Seattle Mariners Don't Get Help They Need in Playoff Race
The Seattle Mariners earned an 8-1 win against the Houston Astros on Wednesday. The victory guaranteed the Mariners series wins against the Texas Rangers and Astros in their last road trip of the season. But they still needed help from the Minnesota Twins, Kansas City Royals and Detroit Tigers in order to secure their playoff future.
Specifically, Seattle needed those three teams to lose.
Instead, all three three of those teams won on Wednesday.
Detroit beat the Tampa Bay Rays 7-1, Kansas City beat the Washington Nationals 3-0 and Minnesota beat the Miami Marlins 8-3.
It was the Royals' second consecutive close-game win against the Nationals. Kansas City won 1-0 in extra innings on Tuesday.
The Twins came back from being down 3-0 in the early goings and scored eight unanswered runs to prevail.
Perfect bunt. No notes, Vazqy pic.twitter.com/DKakGtNu94
— Minnesota Twins (@Twins) September 26, 2024
Those trio of wins now puts Seattle in a worst-case scenario.
If the Tigers and Royals both win on Thursday, then the Mariners will be eliminated from playoff contention. On their off-day, no less.
And even if Seattle goes perfect the rest of the way, if both Kansas City and Detroit win one more game in their remaining slates, the Mariners' season is over. And even if one of the two teams does lose out, Minnesota can't win more than two games either.
Seattle's playoffs odds are now down to 1.6% according to FanGraphs.
The Mariners have had multiple one-run games over the last two road trips. Winning even two of those would have helped the team a lot.
But there's no point in looking back at those games. All Seattle can do is win out, hope it doesn't get eliminated on Thursday and play out the remainder of its schedule.
And hopefully for them, that will be enough.
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