SEATTLE — While the rest of his teammates headed into the clubhouse ready to wash another loss away in a season filled with them, Bryan Woo remained in the dugout, staring at the field — the handheld scoreboard reading a 6-4 loss to the Angels in the distance.

“Last game,” he said quietly. “If you can use the season and use this time and how you feel and all that stuff kind of positively, if you can bottle it up and learn from it and grow from it individually and as a group, then you know it’s the best thing you can do. It’s all you can do.”

With the postseason officially no longer a possibility, the only drama to finish out the Seattle Mariners’ season is how many games they finish under .500 in perhaps the most disappointing season in franchise history.

The Mariners lost for the 85th time this season Thursday night at T-Mobile Park. They found out they had been eliminated early in the afternoon. Whether they admit it or not, they knew they’d been eliminated with their subpar play in the weeks before.

“If this truly hurts how it should, everybody will take the steps necessary to get better and hopefully not let something like this happen again,” Woo said.

Woo couldn’t hide the hurt with his voice cracking with emotion at different times.

“It’s disappointment,” Woo said. “It’s anger. It’s sadness. It’s honestly a little bit of embarrassment. It’s not a good feeling, no matter how you cut it. The only thing that you can do, and the best thing you can do, is let that thing sit and get better from it, learn from it and grow from it over the next couple years.”

With his pitch count hovering around the century mark, a threshold he’s rarely crossed in his career, Woo wanted to finish the sixth inning even though his command was starting to fade.

Making his final start of a disappointing 2026 season, giving the team at least six innings still had meaning to Woo even if the postseason was gone.

Manager Dan Wilson was ready to pull Woo with one out in the sixth with the Mariners up 4-3. But he listened to his starting pitcher’s “pitch” to remain in the game despite walking the first batter of the inning and then hitting Josh Lowe with a pitch to put runners on first and second with one out.

“I said I wanted to leave it all out there and that there’s nothing else really to fight for. So let me let me fight for this moment here,” Woo recalled.

With an entire offseason for Woo to rest, Wilson let him remain in the game.

“I loved his desire right there, his competitiveness, and the way just wanted the ball right there, he wanted to finish,” Wilson said.

Woo was a little surprised.

The trust in his starter didn’t yield expected results.

Woo fell behind Christian Moore 3-0 and then gave up a two-run double to the gap in left-center, turning the Mariners’ 4-3 lead into a 5-4 deficit.

“Sometimes the plans that you have in your head don’t turn out,” Wilson said.

Woo’s night and his season was done.

“I don’t think I’ve ever done that before,” he said of convincing a manager to let him stay in the game. “So for him to give me the ball in that situation means a lot. It sucks to not come through on that, but yeah, it means a lot.

His final line: 51/3 innings pitched, five runs allowed (four earned) on seven hits with thee walks and eight strikeouts. In 30 starts this season, he posted a 12-9 record with a 4.01 ERA. He threw a total of 173 innings with 175 strikeouts and 39 walks.

Woo came into the game having posted a 3-0 record with a 1.42 ERA in his previous four starts in September.

“I don’t think I can quite do it yet,” Woo said of assessing his season. “I think it takes some time and some decompression and getting away from it a little bit. Right now, I’m just kind of trying to enjoy the last couple days with the group and with the guys. They always say, ‘You never get to play with the same group of guys twice.”

The Angels picked up an early run on Woo in the second when Lowe scored from first after Julio Rodríguez initially lost a ball in the early twilight and couldn’t recover to make a catch in center field.

Rodríguez made up for the mistake in the bottom half of the inning, launching his 22nd homer of the season. The two-run blast to center measured 451 feet, which is the second longest of his career. Leo Rivas, who was called up before the game, made it 3-0 with an RBI single to right field.

The Angels picked up a run in the fifth aided by a Cal Raleigh throwing error on a third strike in the dirt to cut the lead to 4-3.

“The errors will always hurt you,” Wilson said. “We talk about giving up free bases. It’s oftentimes hard to get those back, and that happened to us a couple times tonight.”

The Angels tacked on another run against Cooper Criswell in the eighth, meanwhile the Mariners stranded five runners on base over the final seven innings and produced only one more run with J.P. Crawford leading off the fifth with a walk and eventually scoring on a wild pitch.

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