The 2026 Seattle Mariners didn’t just lose games. They got worn down, piece by piece, until the season was basically impossible to salvage.
Yes, the final record was ugly at 76-86. Yes, the roster had problems, the management was shaky and the urgency never seemed to arrive. But the more you look back, the more one thing jumps out: injuries kept kneecapping this team at the worst possible times.
The latest reminder came Monday, when the Mariners announced that Josh Naylor and Cal Raleigh had undergone surgeries on Saturday. Naylor had an operation on his wrist.
Raleigh had one on his left shoulder. That news arrived after some earlier rumblings about Naylor possibly needing to go under the knife, but it still landed like a surprise.
And it fits the bigger picture. Raleigh and Naylor were huge for Seattle in 2025, combining for a 156 wRC+, 69 home runs and 10.8 fWAR.
In 2026, that dropped to a 95 wRC+, 33 homers and 2.5 fWAR. That’s an 8.3-WAR swing right there, and with the Mariners finishing 5.0 games out of first in the AL West, it’s not hard to see how that kind of collapse helped keep them out of the playoffs.
The weird part is that Seattle’s overall injury total doesn’t look outrageous at first glance. The club lost 1,448 days to the injured list during the regular season, which ranked 20th in MLB.
But that number doesn’t tell the real story. The problem wasn’t just how many injuries there were.
It was who got hurt, when they got hurt and how badly it all hit the roster.
The bullpen took an early punch when Carlos Vargas injured his lat on Opening Day. Matt Brash and Cooper Criswell landed on the IL in early June, and from there the relief corps spent the season getting stretched thin. The results were brutal: Seattle relievers ranked fourth in ERA in the first half, then fell all the way to 29th in the second half.
Even so, the offense may have had it worse.
Out of the Mariners’ projected Opening Day starters, only Naylor, Cole Young and Dominic Canzone avoided the injured list. That’s a staggering amount of turnover for one lineup.
Donovan missed nearly three-quarters of the season, and the offense never really recovered from losing that kind of on-base presence. He posted a .425 OBP while batting leadoff, second-best of anyone after Nick Kurtz.
Other cases tell the same story. Crawford didn’t get his numbers back in line with his career norms until September.
Julio went from a .747 OPS before his concussion to a .655 OPS after it. Raley, meanwhile, fell from a .929 OPS through his first 53 games to a .459 OPS over his last 42, while still trying to play through pain.
You can see the ripple effects with Canzone and Colt Emerson, too. Canzone never hit the injured list and still played in 146 games, but a hamstring scare in June lined up with a drop from a .915 OPS before to a .763 OPS after. Emerson came out hot with an .884 OPS in his first 22 career games, then slumped to .430 over his next 47 before admitting he had a wrist injury serious enough to require season-ending surgery.
That’s how a team projected to have a potentially top-three offense wound up third from the bottom in scoring.
And while nobody around the Mariners was interested in hiding behind excuses once the season ended, Naylor’s own words captured the mindset: "If you’re not willing to play through pain, this is the wrong job.”
Still, there’s a difference between playing hurt and playing injured. Too many Mariners, especially on offense, ended up on the wrong side of that line in 2026. That can’t all be brushed off as bad luck.
Some of it points to the players themselves, whether that meant stubbornness or a sense of duty as the injuries piled up. But the responsibility also lands on Jerry Dipoto and Dan Wilson.
Wilson allowed a culture of playing through pain to get out of control. Dipoto stuck with a 2026 plan that had clearly gone sideways and kept riding it anyway.
Wilson and several coaches are gone now, so at least some of that can be addressed before 2027. Beyond that, the Mariners have to build a roster that can survive more than one thing going wrong at a time.
But even the best planning has limits. If the injuries keep coming, there’s only so much a team can do. This season made that painfully clear.
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For a pitcher who has shown real ability when healthy, the calculus is not just about the price tag. Millers recent injury history adds real risk to a decision that also has to account for what his market might look like through arbitration, and the Mariners now have to decide whether the savings are worth the uncertainty. [Read more 🡒]