DETROIT — The snowballing cascaded from slow to swift to sheer disbelief for the Mariners on Wednesday.
They were firmly in the driver’s seat for much of Game 4 of the American League Division Series against the Tigers, yet a momentum-swinging fifth inning from their lights-out pitching staff never came close to slowing. And they now find themselves on the brink of elimination.
A 9-3 loss to the Tigers at Comerica Park will go down as arguably their most stunning in 2025, for the stakes of this playoff stage and how competitive they’d played until Detroit completely seized the game — and potentially, the series.
Seattle is still alive, but a winner-take-all Game 5 on Friday back at T-Mobile Park looms — more so for the rematch that the club faces against all-world ace Tarik Skubal. They are the only team to win three games started by last year’s AL Cy Young Award winner this season (including Game 1 of the ALDS), and they’ll have to make it a fourth to keep their season alive.
While the Mariners’ early lead on Thursday wasn’t commanding, the stranglehold their pitchers had held on Detroit’s offense still persisted as they took a 3-0 edge at the halfway point. Then came the fateful bottom of the fifth, and with it, floodgates that burst like a tidal wave.
The pivot point came when Gabe Speier was called to relieve Bryce Miller with one out, after Miller surrendered Detroit’s first run. Speier had been a linchpin vs. lefties, but Tigers manager A.J. Hinch knew this and aggressively pinch-hit for center fielder Parker Meadows — their best defender — with Jahmai Jones, who had a .970 OPS against lefties in the regular season.
“I have the second move depending on what the other side’s going to do,” Hinch said earlier this week. “One of the pressure points that this team can put on by being all-in and by us willing to do everything … and we’re willing to do anything — and that gives us the second choice to be able to do whatever.”
Jones ripped an RBI double down the left-field line on Speier’s very first pitch, and from there, the Tigers were off and running — to a full sprint that never slowed.
Javier Báez followed with an RBI single that tied the game, though he nearly took the lead on a would-be homer that narrowly hooked outside the left-field foul pole, before he reached on a single and Speier escaped the frame with a Kerry Carpenter groundout. Speier returned for the sixth for a left-on-left matchup with All-Star Riley Greene, who’d been silent all series, but he demolished a middle-middle slider for a 454-foot homer.
The game, at that point, had reached a full tipping point — and for the Mariners in this series, they hope it stopped there.
After taking an early 3-0 lead, Seattle surrendered nine unanswered runs after limiting Detroit to just nine runs in the first three games, three of which came in mop-up duty in Game 3.
