The Seattle Mariners are done for 2026, and the official elimination on Thursday turned what had long felt inevitable into a hard fact.
Seattle still had a mathematical path at the start of the day, at least on paper. The Mariners would have needed to win their final four games while both the Texas Rangers and Houston Astros dropped their last four. FanGraphs already had their playoff odds at 0.0 percent, and the Rangers wiped out even the slimmest remaining possibility by beating the New York Mets in the finale of a three-game series.
That ending lands especially hard because this wasn’t supposed to be a throwaway season. The Mariners entered with real World Series hopes and were projected as a team built for that kind of run. After going 0-for-49 in Fall Classic pursuits from 1977 through 2025, they also had the kind of statistical gravity that made the dream feel overdue.
Instead, the season unraveled almost from the jump. Seattle never got more than four games above .500, and the good stretches were too few to matter. The bad baseball showed up constantly, and by the end of six months, the shape of the team was impossible to ignore.
Now the organization has to sort out how to repair it, and who will be in charge of doing the fixing.
This is only the second time in six seasons that the Mariners followed a playoff year with a losing record, and the other one came in 1998. That club at least gave Seattle some star power to cling to, with a 40-40 season from Alex Rodriguez and 56 homers from Ken Griffey Jr.
There’s no comparable consolation prize here. Cal Raleigh, Julio Rodríguez and Josh Naylor all turned in the worst seasons of their careers at the same time, and the pitching staff no longer looked like the overwhelming strength it was supposed to be.
The mood around the club has shifted with it. The upbeat “We’ll be back!”
feeling that followed the near-miss in 2025 has faded fast. The broad answer is obvious enough: changes are coming.
The hard part is figuring out how deep they go.
According to Adam Jude of The Seattle Times, it is "unlikely" that Dan Wilson will be back in the manager’s chair. That alone puts a major offseason decision on the table. If president of baseball operations Jerry Dipoto and/or general manager Justin Hollander also lose their jobs, the Mariners would be staring at a much larger overhaul from the top down.
For now, the sense is that owner John Stanton is unlikely to take it that far. Dipoto has frustrated Seattle fans plenty over the years, but he has also done more good than harm across his decade in the role. And with the gap between preseason expectations and the actual result so wide, it’s easier to point first to the day-to-day management.
Even so, the roster needs work too. With Randy Arozarena, J.P.
Crawford and Luis Castillo off the books, there should be room to spend in free agency. The farm system and extra arms also give the front office some flexibility on the trade market.
The Mariners have options if they want to be aggressive, and they should be.
What they cannot afford is a familiar kind of retreat. Another inexperienced manager would be the wrong move, especially given Dipoto’s history of hiring Scott Servais and Dan Wilson.
And the club can’t afford to get timid and spend the winter standing still, either. That would only repeat the quiet that hung over the 2024-25 offseason.
If 2026 is going to mean anything useful, it has to show the Mariners exactly where they went wrong. There’s enough evidence now that missing the lesson would be more than a mistake.
It would be unforgivable.
In Other News...
Mariners Just Gave Fans Plenty To Argue About After This Loss
The Mariners came out of Monday night with a 6-4 loss to the Angels that felt as frustrating as it was familiar, the kind of game where the box score only hints at how many chances slipped away. Seattle never found much rhythm offensively and made life harder on itself in the field, with a dropped third strike among the defensive miscues and a couple of double plays wiping out scoring opportunities before they could really build.
Bryan Woo took his turn on the mound, but the bigger conversation afterward centered on how long he was left in and on the pitch selection that helped lead to a game-tying RBI. For a club trying to stay sharp in the margins, this was one of those nights when both the lineup and the defense left plenty to second-guess, and there will be no shortage of opinions on what should have happened differently. [Read more 🡒]
Julio Rodrguezs Apology Just Put The Mariners On The Spot
Seattles season ended with the kind of inventory no club wants to make in October: no playoff berth, 85 losses, and a star who flashed enough to remind everyone what he can do while still falling short of his usual standard. Julio Rodrguez provided one of the more notable swings of the year, but across the board both his offense and defense dipped from the levels that have made him the face of the franchise, and his uneven year fit into a larger Mariners story that never quite found the traction it needed.
What made the final days of the season sting even more was the tone around the clubhouse, where players and staff openly framed the year as a failure and pushed for accountability from top to bottom. Once the conversation turns to coaching, roster construction and overall performance in the same breath, it puts the organization on a short path to answers, and Rodrguezs public apology only sharpened that pressure by making it clear the standard in Seattle is still much higher than what this group delivered. [Read more 🡒]
Mariners Face A Cal Raleigh Question They Cant Ignore
Cal Raleigh has become one of the Mariners most important players, but the conversation around him has shifted from his power and production to the wear and tear that comes with catching almost every day. The workload has been heavy for several seasons, and the discussion now is whether Seattle has pushed him too hard for too long, especially after a 2026 campaign that raised more questions than answers about his overall performance.
Former catcher A.J. Pierzynski weighed in on just how demanding the position can be, pointing to both the physical grind and the mental strain that come with handling so many games behind the plate. The Mariners cant pin Raleighs 2026 struggles on one cause alone, but they do have a decision to make for 2027, and its one that could affect not only his health but also how much offense they get from one of their most central pieces. [Read more 🡒]