazuma Okamoto, who hit 40 bombs to practically cinch up the Rookie of the Year award. Dylan Cease, who looks to be worth every penny the Blue Jays spent on him. Tyler Rogers, who has put up a second-half ERA of 0.67.
If last year’s resurgence was fueled by an Etsy witch that was stranger than fiction, I don’t know what magic has propelled the 2026 Mariners back to the precipice of glory. Maybe Dan Wilson and Edgar Martínez really are that good. Maybe it was improved conditioning, not magic, that kept the whole rotation’s arms intact after Bryce Miller’s return. Maybe it was only a matter of time before Julio turned a hot streak into a hot season.
But whether it was magic that got them here or Humpy that tried to keep them away, they’re on their own now. They have home field advantage this time, and they’ll have 46,000 strong behind them. As those 46,000 roar around them, and hundreds of thousands more bite their nails at home, the world will fall silent around the players.
Julio Rodríguez will dig into the batter’s box, a child again, all alone. Game 7, he’ll intone under his breath. Bottom of the ninth. Two outs. Bases loaded.
A fastball streaks toward the catcher’s mitt.
Julio swings.
Crack.
