Everyone is finding out what Mariners fans already knew about unheralded reliever

October baseball has a way of exposing what a team actually believes. Do you trust your process when the crowd gets loud, or do you chase a feeling? The Mariners have been quietly answering that question with Eduard Bazardo. He isn’t packaged like a star (no flames on the scoreboard, no 101 on the gun), but he keeps showing up in the innings that decide seasons. 

Here’s the tell, and it’s why the national audience is catching up: he shrinks games without drama. Get to strike one, show the same tunnel twice, then move the plate by two inches. The count tilts, hitters expand, and the ball leaves the bat at a speed the defense can live with. It’s repeatable. It travels. And when your “middle” reliever can buy a few outs on command, your whole bullpen plan slides into place. That’s the value of an approach less about velo, more about sequencing, strike efficiency, and zero wasted pitches when runners are on.

Eduard Bazardo keeps stealing leverage innings for Seattle

Rewind to the start of 2025, when the bullpen picture was muddy. Some worries were fair, some were noise, and sitting in the middle was Bazardo. The skepticism wasn’t his whole 2024 résumé; it was the front half everyone remembered. Through July 1 of 2024: 11 games, a 7.98 ERA, 13 earned runs, seven walks, 17 strikeouts in 14.2 innings. Command wobbled, misses leaked back to the big part of the plate, and trust hadn’t formed yet. That’s what stuck.

Then came the turn. From July 1 to the end of 2024, he looked like a different pitcher: 1.38 ERA across 12 games, 16 strikeouts in 13 innings, only two walks. That’s not luck; that’s shape.

Fewer non-competitive misses, more edge work, more conviction with two strikes. He carried that into 2025 — not as a dramatic split, but as a long runway of steadiness. Over his final 48 regular-season games, he posted a 1.65 ERA. Call it “slow starter” if you want. The better read: he’s a problem-solver who trends up as the league builds a book on him, and he builds a better one back.

This October is the confirmation. Five scoreless outings in six appearances, with the two that matter most sitting there in bold. He threw 2.2 scoreless innings in ALDS Game 5 when every out felt like glass, and then two more clean frames in ALCS Game 1.

That’s not filler; that’s series architecture — the kind that lets you hang a win on top of it. And the blueprint has a headline feature: the sinker. On X, Jordan Shusterman of Yahoo Sports called out the wizardry of his sinker and brought receipts:

Bazardo short-circuits crooked innings by getting to leverage counts, dares soft contact, and refuses to give away the first two pitches of an at-bat. Result: Dan Wilson can hold his back-end hammer for the real final act instead of spending it in the seventh just to survive.

So, yes, the timeline noise makes sense now. Eduard Bazardo is a “breakout” to everyone who didn’t sit with the late-2024 version or watch the week-by-week tightening in 2025. Mariners fans logged it months ago. The league is now catching up. October exposes pretenders and elevates truth, and the truth here is pretty simple: Bazardo is built for the back nine.