Instead of 1st World Series, Mariners fans get 2nd guesses after ALCS Game 7 loss

There is no tomorrow for the 2025 Seattle Mariners. There is only the rest of fall and all of winter between them and spring training and the promise of a fresh start in 2026. It's a lot of time for thinking, yet only one question will be front and center.

Did it have to end that way?

The only indisputable truth is that it did end that way. The Mariners made it to Game 7 of the American League Championship Series, marking the closest they had ever gotten to the World Series since the franchise's birth in 1977. Yet at the end, there were the Toronto Blue Jays celebrating a 4-3 win with roots in a seventh inning that is already infamous in the Pacific Northwest.

Going into the bottom of that inning, Bryan Woo held a 3-1 lead, the ball and the franchise's hopes for a clean handoff to Andrés Muñoz. It was a good plan on paper, but then the Blue Jays complicated it with a leadoff walk by Addison Barger and a single by Isiah Kiner-Falefa. A sac bunt by Andrés Giménez moved the runners to second and third with one out and brought the game to its sliding doors moment.

Dan Wilson gambled the Mariners' season and lost in Game 7 of the ALCS

At the plate? George Springer, looking to add to an already legendary playoff résumé with 22 October home runs on it.

In the Mariners' dugout? Dan Wilson, who ostensibly had the options of sticking with Woo, going to Muñoz earlier than planned, or trying his luck with another reliever.

He chose the last door with Eduard Bazardo, and it cost the Mariners their season in the form of a back-breaking, game-winning home run.

The mood on social media in that moment is one that is likely to haunt Wilson until he atones. And given what was lost, nothing less than a trip to the Fall Classic will do.

There is, of course, nuance to the discourse over Wilson's decision that must not be lost in the fury. Bazardo had been one of his best relievers all season, and his excellence had continued into the postseason. He was at least a better choice than sticking with Woo, whose velocity and command were beginning to falter — it was, after all, his third inning of work in his second outing in four days after he had not pitched in over a month because of a pectoral injury.

For his part, Muñoz has been candid about his preference for pitching with a defined role, which had pretty much exclusively meant the ninth inning throughout 2025, he last pitched as early as the seventh inning in August of 2024.

Still another option was to put Springer on and bring in Gabe Speier for a left-on-left matchup against Nathan Lukes. But that would have meant intentionally putting the go-ahead run aboard with Vladimir Guerrero Jr. — who would later be named ALCS MVP — looming as the next man up.

With no clearly good options available, Wilson had to decide which one was the least bad. He made his choice and now he has to live with the fact that, nuance be damned, he chose poorly.

Dan Wilson shouldn't take all the blame for the Mariners' crushing ALCS defeat

Yet to scapegoat Wilson and only Wilson for the Icarus act that the Mariners pulled in the ALCS is to let too many other people off the hook. He is not why the starters had a 6.59 ERA in the series. He is not why the Mariners made three errors and grounded into three double plays in an ugly Game 6 loss. Though he never really figured out the lineup, he is not why the offense hit only .222 and struck out 31 more times than the Blue Jays in the series.

The last of those strikeouts was a fitting end to the game and the Mariners' season as a whole. At the plate to face Jeff Hoffman was Julio Rodríguez, who had already shown off his immense talent with a double and a home run earlier in the game. If he so much as reached, Hoffman would have to tangle with Cal Raleigh and his 65-homer power.

Julio saw six pitches from Hoffman, and all of them were outside the strike zone. It's too bad, then, that he swung at three of them.

The point is not to single Julio out for the scapegoat treatment in his own right. He's a guy you want swinging the bat, and his home run earlier in the game was even a reminder that he's as dangerous as anyone when he expands the zone. He's talented like that.

It takes more than talent to win in the playoffs, however. Postseason games are often won on the margins, and it's incumbent on teams to make theirs as wide as possible by limiting mistakes and taking advantage of as many opportunities as they can get.

In the end, the Blue Jays simply did this better than the Mariners. So when they ponder that one fateful question throughout the winter, they must conclude not only that it had to end that way, but that it's for the best that it did.

They say failure is the best teacher. After all they’ve been through, the Mariners shouldn’t need to learn anything more about what they need to finally reach the World Series.