Salk: Why the Mariners finally seem headed in right direction

The Seattle Mariners are confusing. I don’t think I’m breaking any news on that.

Just when you think they’re going to be bad, they’re good. Just when you think they’re going to be good, they’re bad. They just cannot seem to get this going in any sort of a linear way.

First-place Seattle Mariners better off than other AL rivals

That being said, the last three to three and a half games that they’ve played, I think have been the best we’ve seen at any point this year.

Yeah, I know they swept the Cardinals and they swept the Astros and they took two out of three from the Braves, but it’s never really been about what the other team is. It’s been much more about them.

They swept the A’s, who have been a good team, and the way they did it is they played clean baseball. They hit, and hit early. They played tremendous defense. And the pitching dominated. You add all of those things together and this is the best we’ve seen of the Mariners this season.

I guess the question then is why? And one answer is there is no why. It’s just baseball. Sometimes things come together.

The other possibility is that something happened, and I don’t know exactly what it is. We know that Julio Rodríguez was very late to an at-bat Sunday in Kansas City, and afterwards we heard that there was some sort of a conversation about defense taking place. Ryan Divish of The Seattle Times told us maybe Julio was explaining something to Bryan Woo. Randy Arozarena was probably involved after what we’ll call a misplay that he had the inning before in left field.

I don’t know whether that was a pressure valve being released and allowed everybody else to flourish, because it’s baseball. Trying to come up with causation I think is very hard.

But I do know that since then, they’ve scored 27 runs in 31 innings. Their pitching has been tremendous. And their defense has been as clean as it’s been at any point this year.

Web gem 💎 pic.twitter.com/TxDvz1Vg9h

— Seattle Mariners (@Mariners) May 27, 2026

Obviously it’s helped to have Colt Emerson and Victor Robles and some of the other guys who have come to play and have been added back into that roster. All of those things contribute.

Whatever it is, let’s hope it continues because that version of the Mariners is a whole lot closer to the one we thought we were going to see to begin the year.

This post is a transcript of the video at the top of the post. It is edited for clarity. Catch Mike Salk weekdays from 6-10 a.m. on Seattle Sports’ Brock and Salk.

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