Mariners must begin rescuing sinking season in latest meeting with Angels

On Thursday, it felt like the Seattle Mariners had hit rock bottom. To get swept at home is never a good thing. To get swept at home by one of the worst teams in the American League is fundamentally incapable of ever being a good thing.

Things are feeling a little different on Friday morning, but only because an even more dire thought has crashed the pity party: It could still get worse.

The Mariners are back on the road for a six-game trek that will take them through Anaheim and Phoenix, starting with three games against the Los Angeles Angels over the weekend. They are an ostensibly beatable opponent, as they are 4.0 games beneath the Mariners in the AL West standings and boast a dismal minus-57 run differential, compared to Seattle's relatively solid plus-2.

And yet...well, what's the expression? Ah, yes. "Famous last words."

Everything is going wrong for the Mariners as they head into a crucial stretch of the season

When we do these series previews, we normally focus on the other team and an interesting storyline that it brings to the table. It's a way to keep things fresh, as we'd otherwise just be taking twice-weekly snapshots of the Mariners. Over a 162-game season, such things can quickly get stale.

Right now, though, it really is hard not to rubberneck at the trainwreck that the Mariners have devolved into over the last few weeks.

Since winning their ninth straight series back on May 7, the M's have dropped 15 out of their last 25 games. Ten of those losses have come just since May 20, a span in which the offense can be cleaved into two camps: Cal Raleigh, and everyone else.

Here, take it from MLB.com's Daniel Kramer:

Anyone who's just now waking up from a long nap that began somewhere in the middle of 2024 won't be surprised by this. The Mariners as a bad offensive team? It must be a day ending in Y.

But for those of us who have been following the team since Day 1 this year, this is a rug pull of epic proportions. The might of the Mariners offense was the talk of baseball earlier in the year, but it has since gone from ranking sixth in MLB in scoring through May 2 to tied for 26th in scoring dating back to May 3.

Some kind of slide was inevitable, to be sure. To wit, the early excellence of Seattle's lineup was largely fueled by stellar hitting from Jorge Polanco and Dylan Moore that never felt sustainable. They have since gone cold, and the help that Raleigh should be getting from Julio Rodríguez and Randy Arozarena in the middle of the lineup has been inconsistent at best.

Yet the subsequent cool-down is not so much the fault of individuals as it is a whole-body breakdown. The things this offense did well earlier in the year — i.e., grinding out at-bats, hitting for power, and running wild on the basepaths — have simply vanished.

The Mariners' playoff chances are already feeling the chill of the frozen bats. They are now 1.5 games behind the Houston Astros for first place, with their odds of making the postseason having fallen from a high of 83.4 percent to just 59.9 percent for FanGraphs as of Friday morning.

Meanwhile, the July 31 trade deadline is looming ever closer. It could prove to be Seattle's salvation, given the sheer amount of prospect capital that Jerry Dipoto has to deal from. However, whether Dipoto ultimately leverages that capital could depend on what happens on the mound going forward.

“Yeah, Luis Castillo has looked a lot better, and Bryan Woo is awesome and Emerson Hancock and Logan Evans are there,” ESPN MLB insider Jeff Passan said on "Brock and Salk" this week. “But I think until they have a better sense of what their pitching staff really looks like in this present moment, that we can’t know just how aggressive the Mariners are going to be.”

If this was 2024, there'd be no concern here. But in 2025, the pitching has been stuck in various states of injured and surprisingly ineffective. George Kirby and Bryce Miller (who will both take the hill this weekend) remain wild cards after coming off the injured list, and Logan Gilbert's velocity issues during his rehab assignment raise the question of whether he will be, too.

"Precarious" would be the right word for the situation the Mariners are in, but even that feels like an understatement. The reality is that their 2025 season is skidding out of control, and that the work to save it needs to begin now.

Game Times and Probable Pitchers for Mariners vs. Angels, June 6-8

• Friday, June 6 at 6:38 p.m. PT: Bryce Miller vs. Kyle Hendricks
• Saturday, June 7 at 6:38 p.m. PT: Luis Castillo vs. Jack Kochanowicz
• Sunday, June 8 at 1:07 p.m. PT: George Kirby vs. Tyler Anderson