Mariners score a season-high nine runs on 42 day
One of the most challenging parts of baseball is the grind of playing a game every day, and also, one of the biggest gift of baseball is getting to play a game every day. Tonight the Mariners swept away yesterday’s bad vibes and disappointing loss to the Cubs with a team win that featured what so many of the games so far this season have lacked: solid pitching, grinding out at-bats, stacking hits, and playing clean defense, all working together in harmony. Of course, it doesn’t hurt to have a player making a debut; as Lou wrote, a debut is one of baseball’s most beautiful moments, creating a generous pride that connects us all as people. Tonight, Mariners fans were gifted an opportunity to feel that generous pride, and that generosity was extended by all members of the team, authoring one of the most complete team wins of the season.
George Kirby had a solid start, going six innings and allowing two runs on five hits, with no walks and six strikeouts. The one nit to pick could be over pitch efficiency; he got into some longer battles with hitters, going to three-ball counts five times and often needing six or more pitches to retire a hitter. Postgame Kirby said he was experimenting with a different slider grip to something akin to what Logan Gilbert uses, as an attempt to get the pitch more vertical movement and maybe elicit some empty swings, although he wasn’t using that grip consistently and per Gameday, he didn’t get any whiffs on the slider tonight, period, although he did get five called strikes on the 14 he threw. Overall, Kirby got a respectable number of whiffs—12, putting him just off the leaderboard for today—but Servais emphasized the focus is on getting hitters to become uncomfortable in the box against him once again. There’s still work to be done on that front, but for tonight, Kirby did all the Mariners needed him to do and more, limiting the Reds to just two runs over a solid six innings.
Of course, it helps when you have some run support. In a refreshing change of pace, the Mariners got off to an early start offensively, exhausting Reds starter Frankie Montas in the first and making him throw 45 pitches. Montas didn’t have his command at all tonight, and the Mariners made him pay, with J.P. Crawford and Julio Rodríguez opening the game with back-to-back walks. In a 3-1 count, Jorge Polanco punished this fastball over the plate for his second home run in as many days:
✨ Exquisite ✨ pic.twitter.com/UEqGGAzquk
— Seattle Mariners (@Mariners) April 16, 2024
That would be the hardest-hit ball of the game at 109.9 mph, and it wasn’t particularly close. Polanco said postgame he’s been refocusing on swinging at better pitches, trying to get back on track, and he’s feeling better about where he is right now.
Montas’s poor command would bite him again in the third, when he issued a leadoff walk to Polanco, not wanting a repeat of the first inning, but then left a cutter on the plate for Mitch Haniger, who had ground out an 11-pitch at-bat ending in a walk in the first inning. Mitch didn’t miss this one:
Mitch Haniger, through the marine layer. pic.twitter.com/Zhrnz4DaGn
— Daniel Kramer (@DKramer_) April 16, 2024
That would chase Montas from the game, the earliest the Mariners have been able to get a starting pitcher out yet this young season. Often times this season the Mariners have been ill-matched against starters on top of their stuff, but it’s been even more frustrating to watch as they’ve struggled to get things going against pitchers who haven’t had pinpoint command, landing little slashes but never a final blow.
However, sometimes chasing a starter early isn’t a great thing. The Reds got on the board in the second, when Kirby gave up a early home run to Jeimer Candelario, who got after a pitch up in the zone but too far towards the middle of the plate; he gave up his second run in the fourth, when Christian Encarnacion-Strand ambushed a first-pitch sinker at the top of the zone, to be brought home on the dumbest hit imaginable from old frenemy Jake Fraley. I will not dignify it by embedding it, but feel free to click if you’re the kind of person who likes watching people drop their ice cream cones on the sidewalk or when people wait until the last possible second to merge ahead of you in traffic. That made the score a slightly-tighter 5-2, which somehow feels significantly less comfortable than 5-1.
Meanwhile, Nick Martinez was able to cool down the Mariners, holding them scoreless for three innings before giving up one very big run in the sixth: Jonatan Clase’s first hit, and first RBI, at the big-league level. Ty France led off with a ground ball double down the line, followed by a single to put runners at the corners. After Luke Raley popped out, up came Clase for the third time already: his first time up in the first he had flown out (which as someone pointed out in the game thread, might have been an RBI sac fly had France not hit into yet another double play) and in the third he was robbed of a bloop base hit due to the incredible speed of Elly De La Cruz—again, not embedding, but feel free to click on that link if you’re the kind of person who likes watching nature documentaries about incredibly fast animals or doing sweet tricks on the half pipe in the 1987 video game classic California Games. This time, though, Clase got the better of his Dominican countrymate, sneaking a base hit past the diving EDLC (although sadly at the same time robbing us of the matchup of Elly’s Arm vs. Clase’s Footspeed—something we’ll probably see at some point this series).
Jonatan Clase checks off two firsts with one swing for the @Mariners:
Hit ✅
RBI ✅ pic.twitter.com/ww4xoQ151A— MLB Pipeline (@MLBPipeline) April 16, 2024
The Reds drew a run closer when Gabe Speier came on for Kirby in the seventh and gave up a rare left-on-left homer to now-just-enemy Jake Fraley, but the Mariners answered right back against reliever Buck Farmer in the seventh, with the top of the lineup finally clicking together like they did during the best games they played this spring. Julio Rodríguez started off by parachuting in a fly ball single and Polanco followed him with a walk (although not directly, because Julio was already standing on second, having stolen it). Then Mitch Haniger said “hey, I do this ‘ground ball double’ thing too” and smoked one of his own down the line, scoring Julio. A sac fly from Ty France added another to make it 8-3, and then Luke Raley finally got some of that bad batted ball luck back, smoking an objectively terrible first-pitch slider and then showing off why we call him Scoot Raley, legging out this majestic RBI triple:
It wouldn’t be a complete team win without a mention of the bullpen. With a healthy lead, Servais was able to use his lesser-leverage arms to lock down the final two innings, and Tyson Miller and Tayler Saucedo both pitched zeroes (Miller with some help from a stellar defensive play by Jorge Polanco), with Saucedo striking out the side to end the game.
Maybe it was putting the Cubs series behind them and starting a new week, maybe it was the addition of a new player making his debut, but the vibes around the team were demonstrably better today. Postgame, both Servais and Mitch Haniger talked about how the hitter’s meetings were different today after suffering the tough loss. Mitch was, as always, philosophical:
“You’re always going to have a little stretch where you’re pretty awful in a 162 game set. So just come in every day, and try to improve and get better, and lean on the guys around you.”
“Since I’ve been here, we haven’t had too many, just like, fantastic starts, and I was telling the guys in there, I was like “the best start we’ve ever had when I was here, we were 13-3, and that was ‘19, and it was the worst team I’ve been on. So like. It’s a long season. You’re gonna have a bad two weeks.”
Good advice for baseball—and good advice for life, too.