It only took 1 game for Mariners fans' darkest Dan Wilson thoughts to return

Dan Wilson had 157 days to sit with the pain of Game 7 of the 2025 ALCS. So by the time he and the Seattle Mariners opened their 2026 season on Thursday, you'd hope he'd have a better idea for how to manage his bullpen.

Instead, here we are again. Pondering how Wilson could have gotten it so wrong.

There was a lot that went wrong for the Mariners in their 6-4 loss to the Cleveland Guardians on Thursday. The game really turned, though, after Wilson lifted Logan Gilbert from a 3-3 game in the sixth inning. That put the game in the bullpen's hands, and Gabe Speier, Casey Legumina and Cooper Criswell let it get away.

No Andrés Muñoz. No Matt Brash. No Eduard Bazardo — and yes, we do mean that sincerely despite his role in last year's ALCS debacle.

Dan Wilson once again lacks answers for bewildering bullpen management in Mariners opener

The first mistake Wilson made was leaving Speier in to face José Ramírez with two runners on and two outs in the top of the seventh. The idea seemed to be to turn the switch-hitting Ramírez around and make him bat righty, and Speier did throw him a tough slider on 1-1.

Ramírez being Ramírez, though, it was no great surprise that he put a 111 mph hurting on that pitch, resulting in two runners scoring to give Cleveland a 5-3 lead.

All that transpired while Brash was up in the pen, and it's fair to wonder if Wilson's reluctance to pull Speier cost the Mariners. Ramírez is 0-for-5 against Brash, a small sample size that is nonetheless made more believable by that one swing-and-miss we all still remember.

Leading off the bottom of the seventh, Dominic Canzone got the Mariners back to within a run with his second homer of the game. Yet instead of going to Brash, Bazardo or even Carlos Vargas to keep the deficit at one, Wilson turned to Legumina and Criswell.

They are the two worst relievers in the bullpen, and they unfortunately looked the part. Legumina had to escape a bases-loaded jam of his own making in the eighth. Criswell then opened the ninth by allowing a solo homer to Chase DeLauter that effectively iced the game.

“You have to weigh and make your adjustments on the fly,” Wilson said of his pen management afterward, per Daniel Kramer of MLB.com, “and tonight was a situation where that was the case.”

Hmmm… that sounds familiar to this beauty after ALCS Game 7, in which he famously did not go to Muñoz with George Springer at the plate and the game on the line: “You make your decisions, and sometimes you have to live and die with it."

The charitable read on Wilson's pen management on Thursday is that he needs to see what Legumina and Criswell can do. As they're the last two options in the pen, you'd like to know earlier rather than later whether they can actually help.

But this is a reach. At least as of now, the reality is that Wilson's bullpen management and how he explains it have a common problem: not good enough.