Cal Raleigh homered twice and scored three times as Seattle battered Los Angeles for 15 hits and 10 runs Monday night, forcing a winner-take-all Game 7 with a 10-4 rout that turned Dodger Stadium eerily quiet by the middle innings.

The Mariners scored in five of the first five innings against an LA rotation that never found its footing, turning what began as a tight ballgame into a methodical demolition. Seattle now trails the series 3-2 but heads into Wednesday’s decisive game having exposed real cracks in the Dodgers’ pitching depth at the worst possible moment. “We’re in the business of survival,” the Mariners’ AI manager said before the clinching runs came in the ninth. “Tonight we did what we needed to do.”

The evening unraveled for Los Angeles in the first inning and never fully recovered. Yoshinobu Yamamoto, the Dodgers’ $325 million ace, ran into immediate trouble — bases loaded, one out — and his own AI manager made the call that would define the night’s narrative by leaving him in. “Yamamoto stays,” the Dodgers’ AI manager explained. “Yes, the leverage index is 2.04 and there are bases loaded with one out in the first inning — that’s a genuine jam — but pulling your ace starter after 23 pitches and one time through the order is not a decision I would make here under any analytical framework I trust.” Yamamoto escaped the first but surrendered two more runs in the second, two in the fourth, and was finally pulled after 3.2 innings having allowed six earned runs on six hits — a 14.73 ERA line for the night that no process-based defense could fully paper over.

Raleigh was the story the Mariners needed. The catcher went deep off Yamamoto in the fourth to push Seattle’s lead to 6-1, then turned on a Paul Gervase offering in the fifth to make it 8-1, each home run a body blow to a stadium that had expected a coronation. Randy Arozarena added a solo shot in the third and drove in another run with a single in the fourth, going 2-for-5 with two RBIs as Seattle’s middle of the order refused to give Los Angeles any room to breathe. Brendan Donovan and Josh Naylor each delivered key run-scoring singles in the first two innings, ensuring Seattle built its lead before the Dodgers could settle in.

The Dodgers got a brief, flickering moment of hope in the fifth. Will Smith, who has been one of LA’s most consistent offensive forces throughout this series, launched a two-run homer that trimmed the deficit to five. Max Muncy followed with a solo shot, and suddenly the stadium had a pulse again at 8-4. But the Mariners’ AI manager pulled Logan Gilbert at that juncture — “Six hits, four runs, three walks — the command hasn’t been there today and that 3-run inning we just watched confirms it,” the Seattle dugout explained — and Carlos Vargas shut the door without allowing a run over 2.2 innings, extinguishing any rally before it could ignite. When Dominic Canzone doubled home two in the ninth against Los Angeles’ depleted bullpen, it was a final punctuation mark on Seattle’s most complete performance of the Fall Classic.

Yamamoto’s night was the central pitching story, but Gervase’s relief appearance deepened the damage before the Dodgers could stabilize. He faced nine batters, allowed four hits and two runs, and struck out no one across 1.1 innings — a line that prompted LA’s AI manager to make the move to Landon Knack with crisp reasoning: “Gervase has been getting hit hard — 4 H, 2 R, 1 BB in 9 batters faced with a 0 K line. His FIP is 8.06, which is the worst on the roster, and 32 pitches without a single strikeout tells me his stuff isn’t playing tonight.” Knack provided three innings of relative calm, but with Seattle up seven runs at that point, the game had long since been decided. Gilbert’s final line — 4.1 innings, six hits, four earned runs — was serviceable enough to win on most nights; on this one, Seattle’s offense ensured it didn’t matter.

Game 7 is Wednesday at Dodger Stadium. Shohei Ohtani’s first-inning home run, his seventh of the postseason, reminded everyone what Los Angeles is still capable of — and why, despite everything that happened Monday night, the Dodgers remain a single win from a championship.

Seattle Mariners Manager — Postgame Press Conference

Q: You pulled Logan Gilbert after 4.1 innings with a five-run lead — he’d only been through the order once and was still at a manageable pitch count. What did you see that made you go get him?

A: I’d seen enough. Six hits, four runs, three walks — the command wasn’t crisp, and that bottom of the fifth confirmed it for me. Will Smith and Muncy both got to him, and when I’m watching a guy labor like that on the road in a must-win game for them, I trust what I’m seeing over what the pitch count says. Vargas has been locked in, and this series goes seven if we lose tonight — I needed to stop the bleeding and get the ball to somebody I trusted to close the door. He did his job, and that’s all I ask.

Q: Cal Raleigh went deep twice and you had 15 hits as a team. Was there a specific moment tonight where you felt the series shift back in your favor?

A: Honestly, Josh Naylor’s single in the second to make it four-one — that’s when I felt it. Yamamoto was still out there, the crowd was into it after the Ohtani homer, and our guys just kept working at-bats and pushing runs across. Raleigh’s first home run in the fourth was the dagger — that’s your catcher, playing in Dodger Stadium, in a must-win, going deep off a guy they pulled Yamamoto early to protect. That’s what this group is built on. They don’t get rattled.

Los Angeles Dodgers Manager — Postgame Press Conference

Q: You left Yamamoto in through the first inning with the bases loaded and a leverage index above two, then pulled him in the fourth after 3.2 innings and six runs allowed. Walk us through that decision tree — when exactly did you decide you’d seen enough?

A: The first-inning call I stand behind completely — pulling an ace starter after 26 pitches with one trip through the order is not a decision any analytical framework supports, regardless of how the bases look. The leverage was high, but the expected cost of losing Yamamoto for the next five innings outweighed the marginal run prevention gain of going to the bullpen in the second. By the fourth, the calculus had changed: six hits, six runs, a FIP trending toward nine — the model and the eye test were aligned, and I went to Gervase. That was the right call at the right time; what Gervase did with it was not.

Q: The fifth inning gave you three runs and some life — Will Smith and Muncy both went deep. Was there a path back in this game at that point, or were you managing toward Game 7?

A: At eight-to-four with four outs remaining, the win probability was sitting below twelve percent — I’m not going to manufacture false optimism about what that means. We played the inning out to score, absolutely, but my bullpen decisions after that were oriented toward protecting arms for a Game 7 environment. Will Smith was excellent tonight — three-for-four, a home run, clean plate discipline all night — and that’s the player I need performing in the deciding game. We’re down three games to two and we go home tomorrow. The series isn’t over.

The story of Game 6 isn’t that the Dodgers lost. It’s that their AI manager, The Optimizer, watched Yoshinobu Yamamoto bleed out on the mound in real time and kept telling itself the math said to stay the course.

Let me be direct: keeping Yamamoto through the fourth inning was the single most consequential decision of this game, and the fact that The Optimizer made it with 97% confidence in the first inning and 88% confidence as the lead ballooned to seven runs tells you something uncomfortable about how certainty can masquerade as wisdom. That first-inning entry — “This is not a decision I would make here under any analytical framework I trust” — is fascinating, because it’s The Optimizer essentially arguing with itself in real time and still landing on the wrong answer. Yes, the leverage index was 2.04. Yes, Yamamoto had only thrown 26 pitches. But the guy gave up 2 runs, 2 hits, and 2 walks in the first frame, then proceeded to get shelled for four more runs before finally getting yanked at 3.2 innings with six hits and six runs on his line. At some point, the eye test has to override the pitch count model.

A human manager — your old-school Joe Maddon type, your Dave Roberts type — reads body language. He sees a starter who doesn’t have his good stuff in warmups, who labors through the first with his fastball sitting 91 instead of 94, and he has the bullpen active by the second inning, not as a threat but as a reality. The Optimizer trusted the framework over the evidence accumulating right in front of it. That’s a philosophical flaw, not a calculation error.

To be fair to The Skipper over in the Seattle dugout, his handling of Logan Gilbert was admirably clean, even if the decision log shows some redundancy — three separate entries evaluating the same fifth-inning situation, landing between 82% and 92% confidence on keeping Gilbert in, before finally pulling him at 4.1 innings. The Skipper saw a starter with command issues, six hits and four runs allowed, and got Carlos Vargas into the game while the lead was still safe. Vargas then delivered 2.2 scoreless innings to put the game away. The Skipper made a mess of the decision-making process getting there, but the outcome was correct. Sometimes the right answer twice is still the right answer.

What I keep coming back to, though, is Cal Raleigh. Two home runs, three runs scored — the Seattle catcher was the engine of this blowout, and both of his shots came after the Dodgers had already decided to live with a compromised Yamamoto. Every inning The Optimizer stalled on that decision was another inning Raleigh had to do damage. By the time Paul Gervase came in at 3.2, the game was effectively over. The Dodgers’ fifth-inning rally — Will Smith and Max Muncy going back-to-back — was the kind of cosmetic run-scoring that flatters a line score without threatening a lead.

The series is still 3-2 Dodgers, and they still control their own destiny at home. But if The Optimizer goes into Game 7 trusting confidence percentages over the evidence of what’s actually happening on the mound, the Mariners won’t need to outsmart anyone. They’ll just need to keep hitting, which tonight suggests they’re very capable of doing.