A game that we will ask the Talosians to alter our memory of
Having a contact manager on the mound is a bit like making an alliance with Gal Dukat. Sometimes the batted ball luck will be your friend, and sometimes it’ll be your enemy. For the Mariners, behind Logan Evans’s second MLB start, it was mostly an enemy today.
He started out well enough, getting a silly hack from Corey Seager in the first inning on a sweeper with more cut than a bat’leth. And while he gave up a dumb hit to Adolis García in the second, García mistimed Evans’s move like he’d been hit with a Paxan stun beam and got himself picked off.
The Mariners even gave Evans an early lead to work with. With one out in the top of the third, Leo Rivas battled Jacob deGrom, singling off the tenth pitch of the at-bat and then stealing second base. After J.P. Crawford moved him to third with an infield hit, Crawford took off for second himself, which ruined a tailor-made double play off Polanco’s bat, thus allowing Rivas to score. Julio and Cal followed up with walks to load the bases, but a nice play from Josh Jung left the bases loaded. With the rookie Evans on the mound, leaving the bases loaded left a taste in one’s mouth more toxic than the emissions of a Malon freighter.
And indeed, the wheels came off for Evans in the next half inning as the Rangers strung together hits more quickly than tribbles reproduce. Between parachutes into the shallow outfield, balls off Ben Williamson’s glove and under Leo Rivas’s, the situation became more troubled than the politics of Bajor. Evans didn’t help himself, catching Luis Castillo’s Tellurian Plague from last night and walking the nine-hole hitter. Ultimately, contact managers will give up bad innings like this, and that’s just part of the deal with a guy like Evans until he figures out how to miss more bats.
Of course, sometimes the batted balls were friends, as when J.P. leapt through the air like he was being piloted by Lt. Ortegas and caught a line drive. (That line drive was off the bat of Joc Pederson, who’s early season luck is an absurdity that could only be cooked up by the Q, later just missing a home run around the other side of the foul pole and getting a called strike three well outside the zone.) But the Rangers hung six on Evans in the third, and from there resistance was futile.
To his credit, Evans did rebound like Captain Janeway after a cup of coffee, pitching two more scoreless innings, and ending the day with five strikeouts. Notably, that’s more than deGrom, who the Mariners chased after five innings.
But the offense couldn’t do more than the one run against deGrom or the Rangers’ bullpen. Making matters worse, on one of the rare hits the Mariners had, a sixth-inning single from Randy Arozarena, he appeared to tweak his hamstring and the EMH didn’t let him back on the field after that. (After the game, manager Dan Wilson said it was “nothing serious,” but we’ll have to see what that means.)
Julio also had a hit, beating out an infield single—a rare sight in this season’s early going. To that and his walk, he added some nice catches and a very well played route that kept Josh Smith to a single, something he made look much easier than it was. In a game stinkier than a Klingon, that performance is enough to win him today’s Sun Hat Award.
The Rangers eventually added two more off Eduard Bazardo for a total of eight runs to the Mariners’ one. But no matter how much the Rangers may have tortured us today, the truth remains that there are four lights: the Mariners are still on an eight-series win streak.