Home run robberies against Mariners feel like a cruel joke (and could cost them)

Watching your team get robbed of a home run is a weird feeling. It's not anger so much as stunned disbelief. It's an injustice for which there is nobody to blame but the baseball gods. And so far in 2026, they sure do seem to have it out for the Mariners.

Honestly, we thought we had seen it all when Jo Adell robbed not one, not two, but three home runs against the Mariners in a game the Angels won 1-0 back on April 4. But in terms of sheer impressiveness, Jackson Merrill's robbery of Julio Rodríguez on Wednesday is something else.

He had to go a long way just to get to that ball, and then he had to navigate a weird corner of the center field wall at Petco Park. And even then, he still had to get way up. No wonder Merrill thinks it's the best catch he's ever made.

While not the reason the Mariners ended up losing 7-6, that catch was certainly a reason. Turn that into a two-run homer for Julio, and they may have ended up carrying an 8-2 lead into the ninth instead of "just" a 6-2 lead.

As Adell's three robberies on April 4 absolutely cost the Mariners a win, it's easy to make the case that they should be 10-9 right now instead of 8-11. That's the difference between having the third-best record in the American League and being in the bottom half of the pack, as the Mariners currently are right now.

Mariners know all too well how precious wins are when it comes to making the playoffs

Even if the four home run robberies hadn't cost the Mariners a pair of victories, to suffer that much bad luck in a span of just 19 games would still be ridiculous.

They actually track home run robberies at Sports Info Solutions, at least dating back to 2004. At the top of that leaderboard is Mike Trout, who's robbed 14 home runs since his debut in 2011. That's currently a span of 1,471 games in the outfield, so the Mariners' experience is akin to Trout getting 30 percent of his career home run robberies in 1 percent of his career games.

Mind you, that right there is just fun with numbers. Less fun is the shift in the Mariners' playoff odds at FanGraphs, which have already gone down to 71.0 percent from 80.9 percent on Opening Day.

That's scary enough, and then you have the backdrop of the Mariners finishing exactly one game out of the AL wild card picture in both 2023 and 2024. Even one such finish will convince a fanbase just how precious wins are, never mind two.

So with all respect to the baseball gods, we'd like to kindly ask them to knock this off. Nothing against Adell or Merrill, but this is just plain mean.

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