2 players most to blame for Mariners' miserable season

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>The Seattle Mariners entered 2026 with championship expectations after an ALCS appearance, only to be eliminated from postseason contention before the final weekend. Injuries, shaky pitching and defensive lapses created a team-wide failure, but the lineup’s biggest problem was that its two franchise faces failed to produce at anything close to their normal standard.

>Cal Raleigh and Julio Rodriguez are not solely responsible for Seattle’s collapse. They are, however, the two players whose regression most clearly transformed a club built to contend into one watching October baseball from home.

Cal Raleigh’s regression buried the middle of the lineupMandatory Credit: Dan Hamilton-Imagn ImagesRaleigh’s 2025 breakout established him as one of the game’s premier catchers and a legitimate MVP-caliber force. Seattle needed even a modest version of that player in 2026. Instead, it received one of the sport’s most jarring year-over-year offensive crashes.

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>Raleigh closed the season with a .182 average and .664 OPS, though he did reach 23 homers and 69 RBIs in 126 games. Those totals may look passable in isolation, particularly for a catcher, but they barely resemble the impact Seattle expected from the player who had become its central power threat.

>The slump was not brief, either. In May, Raleigh went 43 consecutive plate appearances without a hit and carried a .166/.249/.325 slash line. His OPS had fallen 384 points from the prior season at that stage, while his hard-hit rate plummeted from 50 percent to 29 percent.

>Injury context matters as Raleigh dealt with right-side discomfort early, then suffered a right oblique injury against Kansas City on May 1. The Mariners initially let him attempt to play through the issue before placing him on the injured list, and Raleigh later conceded that grinding through it was not helping either himself or the club.

>Still, Seattle built its order around Raleigh’s ability to punish mistakes from both sides of the plate. When the cleanup-level bat produced a .567 OPS through Aug. 20 and struggled against fastballs he had crushed a year earlier, opponents could attack the Mariners’ lineup far more aggressively. A late September rebound could not repair the months of missing production.

Julio Rodriguez never became Seattle’s engineMark Hoffman/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn ImagesRodriguez’s season was less catastrophic than Raleigh’s, but his failure carries a different kind of weight. Superstars are supposed to lift a team through its rough stretches. Seattle needed Rodríguez to establish the offensive floor every day, especially once Raleigh’s slump became undeniable. Instead, its $200 million centerpiece delivered career lows in batting average, slugging percentage, OPS and WAR.

>Rodriguez finished with a .247 average, 22 home runs, 71 RBIs, 22 steals and a .708 OPS in 150 games. The 20-homer, 20-steal benchmark is impressive, but it cannot conceal the decline. His .708 OPS was well below his .783 career mark entering the season, and his .401 slugging percentage showed how rarely he supplied the game-changing impact expected from an elite center fielder.

>The story gets more complicated because Rodriguez suffered a concussion on July 3, and his numbers sagged thereafter. He posted a .259 average, .424 slugging percentage and 117 wRC+ before the injury; afterward, those marks fell to .239, .383 and 93, respectively. His defensive work also slipped, an uncharacteristic issue for one of baseball’s premier athletes.

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>But injuries explain only so much. Rodriguez had shown signs of a real step forward in May, when he hit 10 homers and slugged .590. He never sustained it, leaving Seattle without the consistent star production that turns a talented roster into a dangerous one.

>Raleigh’s collapse created a massive hole in the heart of the order; Rodriguez’s down year denied the Mariners the superstar ceiling needed to compensate. Seattle’s miserable season had plenty of contributors, from poor pitching to roster flaws, but these two fell shortest relative to their roles—and the Mariners paid for it every day.

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