From CBS sports:
Reasons to not bring in Ray
1. He is a starter. Starting pitchers are used to longer, more drawn-out warmups. All players are creatures of habit anyway, so it's always risky to bring a starter in relief. Some handle it well, but you never know until you try it. Ray has only appeared in relief four times in his entire career, with three of them coming his rookie year in 2014 and one coming in 2020. That's it.
2. He gives up lots of home runs. Ray finished second in the AL in home runs allowed this season with 32. Even last year, when he won the Cy Young, he was fourth with 33 allowed. Alvarez is one of the best power hitters in baseball and exactly one play beats you: A home run.
3. He hasn't thrown well lately. Ray had a 5.27 ERA with eight home runs allowed in 27 1/3 innings in his last five regular-season starts. He then coughed up four runs on six hits, including two home runs, in three innings in Game 2 of the Wild Card Series.
4. The Astros have owned him. Ray made three starts against the Astros this season. He gave up 23 hits and 13 earned runs in 10 2/3 innings (10.97 ERA, 2.81 WHIP). Astros hitters slashed .442/.509/.865 against him. Small sample? I guess. Nothing really lines up as encouraging here, though.
5. He's a fastball guy. Ray throws fastballs nearly 40 percent of the time. That's his most frequent offering. Alvarez was the second-most valuable hitter against fastballs this season (behind Judge, unsurprisingly), hitting .355 with a .752 slugging against the heater. The homer came on a sinker, but I'm just talking about the thought process to bring Ray in.
Just on the surface, I've got five pretty good reasons to not use Ray when there was one reason -- albeit a flimsy one -- to use him. It was a no-brainer to avoid pulling the trigger on the move.
"We talked about it coming into the series," Mariners manager Scott Servais said after the game. "We talked about it pregame today. I looked at it in the seventh inning and said, 'hey, this could happen.' So that was the plan going in. End of the day, you have a plan, we still got to execute it."
It's true. It was the plan and they needed to execute the plan better. But it's also pretty easy to argue it was a bad plan.