If given the option to choose any player to throw the final pitch of the season for the Seattle Mariners over the past few years, Andr\u00e9s Mu\u00f1oz is the savvy selection. For Mu\u00f1oz to be pitching, Seattle\u2019s final game must be both close and meaningful. The 2023 and 2024 seasons ended on close victories, but they carried no playoff possibility, no cause to exert the Tommy John veteran who turns 27 years old today. 2025\u2019s final game, by contrast, was the most meaningful in the history of the Seattle Mariners. Mu\u00f1oz pitched the final frame for Seattle, a scoreless inning to cap a scoreless playoffs in 8.1 innings yielding just two hits and a pair of walks. He did what was asked of him, and he did it brilliantly, as the back-to-back All-Star has done since arriving in Seattle over half a decade ago.<\/p>\n
More Mr. Rogers than Nasty Boy<\/a>, the Mexican fireballer known by Rick Rizzs as Se\u00f1or Smoke as a possible homage to Mexican pitching legend Aurelio L\u00f3pez<\/a> has become a given for Seattle. It\u2019s a given that Seattle will enter 2026 with reasonable expectation for top-notch high-leverage bullpen, as they can count on Mu\u00f1oz. It\u2019s a given the man known for his mild manner and doting affection for his feline companion Mathilda is equally trustworthy to take on the ninth inning as he is to ensure the litter box is tidy and all meals are accounted for.<\/p>\n After tinkering with a near-sidearm slot in 2023, Mu\u00f1oz continued to climb back up to a three-quarters angle in 2025 as he\u2019d moved towards in 2024. Slightly surprisingly, given his brilliance a season ago, Mu\u00f1oz mixed a number of things up. The righty\u2019s raised arm elevation was paired with a return to working in the strike zone. His breakout 2024 came with a daring degree of confidence in drawing swings, throwing strikes barely 41% of the time per Baseball Savant, 4th-least among 351 pitchers with at least 50 innings pitched that year. A rise to the upper-40s is still infrequent for Mu\u00f1oz, but had him merely in the upper echelons instead of leading the pack.<\/p>\n And yet, it\u2019s part of what sets Mu\u00f1oz ahead of his fellow Bomberos. Eduard Bazardo, Gabe Speier, and Carlos Vargas live in the zone, as do Bryan Woo, George Kirby, Bryce Miller, Emerson Hancock, and Logan Evans. Even Luis Castillo and Logan Gilbert, who chase chases more frequently than the rest of the rotation, live in the zone far more frequently than Mu\u00f1oz. But like his partner in crime Matt Brash, Mu\u00f1oz has the stuff and the skill to dance in and out of the zone at maximum effort. Not only is it brilliantly effective in the moment, but Mu\u00f1oz is setting himself up for some impressive all-time totals if his capacity to keep the ball in the yard, on the ground, or in the catcher\u2019s mitt continues.<\/p>\n The leader for many Mariners bullpen records is Jeff Nelson, a childhood favorite of mine whose deceptive delivery and sweeping slider stymied opponents over 447.1 innings, striking out 471 and walking 232. with 8.3 bWAR and a 3.26\/3.67 ERA\/FIP in the heart of the Kingdome and Steroid Era. In WAR, he\u2019s only topped in a rounding error by J.J. Putz, the famed \u201cBig Guy\u201d (or, in tougher times, \u201cthis Big Fucker,\u201d miss you Dave). It is just those two, and the indomitable Arthur Rhodes, who stand ahead of Mu\u00f1oz by WAR among M\u2019s relievers, with Mu\u00f1oz having roughly 50 fewer frames than Rhodes thus far, ~100 less Putz, and over 200 behind Nelson. In metrics valuable for projection (e.g. K-BB%, whiff and GB%), and those best used for simple categorization (e.g. saves), Mu\u00f1oz is ascendant, with 77 saves putting him in a season or two of Kazuhiro Sasaki\u2019s club record of 129. His 2.28 ERA is the best bar none of any M\u2019s reliever with over 150 innings, with a FIP of 2.63 trailing only It\u2019s difficult to ask a player so brilliant in his role to stretch further, and indeed the M\u2019s see Mu\u00f1oz\u2019s responsibility to cover his inning, maybe one out more in a pinch. His 324 strikeouts in 236.1 innings are a sign of how much the sport has changed in even 10, 20, 30 years. The next time Mu\u00f1oz faces a player the second time through the order will be the first time in his entire career. And yet, all he can do is what is asked of him. What that means is 15-20 years from now, sloppy young – and young at heart – folks will stumble through the \u2018Pen under the watchful eye of a mural to the greatest reliever in Seattle\u2019s team history. Maybe they\u2019ll paint Mathilda too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If given the option to choose any player to throw the final pitch of the season for the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":523712,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2392],"tags":[66354,5,620,4,619,65,38419,3235],"class_list":{"0":"post-523711","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-seattle-mariners","8":"tag-40-in-40","9":"tag-baseball","10":"tag-mariners","11":"tag-mlb","12":"tag-seattle","13":"tag-seattle-mariners","14":"tag-seattle-mariners-previews","15":"tag-seattlemariners"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/115905705014293773","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/523711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=523711"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/523711\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/523712"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=523711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=523711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=523711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Edwin D\u00edaz and Rhodes.<\/p>\n