TORONTO — They were founded, nearly 50 years ago, to settle a lawsuit. That is why the Seattle Mariners came into being, as a way for Major League Baseball to satisfy the political entities that had sued the American League for allowing a prior team, the Pilots, to skip town.
Yet there was nothing in the fine print about the type of team Seattle would get. No assurances that the team would actually win more games than it lost. That didn’t happen until the 15th season. And a pennant? Well, every other team has raised at least one. The lawyers forgot to mandate that, too.
There was no precedent, legal or otherwise, for what the Mariners experienced on Sunday night at the home of their 1977 expansion brothers, the Toronto Blue Jays, who have two championship banners high above center field. Never before, in more than 7,750 games, had the Mariners taken the field with a chance to reach the World Series.
And still, they wait. The Mariners buried themselves under a pile of strikeouts and double plays in Game 6 of the American League Championship Series, falling to the Blue Jays, 6-2. Now comes Game 7, the first in franchise history, George Kirby vs. Shane Bieber, on Monday night at Rogers Centre.
So, Seattle, how is the wait? Part excitement, part dread? Filled with hope? Pure torture? There is comfort, perhaps, in the wisdom of a Canadian, Josh Naylor, a first baseman who has been the Mariners’ best hitter this month.
“I was just telling the guys: this is stuff you do in your backyard as a kid,” Naylor said. “Whether it’s with a parent, a friend, a cousin, whoever it is, you imagine those Game 7 moments and you just try to have fun with it.”
The Mariners have had plenty of fun this October. Even with a first-round bye, they have played more games this month than any other team — five in the division series against the Detroit Tigers, with all those extra innings tacked onto the end, and now six against Toronto, with three wins apiece.
Take it to the limit, one more time.
Maybe this is how it had to be for the Mariners. Even in 2001, when they won 116 games to tie an MLB record, they needed the full slate to survive the first playoff round. Then they lost the ALCS, decisively, and did not return until last week.
Nobody in the clubhouse seems burdened by the past. These are not the 1986 Boston Red Sox, who crumbled under the weight of history in the World Series at Shea Stadium. The pattern of games in that series has been the same as this one, though: the road team won the first four, then the home team won Game 5 and hit the road with a chance to clinch.
The Red Sox lost to the Mets, wrenchingly and wickedly, in Game 6. This one was rather ordinary, nothing much that should linger in Seattle psyches. It was a four-run game that never felt close, at least after the double plays that ended the third and fourth innings with the bases loaded.
“We kept having tough at-bats, we kept putting the pressure on them,” Cal Raleigh said. “Just one of those days: a couple inches away here or there, and maybe we’re talking about a different ballgame. So you take that side of it. You don’t take the wrong side. You take the good stuff and you apply that tomorrow, and you just keep going. It’s what you have to do.”
It was a rough night for Raleigh, the MVP candidate who has now taken 755 plate appearances since opening day while catching 1,177 innings. This was the first game of his career in which he struck out three times, hit into a double play and made an error.
He is still hitting .302 this postseason with a team-high 1.028 OPS. Naylor is hitting .341 with a .974 OPS. Other hitters have had their moments, but nobody else has come through consistently.
The Mariners have scored 28 of their 46 runs this postseason on homers, including 21 of their 27 runs in the ALCS. If they’re not going deep, they’re not doing much.
“They’re not up there trying to hit home runs,” hitting coach Kevin Seitzer said after Game 6. “They’re focused on having good at-bats and just trying to put the barrel of the bat on the ball. So they’re doing everything they can to try to get it done and take good at-bats.”
Naylor and Raleigh are hitting .322 combined. Everyone else is hitting .179 combined. And while the Mariners cut their strikeouts from 10.03 per game in 2024 to 8.93 per game in 2025, they are fanning again at a troubling rate, especially compared to the Blue Jays.
The Mariners are averaging 10.9 strikeouts per game in the postseason, including another 13 against Trey Yesavage, Louis Varland and Jeff Hoffman in Game 6. The Blue Jays are averaging 5.8 strikeouts per game.
They also have 25 more hits this postseason than the Mariners, despite playing one fewer game. On Sunday they seemed to scorch almost everything; even Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s forceout to end the second inning was the hardest-hit ball of the ALCS, at 116 mph.
“When I made a mistake, they didn’t miss it, for sure,” starter Logan Gilbert said, adding later, “They’re a good team, but yeah, it is going to stay with me for a while. We’ve still got a game in front of us tomorrow and hopefully another series after that, but just take it, learn from it, move on.”
Move on — to the World Series. All the Mariners must do is the very thing they have never done. It is time for the closing argument.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
