Hi Everyone —
While walking around beautiful Edinburgh on Monday, I actually saw someone wearing a “Go Seattle” baseball shirt. It looked kind of like an off-brand thing, perhaps even homemade, and the guy wearing it was walking with his little son riding on his shoulders. The man looked happy.
I think about that man this morning.
This post is free for everyone, written on a cloudy morning in London. The Brilliant Readers in The Clubhouse keep JoeBlogs alive, independent, and ad-free — and make it possible for me to write even when I’m supposed to be on vacation. If you’d like to be part of our community, we’d love your support.
Before we get to the emotion — the elation and awesome sound in Toronto, the shock and pain in Seattle — we have to talk about the decision, because baseball in 2025 is entirely built around such decisions. Seattle led the game 3-1 in the bottom of the seventh inning. There was one out. Seattle had runners on second and third. Toronto’s George Springer, one of the essential postseason players of our time, was coming to the plate. Only three players — MannyBManny, Jose Altuve, and Kyle Schwaber — had hit more postseason home runs than George Springer.
And Mariners manager Dan Wilson had to decide how to get the Mariners to their first-ever World Series.
There are no right answers in such moments. Baseball doesn’t work like mathematics or WORDLE. There are only guesses, hopes, predictions, judgments.
Dan Wilson’s main options were:
Walk Springer to set up the double play. True, putting on Springer as the winning run with Toronto superhero Vladimir Guerrero Jr. just two batters away doesn’t seem like much of an option, no, but, well, the intentional walk, alas, has made a major comeback this postseason. Heck, the Blue Jays intentionally walked Cal Raleigh with the bases empty in the top half of the inning.
Stick with his pitcher Bryan Woo, who had been the Mariners’ best pitcher all year and had pitched two scoreless innings. But Woo was coming off an injury — he’d missed a month before pitching a couple of innings in relief last week — and Wilson has managed all series as if keeping his bullpen fresh for just this moment was his top priority. The bullpen was fresh; everybody was available.
Go with his main setup man, Matt Brash. Yes, Brash missed all of 2024 and the first month of 2025 after Tommy John surgery, but his fastball is back in the upper-90s, and his wipeout slider is once again, well, wiping out hitters, and he’s allowed one home run on that slider all season. Brash would normally wait until the eighth inning, but this was hardly a normal situation.
Go with his closer, Andrés Muñoz. He’s the supercharged version of Brash, with a 100-mph fastball and a slider that batters swing a miss more than half the time. He pitched 5⅓ perfect innings against the Tigers in the division series, but, because of the shape and flow of things, had only pitched two innings in the championship series. If you believed that this was the moment, and there was every reason to believe that this was the moment, then Muñoz had to be the choice.
Go with his utility reliever, Eduard Bazardo, who emerged in 2025 as a fine reliever after kicking around with Boston and Baltimore. Bazardo found lots of outs this year despite one of the lowest chase and whiff rates in all of baseball. He is just difficult to make hard contact against. Every postseason manager, it seems, has one safety blanket reliever, a pitcher they seem to trust more than any other, and Bazardo seems to be Dan Wilson’s.
So there you go, there were the choices.
The Mariners did indeed choose to pitch to Springer.
Dan Wilson did indeed pull Woo, as you would expect.
And he went for Bazardo. That wouldn’t have been my choice. That wouldn’t have been my second choice. Being honest, I’m not sure that would have been my third choice considering the situation and the stakes and the moment, but it’s not really fair to say that NOW, after the fact. There are no right or wrong answers … not until after it plays out.
And it played out like a Toronto dream and a Seattle nightmare. The happy part of Toronto Blue Jays history can be told in three homers. Joe Carter hit one off Mitch Williams to win a World Series. Jose Bautista hit one off Sam Dyson and flung his bat to the sky.
And George Springer blasted a ball into the left-field seats off Eduard Bazardo, sending the crowd into an ear-splitting, Apple Watch warning frenzy — the sound peaked at 110 decibels, which is how loud a chainsaw is when you’re standing three feet away.
And that was it, really. That was the game. That was the series. There would be no second chances for Dan Wilson or the Seattle Mariners.
The series win-probability chart tells the sad Seattle story.
Before getting back to that Seattle loss, we really should say something about what a remarkable career George Springer has had. It’s unlikely that you have spent a lot of time thinking about him. Even if you are a bananas Houston Astros fan — and he was the World Series MVP in 2017 when Houston finally broke through and won it all — you undoubtedly have spent more energy in your life thinking about Jose Altuve or Alex Bregman or Yordan Alvarez or perhaps even the understated Kyle Tucker.
And if you are a Blue Jays fan, you know that Springer has been the Ringo of this team, quietly (but purposefully) keeping the time while Vladdy Jr., and Bo Bichette, and others have been out front. Everybody loves and admires George Springer — the story of him overcoming his stutter and helping others do the same has been told often; there are countless quotes from teammates talking about him as a leader — but, again, he’s probably not the first guy you think about.
But you look up now, and Springer really has been spectacularly good. He’s had a 40-WAR career, he’s been the World Series MVP, he was at age 35 perhaps the Blue Jays’ best player during the regular season, and he just hit the home run that sent Toronto to the World Series for the first time in more than 30 years. Barring a late-career boom, he probably won’t be seriously considered for induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame. But he will forever be represented in Cooperstown.
Now for Seattle. After almost 50 years of bumbling, stumbling, fumbling, and tumbling, the Mariners were good enough this year to get their hearts broken. That might not sound like much of a thing, but it actually is — and it’s something people don’t talk about enough. The Mariners had never been a game away from the World Series before. They had never been eight outs from the World Series before.
Yes, Seattle baseball fans had suffered a million little moments of agony in their history, but they had never felt that one awful, sweeping, hair-raising burst of misery — their Drive, their Wide Right, their ball through Buckner’s legs. Now they have. It stinks, absolutely, but you have to climb all the way up to the high wire to fall off.
