Cole Young's game-ending ABS flub puts a new spin on a major Mariners problem

All Cole Young had to do was tap his helmet, and the Seattle Mariners would have stayed alive. A 2-2 fastball from Miami Marlins closer Pete Fairbanks was clearly outside, so an ABS challenge would have kept Young at the plate in a 2-0 game with two outs and a runner on in the ninth inning.

Instead, Young just… walked away, and the Mariners lost.

It's not the reason the Mariners are now just 47-46 on the season. And if anyone's being honest, a handful of those 46 losses were worse than this one. Heck, since the M's rallied in Tuesday's game only to lose it in extras, it wasn't even their worst loss in this series.

Yet sometimes it's the inexplicable stuff that is hardest to move beyond. And that's what we have in the case of Young's non-challenge. The pitch missed the strike zone by plenty and the Mariners had both of their challenges remaining. And given the situation, it's hard to fathom a more obvious time to challenge than that one.

“You might as well take a shot there as a challenge,” Dan Wilson said afterward, per Ryan Divish of The Seattle Times. “I think sometimes that’s not the first thing that pops into your head in that kind of a situation. But you still have to remind yourself sometimes about the ABS.”

Honestly, the best we can do with it is poke some fun at Young for keeping the Mariners on brand.

The offense has had issues with the Automated Ball-Strike Challenge System from Day 1, and the stats at the midpoint of the 2026 season are not flattering. Mariners hitters only have a 43 percent success rate on challenges, with net gains further below zero than any other AL team.

Cole Young showed the Mariners a whole new way to screw up the little things

True, the ABS is a relatively little thing. But it often is the little things that sway games, yet the Mariners play ball as if they either don't know or don't care about that.

You can narrow an investigative scope to the offense and still come up with a long list of high crimes and misdemeanors vis-à-vis the little things. The Mariners are bottom-10 in baserunning value, bottom five in productive outs and second-to-last in batting average with runners in scoring position.

Each of these things have bit them in the Marlins series, wherein they're somehow just 2-for-18 with runners in scoring position. And lest anyone think Young has a monopoly on "What was he thinking?!" numbskullery, let us not forget that Weston Wilson broke for third base from second on a ground ball to his right on Tuesday. That's a no-no you learn back in Little League.

The manager is inevitably the go-to punching bag for conversation such as these, and not undeservedly so. Wilson's issues with in-game management were easier to forgive when the team was vibing its way to wins in late 2024 and throughout 2025. But now even the vibe is gone, and you wonder if there's a correlation between that and the frequent bungling of minor tasks.

Whatever the explanation, too many games have been lost because of the little things already, and the Mariners really don't want to find out what it could cost them if the problem doesn't go away.

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