Mariners haunted by an old foe in ALDS Game 1 they couldn't afford to lose

The Seattle Mariners still have to lose two more games before their season is over, but it already feels like they're staring down elimination. After all, 0-1 holes feel that much deeper when the guy going against you in Game 2 is literally the best pitcher in baseball.

The final score of Game 1 of the ALDS was Detroit Tigers 3, Mariners 2 in 11 innings. The Tigers got as many runs as the Mariners on just one swing by Kerry Carpenter in the fifth inning, and the third run that came courtesy of Zach McKinstry was all they needed after that.

As is usually the case with close games, there are any number of moments where runs might not have crossed the plate for the Tigers if the Mariners had gotten luckier or made better decisions.

The 0-2 fastball from George Kirby that preceded Carpenter's go-ahead bomb probably could have been called a strike on a night where home-plate ump Alex Tosi was calling a wide zone. Yet given Carpenter's career ownage of Kirby, Dan Wilson probably should have called in Caleb Ferguson or Gabe Speier for the left-on-left matchup. Much later, he really rolled the dice by trusting Carlos Vargas to handle the 11th inning despite his control problems.

At the end of the day, though, Kirby gave up two runs in five innings and McKinstry's hit was the only one the bullpen allowed in six innings. It thus can't be said loudly enough that it wasn't the pitching or Wilson's handling of it that lost the game.

The Mariners' offense abandoned them on the eve of a date with Tarik Skubal

The offense simply did not show up on Saturday night. Or at least, the non-Cal Raleigh, non-Julio Rodríguez members of it did not. They collected all six of Seattle's hits, with Julio driving in both runs with a solo homer and an RBI single. Nobody else did diddly.

Bad luck? Sure, there's always plenty of that to go around any time a team loses a tight one. In this case, the Mariners had a bunch of fly balls get bogged down by the marine layer and die at the warning track. They hit five of the six longest balls of the game, and only Julio's homer left the yard.

Also at work in Game 1, however, was a steady stream of bad at-bats. Everyone in the bottom four of the lineup struck out at least once, and the whole lineup worked only two walks. There were both bad takes and bad chases, with Julio committing a particularly bad offense on a splitter from Kyle Finnegan that landed in the left-handed batter's box.

This is not the offense Mariners fans got used to in the latter half of 2025, and especially as the M's were busy leading MLB in runs, home runs and wRC+ in September.

Yet the stench of familiarity was very much there. The team ranked in the bottom 10 of the league in scoring, batting average and OPS just last year. It takes a while for a stink of that magnitude to waft away, and there were times even this year that it came back. Case in point, the Mariners' had their second-worst monthly OPS of the year as recently as August.

What you want in situations like these is for it to be easy to shrug and resort to the ol' "Turn the page" mantra. But these are the playoffs, and the circumstances here feel grim.

For one thing, the Mariners stand to lose Josh Naylor to paternity leave sometime in the next couple of days. For two, they're set to face Tarik Skubal in Game 2. The Mariners have had his number in the two starts he's made against them this year, but the last thing you want to do when facing a guy like him is be overconfident. He's about two make it two Cy Young Awards in a row, and he fanned a career-high 14 batters when he last took the ball on Tuesday.

It's still a best-of-five, of course, and the Mariners will steal the momentum they lost on Saturday and then some if they overcome Skubal and win Game 2 on Sunday. But for this to happen, Steps 1, 2 and 3 involve hitting better than they did in Game 1.

To this end, it would be hard for them to do any worse.