ALDS tied, Mariners vow to 'get back up and fight' in Game 5

DETROIT -- Their grip on the game cascaded away, from slow to swift to sheer disbelief.

The Mariners were firmly in the driver’s seat for much of Game 4 of the American League Division Series against the Tigers on Wednesday. They’d built an early lead and had taken Comerica Park out of the game. Then, a momentum-swinging, game-tying fifth inning against their lights-out pitching staff opened the floodgates, paved the way for nine unanswered runs and never slowed from there.

A 9-3 loss to the Tigers at Comerica Park will go down as arguably the Mariners' most stunning in 2025, for the stakes of this playoff stage and how competitive they’d played until Detroit completely seized the game.

However, they can still reach the AL Championship Series with one more win -- but now they’ll also be playing against elimination. And because that opportunity is still in front of them, they still feel very much alive.

• Tigers-Mariners ALDS Game 5 FAQ (Fri., 8 p.m. ET, FOX)

"You know going into the playoffs that you're not going to roll teams like that,” Cal Raleigh said. “There's a lot of fight in the other clubhouse, too. Stay even-keeled. Flush it. Forget it. Go to the next game.”

That next matchup is a winner-take-all Game 5 on Friday back at T-Mobile Park, where the Mariners will face the tall task of Tarik Skubal, the reigning AL Cy Young Award winner who is the front-runner to repeat.

The Mariners are the only team to beat the Tigers in three games started by Skubal, including Game 2 of this ALDS. They’ll have to make it a fourth to keep their season alive, which would make them the first team to do so in a single season against the lefty ace, widely considered the best pitcher on the planet.

“When you get knocked down, you either stand up or you stay down,” J.P. Crawford said. “And we’re going to get back up and fight.”

While the Mariners’ early lead on Wednesday 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 ripped an RBI down the left-field line on Speier’s very first pitch.

“We anticipated the move, that they were going to pinch-hit there,” Mariners manager Dan Wilson said, "but we still liked the way Gabe matches up. ... They were able to get to him today.”

Wilson’s call wasn’t necessarily surprising, nor the wrong decision. But it did leave Speier exposed against Jones, who had a .970 OPS against lefties during the regular season -- and whose injection into the game looked inevitable given how aggressively Hinch deploys his bench.

"I think it's been talked about all series long,” said Speier, who’d held the Tigers 0-for-8 in the series to that point. “I've been preparing for Jones. And I think he just kind of ambushed me. I gave him a good pitch to hit, but yeah, he kind of ambushed me.”

Speier wouldn’t face another lefty until the lineup flipped to Kerry Carpenter, who in an ideal situation would’ve been the batter that Speier was first used for. And it potentially could’ve taken Carpenter out of the game, with Jones in that spot instead.

Carpenter has a 1.007 career OPS vs. the Mariners (including the postseason) and hit a decisive homer off George Kirby in Game 1. On Wednesday, Speier retired him on a groundout.

“I have the second move depending on what the other side's going to do,” Hinch said of pinch-hitting early in games. “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.”

Aside from Miller’s blemish, he gave Seattle almost all it could ask for -- 13 outs among 16 batters faced.

Yet after he departed, the Tigers were off and running -- to a full sprint that never slowed.

Javier Báez followed with an RBI single off Speier 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 reaching on a single. After Speier finally escaped the frame in a 3-3 tie, he returned for the sixth for a left-on-left matchup with All-Star Riley Greene, who’d been silent all series.

But Greene demolished a middle-middle slider for a 454-foot homer, and the game, at that point, had reached its full tipping point. But for the Mariners in this series, they hope it stopped there.

“It was a bad pitch,” Speier said. “I think it could’ve been better. ... Detroit is a good team. They put together a lot of good at-bats today, and it’s a five-game series. It would be great to win all three, but this is just kind of the way it goes.”

Before the nine unanswered runs on Thursday, the Mariners had limited Detroit to just nine total in the first three games, three of which came in mop-up duty in Game 3. Eduard Bazardo, their No. 4 on the leverage depth chart, took over after Greene’s homer and allowed three more runs. Then Carlos Vargas followed with two more.

The issues were simple to diagnose -- over-the-plate pitches in get-ahead counts that the Tigers were ready for.

"The ones that just kind of leaked, stayed middle,” Raleigh said. “And they just didn't miss them. You have to give credit to them. They were able to put some good swings on them. And, yeah, I think that was the key to me, for sure.”

In a response effort, the Mariners went just 2-for-13 at the plate after Detroit tied the game.

But hey didn’t dwell before their 2,300-mile team charter, and that’s probably a good thing. While Game 4 hit like a freight train and Game 5 will feature Skubal, they still control their season -- and in a ballpark where they are an MLB-best 27-10 since the All-Star break.