Pretty much everything that could go wrong for the Seattle Mariners did go wrong this year, and the biggest red flag might have been the one right in front of them: the pitching identity that’s supposed to be their calling card started working against them.
That’s where Cal Raleigh comes in. In a year when Seattle’s staff slipped from the top of the sport to the middle of the pack, Raleigh put his finger on the problem in a way that felt hard to ignore.
“When I’m watching the game back there, I’m seeing a lot of very aggressive teams - very aggressive teams, even teams that aren’t (typically) aggressive. When I look at that, it’s going to come down to (the pitcher’s) execution.
It’s not necessarily all the time about winning your 0-0s your 1-1 (counts). It’s about executing a pitch and how can we get this guy out.
I saw a lot of very aggressive hitters and guys that were ready to go from pitch one because that’s in our DNA.”
The blunt part is this: Raleigh is right. Seattle still lives by the same pitch-to-contact, throw-strikes philosophy that has defined the organization, but this season it got a lot easier to see coming.
Mariners pitchers threw in the zone 49.5 percent of the time, the highest rate in MLB. They also opened with a first-pitch strike 66.0 percent of the time, which broke their own 2024 mark for the highest on record.
On paper, that sounds clean and efficient. Get ahead.
Avoid walks. Force the hitter into a defensive count.
The problem is that when a pattern becomes this clear, hitters adjust fast. Opposing batters swung at 68.9 percent of pitches in the zone against Seattle, the highest rate in the league, and they offered at 36.5 percent of first pitches as well.
That’s why the Mariners ended up 24th in Run Value in the zone and tied for 24th in Run Value on first pitches. The approach stopped surprising anyone.
The numbers tell the same story from another angle. Batters posted a .606 OPS after 0-1 counts, compared with .810 after 1-0 counts. That gap matters, because Seattle kept giving hitters the same early look over and over again.
The most obvious place the book on the Mariners showed up was on 0-0 counts. In those spots, 56.6 percent of their pitches were in the zone and 64.9 percent were fastballs. League hitters punished the predictability, hitting .374 with a .608 slugging percentage against first-ball fastballs from Mariners pitchers.
Raleigh’s point about not chasing a stat lands here too.
“At the end of the day, it’s about wins. It’s about execution. It’s not about chasing a stat.”
That leaves Seattle with an uncomfortable question heading into 2027: if the old formula is easier to read than ever, what changes? The staff is not about to be rebuilt from scratch. The Mariners kept pitching coach Pete Woodworth and director of pitching strategy Trent Blank even after moving on from Dan Wilson and several of his coaches, and while Jerry Dipoto could still trade a homegrown starter this winter, the 2027 group is likely to look a lot like the 2026 one.
That means any real improvement may have to come from a different lane. Better defense would help.
Better luck would help too. But if the Mariners are looking for the clearest diagnosis of what went wrong, Raleigh may have already given it to them.
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