SEATTLE -- Sonny Gray is getting sick of this.

He’ll be feeling good. He’ll be coasting along. And then, in one inning, things will go haywire. He loses his feel and loses the zone, and the situation balloons on him. And all the while, he’ll still feel good about his stuff -- and, in many of those outings, he finds his sharp form again.

When he is feeling good, he’s the All-Star who struck out Ronald Acuña Jr. and Mookie Betts in a scoreless inning off this very mound at T-Mobile Park in the Midsummer Classic less than a week ago. But on Monday, that inconsistency flared up again in a four-run fifth inning that sank the Twins in a 7-6 loss to the Mariners, giving Gray far too much of a sense of déjà vu.

“It just gets frustrating, because continuously, you’re cruising -- you’re cruising, and you have one inning where it blows up on you -- and it’s just, it just continues to happen over and over, and it’s frustrating,” Gray said. “I’ve got to figure it out. I mean, I’ve got to figure that out. I don’t know what that is, but I’ve got to figure it out. If not, then ... I don’t know.”

Things started innocuously enough, as Gray dominated while throwing 46 pitches through four scoreless innings while his offense spotted him to a 2-0 lead. But after the first out of the fifth, a switch flipped: double, walk, hit batter, RBI single, popout, bases-loaded walk, two-run single.

Gray’s game plan found him leaning heavily on his sweeper, and in that fifth inning, he just yanked it, over and over and over, to his glove side, and he couldn’t make the adjustment. It pained him even more that only Teoscar Hernández’s double was particularly well hit, meaning that, by and large, Gray felt that he beat himself more than the Mariners beat him.

“It's the most I've seen him miss with the slider,” catcher Ryan Jeffers said. “It was getting a lot of swings because it was moving like I've never seen it move. It was just silly how much it was moving, how good it was today. Sometimes, the more it moves, the harder it is to have the feel for it.”

In the pivotal bases-loaded walk to Julio Rodríguez that preceded Jarred Kelenic’s two-out, two-run single, Gray got ahead in the count, 1-2, then yanked two of those sweepers to run the count full, and missed with a fastball to force home a run.

“That’s just unacceptable, to be honest with you,” Gray said. “Maybe it’s a mindset, but I’d rather give up back-to-back-to-back homers than continue to do what I’m doing. Maybe that’s got to switch. I don’t know. It’s just the same thing over and over. That’s the frustrating part.”

This sort of situation was particularly fresh on Gray’s mind because a similar thing happened in his final start of the first half, when he allowed a season-high six runs to the Orioles on July 8. A trio of singles loaded the bases in the second inning before Gray issued consecutive bases-loaded walks, then a two-run single, then another RBI single -- and then, another.

Then, he flipped the switch back and pitched four more scoreless innings like nothing had happened.

But this is a more recent phenomenon, as Gray has only issued eight bases-loaded walks in his 11-year MLB career -- and four have come this season, including three in his last two starts.

“I’ve been around the league for a long time now, and when you go out there and continue to do the same thing, it’s just [extremely] poor,” Gray said.

Often, throughout the season, when Gray has pitched himself into these jams, he’s been able to make the pressure pitches to get himself out of those situations, which is how he’d managed to post a 2.89 ERA entering Monday and gotten named to his first All-Star team since 2019.

But this has been a pain point for him all season, magnified now after his streak of 17 straight starts of three runs or fewer allowed to begin the year was snapped by two consecutive ugly outings. Due to the inconsistency and a lack of run support, he hasn’t won a start since April 30, and the team has only won three of his 13 starts since the end of April.

And he’s getting tired of it.

“I’ve got to throw the ball in the zone,” Gray said. “Clearly, I’m not.”