Welcome to Sliders, a weekly in-season MLB column that focuses on both the timely and timeless elements of the game.
The Seattle Mariners staggered home late Wednesday after a four-city trip that upended their identity. A team built on dynamic starting pitching lost seven of its last eight games through Baltimore, Queens, Williamsport, Pa., and Philadelphia, with an MLB-worst 7.75 rotation ERA in that stretch.
On Friday, though, the Mariners will be home. And for a team suddenly desperate for reliable starts, Bryan Woo is as close to automatic as any pitcher on the planet.
“I’m never trying to fool around,” Woo said this week, on the bench before a game in Philadelphia. “I’m never trying to spot corners and finesse. I’m going right after you. And I feel like if I do that consistently, then it breeds efficiency, and efficiency gets me deeper into games.”
No pitcher in a decade has been as efficient as Woo from the start of a season into late August. He has lasted at least six innings in each of his first 24 starts, becoming the first starter to do that since Zack Greinke in 2015.
Woo’s precision, though, makes him a distinct case in MLB history. According to the Mariners, he is the first pitcher ever to open a season with 24 consecutive starts of at least six innings and no more than two walks.
Last week’s bludgeoning aside, the Mariners have largely succeeded with a pitching philosophy like this: “Hitting is hard, and your stuff is good, so throw strikes.” No American League team gets more innings from its starters than Seattle, and Woo embodies the approach.
“It’s nice being out there in the bullpen knowing that the first five, six innings, you’re just able to kinda hang out,” reliever Gabe Speier said. “I mean, yeah, every once in a while there’ll be a blow-up game where guys start smacking balls, for sure. But attacking is going to work, like, 95 percent of the time. If you stick with that mentality throughout the whole year, I think you’re going to have a good year.”
Woo is 10-7 with a 3.02 ERA, striking out 153 and walking 28 across 152 innings. According to Sports Info Solutions, he throws fastballs (four-seamers or sinkers) 72.4 percent of the time, the most of any qualified pitcher in MLB.
To Woo, it’s not complicated. Whatever catcher Cal Raleigh or Mitch Garver puts down, he will throw. He might shake off a suggestion now and then, but he trusts their preparation and instincts — and trusting those around him has helped make Woo an All-Star.
Woo, 25, never saw himself as a pitcher in the first place. He wanted to be a shortstop and volunteered to pitch when his high school team needed an arm. In three seasons at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, he had a 6.36 ERA, allowing 11.6 hits and four walks per nine innings. When the draft came around after his junior year, Woo was recovering from Tommy John surgery.
“I was just kind of relying on if a scout liked me or not,” Woo said. “It wasn’t really like I was gonna have any numbers to show for it.”
That scout was Trent Black, now the Mariners’ director of pitching strategy. Every year, Black immerses himself in videos of draft prospects, studying the way their bodies move. From that, he identifies pitchers who can improve and thrive under Seattle’s guidance.
Black didn’t scout Woo in person, and he didn’t need to. He saw enough in the arm action and range of motion of an injured, ineffective pitcher to push for the Mariners to take him.
“Trent’s interpretation, and I’ll translate it roughly this way, was: ‘Through the lens I’m looking through, I would take him (first overall) in the draft — I just think there’s so much potential to help him grow,’” president of baseball operations Jerry Dipoto said. “So we worked something out with his agent; we drafted him in the sixth round, we overpaid him to urge him to sign rather than going back to school or a transfer portal. And he trusted us.”
Woo signed for $318,200 as the 174th pick in the 2021 draft — and so far, he has easily outperformed the 15 pitchers taken in the first round. The way he throws his fastballs distinguishes Woo from the rest.
“The uphill plane — and, really, his ability to move like that with an uphill plane — is unique,” Black said. “He’s able to actually create the upload point by getting down the mound and not compensating with his body to get there. That’s the unique piece of it. So you still see that clean delivery, but he’s somehow releasing it from a much lower height than normal.”
Opponents have hit just .147 off Woo’s four-seamer this season. He’s prone to home runs because he emphasizes high fastballs, but more often than not, that style helps him dominate.
“He locates it extremely well at the top part of the zone, so he’s elite at doing that one thing,” Black said. “And then you add in the velo component, and he’s 95-plus most of the time. A guy (like that) pitching at the top of the zone, he’s going to get a good amount of whiff.
“Now, the extra whiff that he gets, that’s the part we don’t understand fully. So that’s the deceptive piece. And maybe it’s because he’s got a two-seamer that works in the opposite direction. It’s hard to explain, but hitters feel it, and we’ve seen it play out over and over.”
For Woo, the last component was convincing himself to be the type of pitcher he’s become. Since Raleigh challenged him last summer to find a better routine and last longer in games, Woo has embraced the persona completely.
Starting pitching may never return to the 300- or even 250-inning benchmarks of the past. But for how the job has evolved, going six or seven innings every start is a remarkable achievement.
“I don’t think it’s talked about enough now with pitching — going deep into games and innings,” Woo said. “A lot of it’s just about strikeouts and velo and all that stuff. Being a workhorse is something that’s hard to quantify beyond innings, but I think the team feels it, the staff feels it, the coaches, the bullpen. It’s something that I take pride in.”
A Hall of Fame name lives on
According to the United States Social Security Administration, the name Ryan was the 11th most popular for boys born in 1991. That summer, in St. Louis, Ryne Stanek’s parents decided to change the spelling to honor Ryne Sandberg, the National League’s starting second baseman in the All-Star Game that month.
“They were going to name me ‘Ryan’ regardless, but wanted to spell it like that,” said Stanek, a veteran Mets reliever. “My dad just respected the way he played and liked him as a player — obviously didn’t like the Cubs, but liked him.”
It takes a strong reputation for a Cardinals fan to name his son after a Cubs superstar. But that was the appeal of Sandberg, the Hall of Famer who died last month, at age 65, from metastatic prostate cancer. Sandberg’s nephew, Jared Sandberg, was Stanek’s manager with the Triple-A Durham Bulls. But he never had the chance to meet his namesake.
Ryne Stanek reacts during an appearance against the Brewers last month. (Brad Penner-Imagn Images)
“All you heard about him was nothing but great things,” Stanek said. “Just very much what people would consider now to be an old-school or a purist mindset is what I gathered: You play hard, you respect the game, you do the right things.”
Only five players named Ryne have ever reached the majors: Ryne Duren, a near-sighted ’50s relief ace whose given name was Rinold; Sandberg (who was named after Duren); and three recent pitchers — Stanek, Ryne Nelson of the Arizona Diamondbacks and Ryne Harper, who pitched for Minnesota and Washington from 2019 to 2021.
“It’s cool to have something that you’re almost attached to since birth,” Stanek said. “It feels like destiny, a little bit.”
Nelson — who was also named for Sandberg as a twist on the name Ryan — is having a solid year for Arizona (6-3, 3.58 ERA in 113 innings), and Stanek has pitched in two World Series across a workmanlike nine-year career.
But any future Rynes, Stanek said, will probably have to be named for Sandberg.
“I’ll go out on a limb,” he said. “Nobody’s probably naming their kids after me and Ryne Nelson.”
Gimme FiveLife lessons from Clint Hurdle
The Colorado Rockies were the first team to clinch a losing record for 2025, naturally, but they’ve quietly had a respectable second half. After winning just two series before the All-Star break, they won four of their first nine series after it. That won’t lift the Rockies out of last place, but the modern benchmarks for futility — the 1962 Mets (.250 winning percentage) and 2024 White Sox (121 losses) — seem safe.
Clint Hurdle, the interim bench coach who managed the Rockies to their only World Series appearance in 2007, is a reminder of better times. He is also a new author, with “Hurdle-isms: Wit and Wisdom from a Lifetime in Baseball” published in February.
In an interview before a Rockies game earlier this season, Hurdle — who sends a “daily encouragement” email to scores of friends around the game — shared five lessons to live by.
There’s two kinds of people in life and in sport — those that are humble and those that are about to be. “We’ve been humbled. But you have to have courage. Through the humility, you can build courage. And we’re learning from that position of humility, which I think can provide you with a better foundation moving forward.”
Shower well at the end of the night. “Honestly self-evaluate what went right, what didn’t go right, but then go and wash it all off. Because you’re going somewhere — whether it’s (with) your wife and kids, whether it’s (with) friends and family — and the next day is a new opportunity. You’ve got to show up fresh for that new opportunity.”
We’re hired to do the work now. “We’re not promised to get to sit by the pool and sip lemonade at the end of the day. I’m here to do the work now. I don’t know what next year’s going to bring, but I’m not focused on next year. I’m going to be the best version of myself, to coach, to lead, to do what’s asked of me while I’m here. And by modeling that example, hopefully that rubs off on the players. That’s their responsibility as well.”
Life’s not fair — the only thing fair in life’s a ball hit between first and third. “And the thing that makes it fair is that it’s not fair for everybody. How you react and how you adapt to what’s not fair speaks to your integrity and your character.”
Have a white-belt mentality and never stop learning. “The white-belt mentality comes from karate. I was the manager of the Rockies and my son wanted nothing to do with baseball. So he starts with karate. He was just a beginner, he was nine. He goes, ‘Dad, I got the white belt. It’s the best belt — you know why?’ I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘Because it means I get to learn everything about this.’ So that white-belt mentality really helps.”
Off the GridBob “Hurricane” Hazle — Braves/.300 season
For the .300 season category on the Immaculate Grid, I often think of players who hit very well in partial duty — a guy who singled in his only at-bat, like Jeff Banister in 1991, or a free agent-to-be who surged after a trade, like Mark Teixeira with the Angels in 2008.
So, on Monday, when the Grid called for a Braves player who hit .300, Bob “Hurricane” Hazle was the pick. (And not just because it’s hurricane season.) Called up to the Milwaukee Braves in late July 1957, Hazle was an instant sensation.
A month after his promotion, Hazle was somehow hitting .507, with 34 hits in 67 at-bats. He slammed five homers and had an otherworldly 1.407 OPS.
“It doesn’t seem possible that anyone can keep up such a pace,” teammate Red Schoendienst told The New York Times. “But right now the kid is Stan Musial, Mickey Mantle and Ted Williams all wrapped in one.”
The magic lasted right through the World Series. Hazle hit .403 in the regular season (54 for 134), and in Game 7 of the World Series, at Yankee Stadium, his single off Don Larsen sparked a four-run rally and sent the Braves to a 5-0 victory. It was their only championship between 1914 in Boston and 1995 in Atlanta.
Hazle — who got his nickname from the actual Hurricane Hazel, which had struck his native South Carolina three years earlier — faded as quickly as he arrived. In a 1958 season disrupted by two beanballs, he batted just .211 with the Braves and Detroit Tigers. He retired from the minors two years later, washed up at 29.
Thirty years after Hazle’s indelible summer, writer David Lamb found him in South Carolina, working as a traveling whiskey salesman. The Braves had given Hazle a skimpy bonus for his 1957 heroics — just $1,000 — and he left the sport bitter. But while Hazle could never explain his moment of glory, he always treasured it.
“I wasn’t doing anything different; it was just that everything was working for me,” Hazle told Lamb, in the Los Angeles Times. “I didn’t want to wake up. Gosh, that was a good life.”
Classic clipBob Uecker and the “Mr. Belvedere” All-Stars, 1989
The Milwaukee Brewers will celebrate the life of Bob Uecker on Sunday, when they host the San Francisco Giants at American Family Field. Among the attendees will be Uecker’s co-stars from “Mr. Belvedere,” the ABC sitcom that ran from 1985 to 1990.
The first episode of the final season, which ran on Sept. 16, 1989, was a tribute to Uecker’s clout. Only the most beloved .200 hitter could have assembled such a staggering guest list: Hank Aaron, Ernie Banks, Johnny Bench, Reggie Jackson, Harmon Killebrew, Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays… and Robert Goulet (he owned the field, you see).
Those eight, plus Uecker, play a sandlot game against a bunch of kids. They’re not especially spry, and the jokes are pretty painful. But if you thought “The Simpsons” had the best single-episode collection of baseball talent in 1992’s celebrated “Homer At The Bat” — you’re way off.
Going by Wins Above Replacement — even with nothing from Goulet and a negative figure from Uecker — it’s a rout. Here’s how the “Belvedere Bulldogs” compare with the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant ringers. (In defense of S.N.P.P. scout Waylon Smithers, his boss’ top choices were all dead.)
Mr. Belvedere
PlayerCareer bWAR
Hank Aaron
143.2
Ernie Banks
67.8
Johnny Bench
75.1
Robert Goulet
0
Reggie Jackson
74
Harmon Killebrew
60.4
Mickey Mantle
110.3
Willie Mays
156.2
Bob Uecker
-1
Total:
686
The Simpsons
PlayerCareer bWAR
Wade Boggs
91.4
Jose Canseco
42.4
Roger Clemens
139.2
Ken Griffey Jr.
83.8
Don Mattingly
42.4
Steve Sax
25.7
Mike Scioscia
26.1
Ozzie Smith
76.9
Darryl Strawberry
42.2
Total:
570.1
“LOL,” texted Sax, when asked how Springfield would fare against the Belvedere bunch. “I think we would lose!”
(Top photo of Bryan Woo: Al Bello/Getty Images)