Mariners’ playoff hopes alive and well thanks to their play vs Astros

It’s been a trying season for the Seattle Mariners, who by all likelihood would be out of the AL playoff race if not for two things.

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One is their season-high eight-game win streak that started in late May with back-to-back series sweeps of the Athletics – who had been leading the AL West to that point – and Arizona Diamondbacks.

The other is what the M’s have done against the current AL West leaders, the Houston Astros.

Following Sunday’s series-clinching 3-2 win at Houston’s Daikin Park, the Mariners improved their season record against the Astros to 9-2. And they did it by playing better baseball than they have in months.

The crushing 10th-inning blowup on Friday notwithstanding, Seattle thoroughly outplayed the Astros in their home ballpark. Its slumbering offense woke up, averaging 9.64 hits and 6.43 runs per nine innings over the three-game series, and pitchers Emerson Hancock and Bryan Woo shined, something that the starting rotation hasn’t done much of on the road recently.

Quite simply, it was the best the Mariners have looked since a 5-1 run from June 29-July 5, which put them three games above .500 and gave them a 1 1/2-game cushion for the AL West lead.

In between that run and Saturday’s 10-5 win in Houston, the Mariners cratered to the tune of a 10-22 record.

As a result, the Mariners’ overall record this year isn’t pretty – they sit seven games under .500 at 59-66 on a day off Monday – but the few bright spots, and particularly the dominance of the Astros, have allowed them to hang around in an AL playoff picture that is full of teams that wouldn’t be contenders in most other seasons.

Entering Monday, the Mariners are somehow just 2 1/2 games back of the third and final wild card, which is currently held by the 61-63 Baltimore Orioles. Seattle is the last of six teams within striking distance of the O’s, which means that, yes, seven teams with losing records are currently fighting to make the playoffs.

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Perhaps just as unlikely is the fact that the Mariners aren’t far out from the AL West lead, either.

With the weekend series win, the M’s picked up a game in the division standings to cut their deficit to just four games behind the Astros (63-62), with the second-place Texas Rangers (61-64) in between them at two games behind Houston and two games in front of Seattle.

The Mariners’ performance against the Astros in 2026, which is really a continuation of four years of Seattle owning Houston in head-to-head action, could prove to make all the difference this season. While the M’s are currently working their way through an August gauntlet of tough competition, most of September presents an advantageous schedule. The Mariners will have a combined 14 games next month against the three worst teams in baseball: three against the Colorado Rockies (50-74), and seven apiece against the Athletics (49-75) and Los Angeles Angels (49-76).

Maybe even more important is that the Mariners aren’t done playing the Astros. The bitter rivals will play one final two-game series to start the last week of the season at Seattle’s T-Mobile Park on Tuesday, Sept. 22 and Wednesday, Sept. 23.

With the Mariners having handily clinhced the head-to-head tiebreaker over the Astros, a good month or so between now and then could put Seattle back in the driver’s seat. After all, the M’s just need to finish with the same amount of wins as the Astros to beat them in the standings.

No doubt, it’s been a disappointing season to this point for the Mariners. But it’s certainly not over. With the way the division and AL as a whole has shaken out, plus their season-long performance against Houston, they’ve done just enough to put themselves in position to put the frustrations behind them in September and reach the playoffs in back-to-back seasons for the first time in a quarter-century.

All they have to do is play over their last 37 games like they did in Houston.

Seattle Mariners news and more

• Dipoto details Mariners’ plan for Colt Emerson’s wrist injury
• Former Mariners OF Butch Huskey dies at 54
• Seattle Mariners claim UW Huskies product off waivers

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