Grading the ice-cold Seattle Mariners' unforgivable 3-0 series sweep vs. Baltimore Orioles

Welcome to the low point of the Seattle Mariners' 2025 season...at least so far.

Their three-game set with the Baltimore Orioles felt like a trap going in, and it proved to be that as the O's won all three to walk away with a sweep. Yet at least from where we're sitting, it doesn't feel as much like a statement series for Baltimore so much as one that the home team didn't show up for.

Most notably, the Mariners mustered only six runs across the three games. That rendered their margin for error thinner than a layer of graphene, so it's no wonder it proved to be too thin for the team to overcome in other aspects of the game.

Anyway, let's grade how the Mariners did in all facets. It's obviously not going to be pretty.

Mariners vs. Orioles Breakdown and Grades: Series Results

• Tuesday, June 3: SEA 1, BAL 5
• Wednesday, June 4: SEA 2, BAL 3
• Thursday, June 5: SEA 3, BAL 4

Grading the Mariners’ Offense: F-

Thank goodness for Cal Raleigh. As was the case last weekend against the Minnesota Twins, he was the only saving grace the Mariners offense had in this series. He drove in four of the six runs they scored, including two on his league-leading 24th homer of the year on Thursday.

Otherwise, this F- is warranted on vibes alone.

The Orioles staggered into Seattle having allowed the fourth-most runs of any team in Major League Baseball. A showdown against them thus offered a reprieve for a Mariners lineup that has been struggling to score for the better part of the last month, at least in theory.

In reality, the struggle continued. Six runs in three games is no kind of offensive output for a serious contender, and it's only getting harder hold the Mariners in that sort of esteem. Serious contenders have more than a small handful of capable hitters, and Seattle simply doesn't right now.

Raleigh is obviously blameless, and J.P. Crawford showed signs of life by getting on base multiple times in all three games. Unfortunately, the core of Seattle's everyday lineup is still lacking in consistency. Julio Rodríguez had one good game and two bad ones in this series, and Randy Arozarena is in a worsening funk marked by a .143 average over his last 16 games.

The bottom of the lineup also continues to be a capital-P Problem for Dan Wilson, with Rowdy Tellez's solo homer on Tuesday providing the lone highlight for that group in this series. What might help is moving a skidding Jorge Polanco to that neck of the woods, which at the very least would remove a presently automatic out from the No. 2 spot.

In any case, the bottom line is that the offense is scoring 3.5 runs per game with a 90 wRC+ dating back to May 3. The front office needs to treat this as an extinction-level event that won't be solved by the likes of Luke Raley coming off the IL.

Grading the Mariners’ Defense: B

The defense has laid some eggs at times throughout this season, but it is largely blameless for what unfolded against the Orioles over the last couple of days. It didn't make any errors and didn't commit any really egregious mistakes otherwise.

Yes, Crawford should have come up with that one ground ball in the first inning of Tuesday's game. But that only would have saved one run in the scheme of things, which makes it hard to look back on it as the play that caused the Mariners to lose in that one.

And yes, that was a blockable ball that got past Raleigh and allowed a run to score on Thursday. But there is a difference between "blockable" and "easily blockable," and this was not the latter. It was a hard changeup that bounced well in front of home plate.

We did see some actual good defense from the Mariners in this series. The defense turned five double plays in the first two games alone. We also got a diving catch by Arozarena on Wednesday and the first bona fide web gem of Cole Young's career on Tuesday:

If there is a fair question to ask regarding Seattle's defense right now, it's whether the club needs to reassess its positioning. There was nothing to be done about Heston Kjerstad's game-breaking triple in Game 2, but better positioning would have made a difference on several ground-ball hits (see here and here) in Game 1.

Bad luck will always be a variable whenever the ball leaves the bat, to be sure. But on ground balls, specifically, it is worth noting that the Mariners are dramatically underperforming their expected batting average. It's worth looking into whether that can be fixed.

Grading the Mariners’ Pitching: B

As with the defense, the pitching is not to blame for the Mariners losing this series. If anything, it's deserving of sympathy on account of just how weirdly the Orioles scored the bulk of their runs.

They did hit four balls over the fence, but those scored just five of their 12 runs. They had to get the other seven the hard way, and Lady Luck did them a favor by sprinkling magic dust on more than their fair share of soft-hit balls.

The O's especially overwhelmed George Kirby with dinkers and duck snorts, with five of the eight hits off him falling short of clocking at 90 mph off the bat. There was also that cringe-inducing triple by Kjerstad, which left his bat at 79.3 mph and barely landed inside the right field line.

Stuff like this will make you tear your hair out, but it's worth pausing to focus on the positives.

For one, Kirby looked and apparently felt more like his usual self on Tuesday. His five-inning, two run effort was his best since coming off the injured list, for which it helped that his location was closer to where the Mariners need it to be.

With 5.2 innings of one-run ball on Wednesday, Emerson Hancock continued what is turning into a career-redefining run. He's had one bad start in nine tries since returning from the minors on April 17, and it could force the Mariners to keep him in the rotation over, say, Bryce Miller.

Save for the 87 mph cement mixer that he served up to Adley Rutschman, Bryan Woo mostly pitched well on Thursday. He's now gone at least six innings in all 12 of his starts, and this was only the third that was not of the quality variety.

The only guy who had a truly rough time in this series was Collin Snider, who gave up four hits and two runs in the top of the ninth on Tuesday. Some of that was a case of the buzzard luck covered above, but it's also just, well, him. After posing a sub-2.00 ERA last year, Mariners fans might be surprised to hear his ERA is as low as 5.47 this year.

This said, we wish him well after he landed on the IL with a flexor strain on Wednesday. You never want to see a guy go down with an injury, so hopefully the time off will help get him right.

Grading the Mariners’ Strategy: C

On the topic of Snider pitching in the ninth in the first game, there's an argument that Wilson should have been more aggressive by using Matt Brash, Carlos Vargas or even Andrés Muñoz to preserve what was then a 3-1 deficit.

Truth be told, though, we don't blame him. Or envy him, for that matter.

Though those guys got to rest on an off day on Monday, Wilson burning any of them with a two-run deficit in the first game of the series would not have been wise. It would have compromised their availability for the remainder of the series, which would have been wasteful given the circumstances — not just in terms of the deficit, but what feels like the sheer unlikelihood of the M's scoring two runs in a single inning these days.

As alluded to earlier, what we do need to have a conversation about is whether it's time to move Polanco out of the No. 2 spot when he starts. The blunt answer is that it is. He is 12-for-his-last-86, so continuing to bat him second is a pretty significant inefficiency.

This said, the usual defense of Wilson applies. His real value is in how he manages the clubhouse, and the reality is that he's doing his best with a badly undermanned roster.

Ultimately, the sweep finished off 3-6 home stand that dropped the Mariners' record to 32-29. They are 1.0 games behind the Houston Astros for first place in the AL West as of this writing, with a chance to be 1.5 games out by the end of the day.

The only silver lining is that Mariners fans won't have to sit on their "ick" for long. The Mariners will begin a six-game road trip on Friday in Anaheim against the Angels.