SEATTLE – More than $100 to park five blocks away. Get here an hour early? You’ll need all that time to wait in line to buy a “2025 Postseason” hat.
Whatever, there is playoff baseball in Seattle and the petty considerations of cost and convenience were swept aside by throngs of fans desperate to participate.
They surged into T-Mobile park by the thousands. Hours before first pitch, this playoff-starved baseball town turned out to watch its stars continue their early autumn romp that saw them lock up the AL West and secure home-field advantage in the American League Division Series.
The fans brought the energy and the Mariners stars delivered. A three-hit game for Cal Raleigh. A home run and another key RBI for Julio Rodriguez.
Unfortunately, there are other players, too, and the tepid performance from the bottom of Seattle’s lineup doomed the home team’s chances in Saturday’s 3-2 11-inning loss. Now the Mariners have lost home-field advantage and face the best pitcher in baseball, Tarik Skubal, on Sunday.
Fans filled every sidewalk outside T-Mobile Park two full hours before first pitch on Saturday.
When they got to their seats, they stood and roared through the entire extended player introduction and the national anthem. They stood and cheered through first pitches, through warmups, through Aerosmith blaring over the loudspeakers – this crowd wanted to stand and cheer for their playoff baseball team, regardless of reason or context.
With few exceptions, most fans didn’t feel their seatbacks until starter George Kirby had thrown a few past Detroit leadoff man Gleyber Torres.
This was a different crowd than the one that greeted the Mariners on Oct. 15, 2022, in the team’s first playoff game in Seattle in 21 years. That was a loud crowd, too, but maybe not so proud. At that time the home team already had its back against the walls, down two games to the visiting Astros, and the smoke-filled air meant the batters’ hacks over 17 scoreless innings were matched by coughs from the crowd.
The 47,290 fans who packed T-Mobile had plenty to cheer for early, as starting pitcher George Kirby struck out the side around a single to top the first inning, and the tension erupted out of the ballpark when Rodriguez smoked one 435 feet in the fourth inning to give the home team a 1-0 lead.
The joy of release from the first score soon gave way to tension mounting. Mariners manager Dan Wilson, in a decision that will continue to linger in fans’ minds, left a laboring Kirby in to face his nemesis Kerry Carpenter, having thrown 90 pitches with a runner on second.
Carpenter had four hits in his previous eight at-bats against Kirby, all of them home runs. Four pitches later he had another, and the Tigers had a 2-1 lead.
Rodriguez tied the game in the sixth with a single to score Randy Arozarena, but with two runners on and no outs Seattle couldn’t capitalize further, leaving a tie game and uneasy feelings for fans that remember the 18-inning loss the last time the Mariners hosted a postseason game.
The decision to let Kirby face Carpenter again was an example of the knife’s edge on which playoff games are played. Time and again Seattle came oh-so-close to breaking it open. Raleigh’s first at-bat saw a ball ripped just inches foul that would surely have been an easy double. The failed eighth-inning rally where deep, true blasts by JP Crawford and Arozarena petered out just short of the centerfield fence.
Seattle came into the game heavily favored, but the longer the favored team doesn’t take control, the odds start to even.
Zach McKinstry finally put the Tigers up for good in the 11th, scratching a single up the middle to score. Spencer Torkelson, who made it to second on a wild pitch. The Mariners who bat 4-through-9 in the lineup did not achieve a single hit between them.
Maybe they will do better against Skubal.