The Mariners Should Enjoy Their Piggyback Ride Into First Place

A unique pitching situation has resulted in some interesting comments from the starters involved and team management.

Bryce Miller has been part of Seattle's unique pitching strategy lately. | Scott Marshall-Imagn Images

The Mariners need to win baseball games. Manager Dan Wilson has adopted a novel way to accomplish that goal. And yet not everyone is happy about it.

During a 9–2 victory over the Athletics on Tuesday night, the Mariners called on Luis Castillo for the first four innings of work before typical starting pitcher Bryce Miller came in from the bullpen to work the final five. The former kept a clean sheet while the latter allowed only two runs. Combined, it was an excellent performance, the type that will have any team in a position to win the ball game. Both times Seattle has tried it since Miller returned from an oblique injury, crowding the Mariners' rotation, things have gone well (though Castillo struggled in the ninth inning of the first attempt, resulting in a 2–1 loss the White Sox).

Miller and Castillo have a combined 2.12 ERA with 21 strikeouts and five walks in the games they’ve teamed up to tackle. They’ve also accounted for 17 of the 18 innings in those matchups. Castillo had previously recorded an ERA over 6.00 in his first nine starts.

The experiment has not been without its bumps and bruises, however.

Miller admitted that the situation is "not very comfortable" in a strikingly honest postgame interview.

Bryce Miller on the piggyback situation: "This set-up's not very comfortable." pic.twitter.com/lvyl0NAZ7z

— Ty Dane Gonzalez (@TyDaneGonzalez) May 26, 2026

Castillo was caught on camera throwing his glove after he was pulled with four scoreless innings on his ledger, having allowed just two hits and two walks with six strikeouts. It was the first time in MLB history a pitcher had left the game with such a line.

Luis Castillo is slowly becoming the odd man out in Seattle and it might be time for a change of scenery for the veteran RHP

A Thread🧵(📊by @jscud23)

📹: @DKramer_ pic.twitter.com/NazqK8rg1b

— Baseball Unstitched (@BaseUnstitched) May 26, 2026

The Mariners' top minds have tried their level best to improve their communication about the plan to both players.

Per MLB.com:

And that outlook was thoroughly relayed during meetings with Castillo and Miller on Tuesday, which included manager Dan Wilson and pitching coach Pete Woodworth. Later on, Mariners president of baseball operations Jerry Dipoto initiated a one-on-one with Miller and Castillo each, to extend the line of contact even further.

Both players were said to have absorbed those correspondences positively.

“While still not an ideal situation, I am confident that we were able to more clearly communicate the current situation and plan moving forward,” Dipoto said.

In some ways the underlying conflict here is actually a positive. Pitchers should want the ball and to eat innings. There's an ever-evolving line between pride, ego and what's best for the team. Yet one thing that never changes is that the more quality innings a team's starting rotation can rack up, the better the long-term results will be.

Mariners pitcher Luis Castillo had mostly struggled this year before the team enacted its piggyback plan. | Scott Marshall-Imagn Images

It's the easiest thing in the world to sit and assess the situation from afar before coming to the conclusion that Castillo and Miller should embrace the plan with open arms for the betterment of the team. And yet we're going to do it anyway.

All over baseball players are being asked to do something that wouldn't be their top preference. Every single night. It's part of being on a team and the collective is far more important than the personal. The rub, of course, is that when the personal side bleeds over into hurting the collective, teams often find themselves in a bigger pickle than the one they were trying to originally solve.

With the full understanding that pitchers still desire personal wins even after the analytic community has deemed them unimportant and that future contracts are based on past empirical results, it seems essential that everyone involved look at the most important bottom line.

Doing that should brighten things up a bit as the Mariners have now caught the Athletics to take over first place in the American League West. Then there's the very recent history of past playoff success, built on any number of pitching permutations that saw Seattle come within one victory of capturing the pennant last year. The best course of action for Wilson, should his team again make the postseason, is to be adroit and flexible when it comes to who gets the ball in October. To have him handcuffed in that department because his players don't want to enact a strategy seems like something that would be ultimately detrimental.

Again, it's worth focusing on the positives here. One, Seattle is not short on pitching. It's a blessing to have this many solid arms. Two, the plan has worked. Finally, things overall are moving in the right direction. It may not be ideal for two guys who have proven themselves capable of more, but it's a solution right now. To make it a bigger problem would be hustling backward.

---