4 explanations for how a promising Mariners season crumbled into a losing cause

As of Monday, the Seattle Mariners couldn't possibly finish 2026 with a winning record. As of Tuesday, they can't possibly avoid a losing record. They are doomed for their worst full season since 2019, which is not what anyone had in mind after last year's campaign fell just eight outs short of the franchise's first World Series.

Postmortem time? Postmortem time.

What went wrong for the 2026 Mariners, in 3 easy steps

Inasmuch as there's ever an ideal scenario under these circumstances, it would be nice if we could look back at the Mariners' 2026 season as a noble failure. We'd love to believe it was a mission that had the right ideas and the right execution, but which was overcome by too many acts of the baseball gods.

Alas, this was no noble failure. This was a farce, akin to a clown stumbling around a field of rakes with a bottle of gin in one hand and a stick of dynamite in the other. It was never going to end well.

There were too many injuries

This is it. The one thing you can point to as evidence that the 2026 Mariners got a bad break. Because even if the actual numbers (i.e., 27 total IL placements and 1,329 days missed) aren't that bad, they really did get hamstrung by the injury bug.

They've been without Brendan Donovan for almost the entire season. Cal Raleigh, Julio Rodríguez, Randy Arozarena and J.P. Crawford have also spent time on the IL, while Luke Raley and Colt Emerson both tried and failed to play through what proved to be season-ending injuries. So, at no point this year was the offense anywhere near full strength.

And the bullpen? My goodness, the bullpen. Injuries to Matt Brash, Gabe Speier, Carlos Vargas and Cooper Criswell aren't the reason it's been a disaster with a 4.52 ERA, but it hasn't helped.

There were too many regressions

How many Mariners have actually had a good season? Arozarena has. So has Dominic Canzone. Logan Gilbert has been perfectly solid. And while neither was perfect, it was nice to see Cole Young and Emerson Hancock break out.

That's really it, though, and we should have no business saying that about what was meant to be one of baseball's most talented rosters. And it isn't all about Raleigh and Julio, even if they did suffer a 10-WAR swing from a combined 13.8 rWAR in 2025 to just 3.7 rWAR in 2026.

Naylor and Rob Refsnyder (remember him?) came in well under their career norms after boarding as the Mariners' marquee free-agent signings. George Kirby, Bryan Woo and Bryce Miller have been average or worse out of the starting rotation, while Andrés Muñoz has somehow blown 10 saves out of the pen.

They played terrible baseball

It's not just that the Mariners are 70-82. It's that they're 70-82 with a -61 run differential. Their expected record is 69-83, indicating that they are lucky to have won 70 games.

Hey, this is life when you can't hit, pitch or field:

• OPS: .692, 28th in MLB
• ERA: 4.22, 20th in MLB
• Outs Above Average: -51, 30th in MLB

This is about as damning as indictments of baseball teams go, yet there's something about it that feels like a kindness. It doesn't capture how many "That can't happen" moments not only happened, but screwed the Mariners at the worst possible times. It got to a point where the scouting report on them even had to be rewritten: Just wait for them to beat themselves.

What *really* went wrong with the 2026 Mariners, in 1 easy explanation

There's an argument that the 2026 Mariners were simply never going to be good, but that's some Captain Hindsight nonsense. We all saw what they did in 2025, and it wasn't mere human bias that forecasted more of the same (or better) in 2026. Projection systems generally had them down as the AL West favorites and a real World Series contender.

So no, this is not a "rotten to the core" thing. It's a thing that became rotten much like that one dude in The Sun Also Rises went bankrupt: Gradually, and then suddenly.

Nobody did enough about anything

The blame game inevitably points to two usual suspects in manager Dan Wilson and president of baseball operations Jerry Dipoto. The former seems more likely than the latter to be shown the door, and it's telling that there is no real movement for Wilson to stay.

Is there such a thing as toxic patience? Because that was Wilson's whole thing this season. No matter how gut-wrenching the actual experience, every loss was a "tough one" and nothing more. The implicit message was that all the Mariners needed when confronted with adversity was to turn the page, even as it was clear that they had real problems that would follow them every time.

The poor fundamentals? Those should have been fixed. The lack of urgency to get struggling stars like Raleigh and Julio to make adjustments? That's just inexcusable. And what was with the culture of playing through pain? Admirable in the abstract, perhaps, but the final bill makes it clear that it did way more harm than good. How many troubles could have been avoided with more precautions, we'll never know.

If for no other reason than Wilson was his hire in 2024, Dipoto is hardly blameless in all this. He also could have chosen to be more aggressive at the trade deadline, instead of merely offloading Luis Castillo and renting Taylor Ward (literally a 12 OPS+ as a Mariner, by the way) from the Baltimore Orioles. The risk would have been great, but it's hard to fathom bigger moves resulting in a post-deadline record somehow worse than 15-24.

It truly is amazing that, even now, the Mariners aren't dead yet in the AL playoff race. Their elimination number in the AL West stands at 5. They could be eliminated as soon as this week. Or, they could rip off a winning streak and somehow sneak in.

Barring a miracle like that, though, the 2026 season is destined to take its place as arguably the worst tragedy in 50 years of Mariners baseball. It's either this team or the post-2001 squad of 2002, and that one at least produced 93 wins.

What happens next? Good question. Indeed, the only question that matters. But for now, it can wait until after the dirt on the 2026 Mariners has a chance to settle.

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