Bryan Woo is missing the obvious in search for answers for Mariners road woes

Bryan Woo is tired of sucking on the road. Not our words. His. And they come from real numbers that strongly suggest he needs to make real changes when he pitches away from T-Mobile Park for the Seattle Mariners.

His ERA in six starts at home this year is 2.37. His ERA in eight road starts is 5.93. And as Daniel Kramer of MLB.com showed, the specifics don't allude to bad luck:

“I’m getting pretty tired of trying to come up with reasons or excuses or superlatives,” Woo said after he took the L in a 7-5 loss to the Baltimore Orioles on Thursday, per Adam Jude of The Seattle Times. “I’m just tired of sucking. It is what it is. I don’t know. Like I said, I don’t have the answers. I’m looking for them.”

The most obvious advice anyone can give the 2025 All-Star is to stop throwing meatballs. That sweeper that Pete Alonso crushed for a 439-foot homer isn't an isolated incident. A lot of the damage Woo has given up on the road have been on pitches that have caught too much of the strike zone.

Yet pitchers are robots no more than hitters are. Precision is not a given, so the best they can do is make sure they have a sound process as a safety blanket.

Bryan Woo might have to wander outside his comfort zone to slay his road demons

For Woo, the process is all about letting fastballs rip and letting the rest take care of itself. He's as extreme a fastball pitcher as there is in MLB, specifically relying on his four-seamer and sinker for 67 percent of his pitches. And he has a career 3.39 ERA, so it's obviously worked for the most part.

In 2026, though, the home/road splits for those two pitches are about as jarring as his overall home/road splits:

At home, Woo can let the four-seamer and sinker fly and basically not have to worry. On the road, everything breaks down to a point where his whole pitching identity is kaput.

Granted, any analysis that boils down to "It must be the pitch mix!" invariably runs the risk of leaving nuance on the side of the road. Woo spoke on Thursday about getting into too many bad counts. You want to throw strikes in those spots. And to throw strikes, it's often best to throw fastballs.

Even so, that Woo is throwing more fastballs on the road than at home allows for questions about whether he's overdoing it. And there is nuance that doesn't help his cause.

T-Mobile Park is playing even friendlier than usual to fastballs in 2026, which could be lulling Woo into a false sense of security. And that, in turn, might be distracting him from how hitters are more familiar with his act. When they see a fastball in the zone, they're swinging 74.5 percent of the time, a new career high for him.

Because the sinker continues to be more of a liability than the four-seamer, we'll double down on previous advice that the sinker might not be worth throwing anymore. He's already putting more trust in his slider and sweeper, which puts his changeup next in line for more usage. As it is, he's thrown it 71 times to lefties and they have just one hit in 20 at-bats against it.

Sans some kind of change to his process on the road, Woo can either hope for different results from the same thing or the Mariners can simply stop pitching him on the road. Neither of those is a viable way forward, so the ball's in his court one way or the other.

Add us as a preferred source on Google

Follow