If you don’t know about the psychologist Erik Erikson, in addition to having a pleasing name to say, he was a pretty cool guy who studied identity formation (with specific cultural contexts, way before anyone was doing that), describing eight distinct life stages, each guided by an existential question. The 2026 Mariners have been making me think about a lot of existential questions, like why baseball hurt so much?, and none so many as tonight, when they dangled the possibility of a slump-busting win only to fall in the late innings at Yankee Stadium in particularly grueling fashion.
According to Erikson, the first stage of life – infancy – is marked by the psychological crisis of trust vs. mistrust. The world is big and scary and unfamiliar, and it’s unclear as to what can be trusted. That’s a battle Mariners fans have been going back and forth on with this 2026 team, who have been seemingly unable to string together nine innings of cohesive baseball, let alone a winning streak. But lately the Mariners have been so bad it’s almost felt comforting. Familiar. Consistent, even if it’s terrible. So it wasn’t thrilling so much as it was frightening when they posted a three-run first inning against Yankees starter Will Warren. With one out, Cole Young hit an oppo ground ball single with one out. Is it time to start beating the “put Cole Young back at leadoff” drum a little more loudly? Randy Arozarena continued his homer-hitting ways, lacing a sweeper off the plate just over the right field wall for a two-run homer. With two outs, Julio Rodríguez added on with a solo homer of his own. Three runs! In the first inning! The Mariners fan mind cannot comprehend.
But for those of us torn between trust and mistrust, and heavily on the side of mistrust, it’s hard not to see another example of the Mariners not fully jumping on a pitcher early. It only took three pitches to make those two outs between the home runs, both outs pounded into the ground. Probably nothing to worry about, right? Right?
Maybe a little something to worry about, because Bryce Miller gave back one of those runs right away in the bottom of the inning. Toddlerhood, per Erikson, is marked by a struggle for autonomy – asserting likes and dislikes as a way to mark oneself as an independent entity in the world. Freed from the confines of the piggyback, these last starts down the stretch have been Bryce Miller’s opportunity to prove he deserves to stand as an autonomous unit. But today Miller’s repertoire essentially shrunk to two, maybe three pitches, as he went all fastball/sinker supplemented with the splitter. Miller didn’t throw his cutter a single time today, explaining he doesn’t like that pitch against this lineup, and he threw just two sweepers and one slider.
“I wish I would’ve thrown a few more curveballs,” he said postgame, but noted the primary thing he needed to do was execute his pitches better, especially at pivot points.
“I couldn’t execute,” he said. “I couldn’t make the pitches when I needed to. All the runs they scored on me were with two outs…I gotta execute with two outs and two strikes.”
Things got worse in the third, despite Canzone chipping in another solo homer to give the Mariners that run back. But the Yankees seemed ready for what Miller wanted to do in the third, starting with a leadoff double from Austin Wells, who dropped the head of the bat on a fastball in his lefty loop zone for a hard-hit two-bagger. It looked like Bryce might escape the inning without letting the run score, but he opted to go six straight splitters to Ben Rice, who refused to chase them, issuing a two-out walk (bad Bryce!). Miller then got into a long battle with Spencer Jones, feeding him almost nothing but fastballs (and one splitter) but unable to miss Jones’s bat. Finally, on the eighth pitch of the at-bat Miller left a 96.6 mph fastball middle-low for a two-run double that drew the Yankees within a run. The psychological crisis of toddlerhood, according to Erickson, is the tension between a desire for autonomy and shame/doubt. The psychological crisis for me watching this game is the tension between me truly, deeply believing Bryce Miller is a good pitcher, and the doubt tonight’s performance engendered.
The Mariners offense had opportunities in this game, which is the frustrating part of tonight’s loss for me. In the second, a leadoff “double” (flyball that dunked into no-man’s land) for Brendan Donovan, followed by a walk to Cal Raleigh, ultimately went nowhere after a Colt Emerson strikeout and a Taylor Ward GIDP. After Canzone’s homer in the third, Julio and Cal Raleigh worked back-to-back walks, only for Donovan to hit an inning-ending groundout. A leadoff single in the fourth from Raleigh was stranded with another Emerson strikeout and back-to-back groundouts from Ward and Young, Ward’s on a first-pitch swing.
The backbreaker for me was the fifth inning. Randy Arozarena led off with a 12-pitch walk – the longest plate appearance of his career – that bounced Warren from the game. With Fernando Cruz in, Dominic Canzone popped out on the second pitch he saw, for the second time that game making a quick out following a strong plate appearance by Randy. Julio Rodríguez then walked, and Josh Naylor singled up the middle to bring in a run and give the Mariners some breathing room, but more importantly, keep the line moving with just one out. But then a pair of Yankees fans stormed the field, causing a delay, and Aaron Boone yanked Cruz to replace him with lefty Tim Hill, and once again, Brendan Donovan went after the second pitch he saw for an inning-ending GIDP. Per Erickson, the existential question of early childhood (3-6 years) has to do with the safety of exploring the larger world: is it okay for me to do, move, and act? I would prefer the Mariners hitters ask themselves these questions when standing in the box considering their swing choices.
As expected, the Yankees went on to tie it up in the fifth against Miller. With Miller’s repertoire limited, the Yankees were clearly looking for the sinker or fastball early in counts. Austin Wells swung hard at a first-pitch sinker for a flyout, followed by George Lombard Junior doing the same on a four-seamer, flying out to Canzone. Finally, Trent Grisham was able to get one of those early-swing flyballs over the wall, jumping on a first-pitch sinker for a Yankee Stadium special (364 feet, .130 xBA), to bring the Yankees within a run once again. Ben Rice followed that with a double on one of the two sweepers Miller threw tonight, and then Spencer Jones again ambushed a first-pitch fastball for a back-to-back double, tying the game.
The Mariners had a chance to go ahead in the sixth. Cal Raleigh led off with another walk, and as frustrating as this game was, Cal Raleigh showing some better discipline at the plate is a good sign, she said, lacing up her clown shoes securely. But Colt Emerson struck out, and despite Taylor Ward reaching on a fielding error that should have been a GIDP, Young and Arozarena went on to make back-to-back two-pitch weak contact outs to quell that threat.
Bryce Miller managed to make it through the sixth, almost getting into some more two-out trouble when Ryan McMahon narrowly missed a homer on a splitter at the bottom of the zone; he was thrown out trying to stretch for a double thanks to a nails throw by Canzone in right. But the Mariners weren’t able to carry that momentum forward in the top of the seventh; Josh Naylor took a two-out walk but was picked off for the third out of the inning, surprised by Paul Blackburn. The Mariners took seven walks tonight, and scored just one of them. Late childhood and adolescence, says Erikson, is the age of looking around and assessing oneself against one’s peers: do I have what it takes to make it in the world? What is my identity? This late in the season, it feels like the Mariners still lack an identity.
The Yankees finally went ahead in this in the bottom of the seventh, making some more hard, loud contact off Gabe Speier. George Lombard Jr. singled, then scored on a Trent Grisham double. “That’s a double, and that’s the Yankee lead” crowed Karl Ravech on ESPN, and it felt like he said “and that’s the ballgame,” and that’s also how it felt, a feeling only intensified when Ben Rice added on with a hard-hit single up the middle Colt Emerson couldn’t handle to score another run. After an intentional walk to righty Heliot Ramos, Speier was supposed to get lefty Jazz Chisholm, but walked in a run instead to put the game even further out of reach. We’re up to the stage of early adulthood, marked by romantic/interpersonal relationships in Erikson’s schema, so I’m going to hold your hand while I tell you that Cole Young was removed prior to this inning with “dizziness.” Cole Young has been the emotionally loadbearing One Good Thing about this cursed season, so this one feels like an extra little kick in the throat from the baseball gods.
From here on, the game went about as you expect. The deficit got bigger, with Nick Davila giving up a second homer to Grisham, making it 10-5. The Mariners failed to add on. The announcers, both national and local, turned to different topics of conversation other than the game.
Middle adulthood, says Erickson, is driven by the existential question “can I make my life count?” (It always comes back to Mary Oliver, you know this by now.) There is something about a baseball season – spanning seasons, all the life events that can happen between March and October, easily markable gateposts – that inspires one to think about mortality. And there is something about the Mariners, in particular, that inspires one to think about how one is counting out the days of one’s life, or what it says about us to tie ourselves to this continually underperforming, disappointing, frustrating baseball franchise. I’m not there yet chronologically, but hoping I can mentally, at least, get to Erickson’s final stage of identity development sometime before the end of this season: ego integrity vs. despair, the answer to the question “was it okay to be me a Mariners fan?”
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