The Seattle Mariners' 1st half was a frustrating, hard-to-watch success

It was only a couple days ago that the Seattle Mariners' 2025 season hit rock bottom. Surely you remember it, as they were on the business end of a three-game sweep by the New York Yankees that concluded with as ugly a loss as any team can have.

And yet, here we are less than 24 hours after the Mariners responded with arguably the best three days they've had all year. They're six games over .500 at the All-Star break, and they would be the American League's third wild card team if the season was over.

Welcome to the 2025 Seattle Mariners, folks. Catch the fever, so long as you can put up with symptoms that include everything between unbearable anguish and overwhelming euphoria.

Mariners showed who they can be in dominant sweep of the Tigers

To say that we were worried about the series against the Detroit Tigers would be putting it mildly. Regardless of context, you never want to be nursing wounds when you're anywhere near Tigers, much less a pride that leads Major League Baseball with 59 wins.

Oh, and Tarik Skubal was on the mound for the opener on Friday. As much as we dig Bryan Woo and would have loved to see him start the All-Star Game, Skubal is the unsparing maelstrom at the center of the pitching world right now. The 2024 AL Cy Young Award winner is on a 65-start run in which he has a 2.43 ERA and 483 strikeouts in 393.1 total innings.

So no, we didn't see the Mariners committing 12-3 beatdown on Friday. Nor did we see a 15-7 win on Saturday or an 8-4 win on Sunday to complete the sweep. To see such things coming would have required believing in the Mariners as a well-rounded force for good baseball, which is something they simply have not been for the majority of the season.

The Mariners have had exactly two reliable players throughout the '25 campaign. One is Woo, who has gone at least six innings in all 18 of his starts. The other is Cal Raleigh, who convinced us he was a sure thing for home runs well before he set an American League record with his 38th of the first half.

Pretty much everyone else has settled for being reliable in cameo appearances only. This includes frustratingly up-and-down offensive mainstays like Julio Rodríguez and Randy Arozarena, and one similarly unpredictable rotation stalwart in Luis Castillo. This is, of course, to say nothing of how injuries have sidelined Logan Gilbert, George Kirby, Bryce Miller, and Luke Raley for long stretches.

It boggles the mind, then, that FanGraphs actually has the Mariners' odds of making the playoffs higher today than they were on Opening Day. The vibe is that of a team which has taken its lumps from adversity but also landed a few haymakers of its own, with possibly more to come in the second half.

Gilbert and Kirby are healthy, after all, and the same will hopefully be true of Miller before long. Meanwhile, Arozarena is already on a heater and Rodríguez ended the first half with a much-needed tease that he may be about to go on one of his own.

He homered in all three games against the Tigers, and he just plain looked like a man on a mission. Whereas he had been swinging indiscriminately to no real effect, his swings against Detroit seemed to have a bit of anger behind them. He was swinging like he wanted to hurt the ball, and he did.

Julio is already 0.4 rWAR and six homers shy of his totals from last season, when he didn't really get going until August. The generous take is that he's ahead of schedule. The more blunt take is that he owes it to the Mariners to be better than a guy who may yet salvage his season with a hot second half.

If said hot second half doesn't happen, the best anyone can say is that the Mariners might hang on as a playoff team. But if it does, their road back to their first postseason since 2022 will be nice and clear.

3 up, 3 down for the Mariners after Tigers series

Up: Julio Rodríguez, Randy Arozarena, Jorge Polanco

Rodríguez and Arozarena joined Raleigh in going deep multiple times against the Tigers over the weekend. While it was a case of Julio heating up, it was more so a case of Arozarena staying hot. He concluded the first half with a 1.207 OPS and nine home runs in 15 games.

For his part, Polanco is beginning to resemble the hitter who went supernova back in April. His pinch-hit homer on Sunday made it four for him in his last nine games, a span in which he's 11-for-33 overall.

Down: George Kirby, Gabe Speier, Eduard Bazardo

Kirby had to wait out a rain delay before taking the mound on Saturday, and it may have affected him. After walking a total of two batters over his four previous starts, he issued three in an outing against Detroit that saw him give up four runs in five innings.

Bazardo walked three guys in his two appearances in the series, also allowing three hits and two runs. Speier blew the save on Sunday before the Mariners eventually rallied, and has now gone three straight outings without striking anyone out.