SEATTLE — Another sold-out crowd went into its customary “Ju-lio!” chant in Sunday’s eighth inning, but this one felt louder, deeper, more desperate, almost as if you could feel the anticipation that comes from 24 years without a playoff home win. Julio Rodriguez, the Seattle Mariners‘ beloved center fielder and one of the sport’s best producers over these past three months, responded by hitting the line drive that drove in Cal Raleigh for the go-ahead run, then arrived at second base, punched the frigid October air, flexed for 47,371 T-Mobile Park fans and, mostly, fed off their energy.
“I kind of looked around a little bit,” Rodriguez said after powering a nail-biting, 3-2 victory over the Detroit Tigers. “I could see everybody jumping around, and that made me feel really good. It was an awesome moment.”
Facing Tigers ace Tarik Skubal with the possibility of going to Detroit down 2-0 in this best-of-five American League Division Series, the Mariners rode an impressive pitching performance and two Jorge Polanco home runs to take a two-run lead heading into the eighth inning. And after Josh Naylor‘s error paved the way for Spencer Torkelson‘s tying double, the Mariners, one of baseball’s hottest teams since reaching their nadir in early September, responded yet again. Raleigh hit a one-out double off Kyle Finnegan, Rodriguez did the same, and Andres Munoz, asked to take down two innings for the first time in six years a night earlier, closed it out in the ninth.
For the first time since Oct. 15, 2001, site of the decisive game of that year’s ALDS, the people of Seattle could witness a playoff win first-hand.
“For us, it means a lot to give the fans what they deserve,” Munoz said. “I’ve been here for a little bit, and they deserve this.”
Skubal knows the Mariners’ struggle well. Long before solidifying himself as the AL’s greatest pitcher, Skubal pitched at nearby Seattle University, the only Division-I school that would offer him a scholarship. As a way to help pay it forward, and inspire kids hoping to follow his path of going from a ninth-round pick to a Cy Young, Skubal invited the entire Seattle University baseball team to watch him pitch.
The Tigers were coming off a gritty effort in which they utilized seven pitchers in 11 innings to practically steal Game 1. Skubal, five days removed from a 14-strikeout masterpiece in the wild-card round, hoped to put his Tigers on the brink. But Polanco got in his way. In the fourth, Skubal left a 2-0 slider out over the plate and Polanco lined it into the Mariners’ left-center-field bullpen, resulting in the first home run Skubal had allowed on that pitch since May 20. In the sixth, Skubal got ahead into the count, 1-2, but Polanco worked it full, then got a middle-middle sinker at 99 mph and sent it 369 feet.
“It’s a good at-bat,” Skubal said. “Two good swings on baseballs, and that’s how I give up runs tonight. I thought my stuff was really, really good. I thought my execution was great. But that’s the game of baseball.”
Polanco navigated the worst season of his career in 2024, putting up a .651 OPS after the Mariners acquired him from the Minnesota Twins. He spent a lot of that year playing hurt, ultimately undergoing surgery on his left knee shortly after the team’s season ended. The Mariners, scrambling for infield help in February, brought him back on a deal that would pay him $7 million in 2025 and saw him morph into one of their best performers down the stretch.
From the start of July to the end of September, Polanco slashed .282/.348/.551, ranking 11th in the majors in OPS. And when the Mariners needed a win most, he became the first player in four years — Paul Goldschmidt on Aug. 25, 2021 — to hit two home runs in one game against Skubal.
“He’s such a good baseball player,” Rodriguez said. “He’s a grinder. All year long he’s been having great at-bats, coming clutch in so many situations. And today, to have hit two homers against the best pitcher in the game right now — it’s awesome. There is not enough words to describe what he means to the team.”
Luis Castillo, a man known to feed off the home crowd in Seattle, got the Game 2 assignment and needed 51 pitches to record the game’s first six outs. A short start, coming off a night in which the Mariners taxed their bullpen, seemed likely. But Castillo completed the third and fourth innings with just 18 pitches. In the fifth, Mariners manager Dan Wilson confronted the same situation that presented itself the prior night: fifth inning, traffic on the bases, left-handed hitter Kerry Carpenter up, lefty reliever Gabe Speier warming in the bullpen.
“Déjà vu all over again,” Wilson said.
Twenty-four hours earlier, Wilson entrusted George Kirby to face Carpenter a third time and watched him surrender a two-run homer. This time, he turned to Speier, who struck out Carpenter to end the fifth, then cruised through the middle of the Mariners’ lineup in the sixth. Eduard Bazardo followed by stranding a runner in the seventh. Matt Brash seemed primed to do the same in the top of the eighth, but Riley Greene’s grounder, a potential inning-ending double play, ricocheted off Naylor’s glove at first base. Five pitches later, Torkelson deflated an entire city with a game-tying double down the right-field line.
“Just keep going,” Raleigh recalled thinking. “In the playoffs, you have to have a short memory.”
Raleigh, the franchise catcher coming off a historic 60-homer season, responded by turning on a splitter out over the plate and driving it toward the right-field wall. Rodriguez, arguably the game’s best player since the All-Star break, followed by turning on another splitter in almost the exact location and lining it down the left-field line, bringing Seattle back to life.
“It was awesome,” Rodriguez said. “These are things I dreamed of as a kid.”
Mariners fans waited 21 years after that 116-win 2001 season for their baseball team to get back into the playoffs. When they finally did, in 2022, the Mariners won back-to-back wild-card games in Toronto but suffered two brutal ALDS losses in Houston, came back home, played 18 innings and lost 1-0, ending a promising season. The next few years were mired by late-season collapses that left them out of the playoffs, which only added more pressure on a 2025 team widely considered the most talented of this generation. Raleigh called getting that first home playoff win “a nice weight to get off the guy’s shoulders.”
They hope for several more.
