Mariners show three-step winning formula

This story was excerpted from Daniel Kramer’s Mariners Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

SEATTLE -- For the first time over the Opening Week of the regular season, the Mariners exercised a formula to victory that this roster was built for in Wednesday’s 3-2 win over the Tigers.

1. Get a quality start from their starter
2. Give him just enough run support
3. Let the leverage arms bridge that late lead to the finish

It sounds wildly simple, but for a team built on starting pitching and a bullpen that’s getting healthier, if their offense can muster just enough run production -- and more so, consistently -- they don’t need an all-world lineup to take the next step back to October for the first time in three years.

Agree with the logic or not, that’s how Seattle’s front office constructed the 2025 roster based on the offseason resources afforded to them.

“We talked about it in Spring Training a lot, that we're going to be in a lot of one-run games,” Mariners manager Dan Wilson said. “That's just how it goes.”

The challenge with this formula is that just about everything has to go right -- which it did on Wednesday, but not without a tense bases-loaded jam that Andrés Mu?oz worked out of.

On most nights, Seattle’s starters should keep the club in the ballgame, having ranked third in MLB with a combined 178 quality starts from 2023-24. Yet the Mariners’ record in those games was 132-46 for a winning percentage of .742, ranked 19th.

If they’re going to reach the postseason, that percentage must climb.

“We're going to win the games in the late innings because that's just how our team is built,” Wilson said. “And so when we have these kinds of games, and they're within our grasp, it's important to execute and take them."

Most of the Mariners’ losses in quality starts could be correlated to a lack of run support and/or hiccups from their bullpen. Seattle was 27-28 in one-run games last season after leading MLB in one-run victories in 2022 and ‘23.

The club also struggled to put games away, going 9-10 when tied after the sixth inning, 7-13 when tied after the seventh, 10-10 when tied after the eighth and 9-8 in extra innings. They also went 62-31 when scoring first and 22-46 when the opponent scored first.

“We go in with the mentality that we have to score early,” said right fielder Victor Robles, who ripped a key two-run double off Tigers starter Tarik Skubal. “With all the starters that we have, we know that if we can take advantage of that early, we’ve got [the pitching] that can carry us the rest of the game.”

It’s far too soon to make wholesale judgments on the 2025 lineup, though the fact that it’s mostly the same faces from a year ago lends a little more credence to an early assessment.

The bright spots have been Randy Arozarena scorching the ball, Julio Rodríguez carrying a team-best .379 on-base percentage (up from .325 last year) and Jorge Polanco (6-for-15 with a game-winning homer on Opening Day) showing signs of a rebound. The bullpen should soon inject power arms Matt Brash and Troy Taylor via returns from the injured list.

But there are still tendencies from last year’s struggles that have surfaced and need to be sorted, such as the lineup’s 27.5% strikeout rate (tied for sixth-worst and up from 26.8%) and a .111 batting average with runners in scoring position (last in MLB).

Creating traffic and cashing in, especially early in games, also correlates to far more confidence for a starter, who then isn’t forced to pitch on a tightrope.

That the Mariners came away 3-4 on their opening homestand despite quite a few flawed games was a positive. They know that they’re going to play in closer games than most teams -- it’s just how they’re built -- but how often they reach the finish line as they did Wednesday will determine the totality of their success, or lack thereof, in 2025.