Raley Good: Offense continues to heat up as Mariners defeat Royals, 6-2

Luke Raley ties a career-high for hits and RBI and Ty France provides insurance on a vintage George Kirby start

George Kirby has been tasked too often this season with keeping the Mariners in the game while the slumbering offense stirs to life. While Kirby is a perfectionist, it’s still a tremendous ask of the 26-year-old, as it is for the rest of the rotation, navigating opposing lineups like trying to find the tasty fish in poisonous blowfish while waiting for the offense to get into gear. Tonight the offense gave Kirby a break with some early run support, and he in turn rewarded them with what Scott Servais called “a vintage George Kirby performance.”

The Mariners went to work on Royals starter Brady Singer early, driving his pitch count up to triple digits by the fifth inning. They drew first blood in the game in the second inning, when Cal Raleigh ambushed a first-pitch slider for a double, hustling dumpily into second on a ball hit into the right-field corner. Two batters later, Luke Raley showed that his warming trend of the past couple weeks is threatening to burst into full-on conflagration:

He then got overly excited while wielding the trident and broke it, and I think I might have to switch out Nuke for “Lenny” as a nickname.

Important note: Raley claims the trident came to him loose, and all he was doing was carrying it “and all of a sudden I hear, like, “dink”, and the bottom is off.” I asked him after the press conference if he was a little brother because that was some of the most little-brother explication I’d ever heard, and he confirmed that yes, he is the little brother, so do with that info as you will.

The Mariners threatened more in that inning, with Ty France and Dylan Moore collecting back-to-back hits after Mitch Garver had flown out, but Josh Rojas got very unlucky, scalding a ball 103 mph off the bat but directly at Bobby Witt Jr., probably the worst place to hit it. Also unfortunately that France was on board when DMo doubled; Manny Acta wisely held the slow-footed France at third, but it did wind up costing the Mariners another run in what would turn out to be a low-scoring game.

For a while, though, it looked like the Mariners were going to run riot over the Royals, because they came back the next inning and immediately put traffic on the bases again. Julio Rodríguez led things off with a single, followed by a Jorge Polanco single that moved the speedy Julio to third base. A Cal Raleigh single brought Julio home, and then Luke Raley drove in yet another run with a single of his own, making it 4-0. Once again, it felt like the Mariners could have taken more advantage in that inning—Mitch Garver and France both struck out to end the inning when it felt like the Mariners might have had Singer on the ropes—but with four runs through just three innings, it felt like the Mariners could score off Singer at will.

For Raley, he tied a career high in RBI and hits per game tonight, with three of each; even more impressively, he and Cal Raleigh shared billing for five of the game’s hardest-hit balls tonight, with Cal just edging him out for the top spot with 107.4 on his single to 107.3 on Raley’s home run. Much was made pre-season about the prospect of back-to-back Mitches in the Mariners lineup, but the Raleigh-Raley pipeline is the one that hit pay dirt tonight.

After that, however, the run-scoring dried up for the Mariners, as Singer faced more traffic in the fourth that ultimately came to nothing with a single from Josh Rojas and a walk from Polanco, and then was able to work a 1-2-3 fifth despite hanging on a thread pitch-count wise. But the Mariners weren’t able to do anything against Singer’s replacements, Tyler Duffey and Angel Zerpa.

Given a four-run cushion, however, George Kirby was able to slice and dice his way through the Royals lineup, keeping them off the board over seven innings despite working through some bizarre vintage Mariners-Royals nonsense including two hit batters in the first inning—the second one being a questionable call where Royals catcher Salvador Pérez—who should have been called out on a perfectly-located sinker from Kirby on the third pitch of the at-bat— appeared to lean his elbow into a splitter from Kirby, loading the bases with just one out. (Kirby afterward said the splitter was poorly located and it was his fault he hit Perez). Kirby escaped that jam, however, dominating Michael Massey on three pitches, getting him swinging after 97 at the top of the zone for the second out of the inning, followed by getting Nelson Velázquez to ground out. However, that first inning cost Kirby 24 pitches, seemingly putting him in line for a short night, especially after he needed another 18 pitches to clear the second thanks to a [checks notes] catcher’s interference from Cal Raleigh (the Mariners and Royals will never play a normal baseball game).

However, after that second inning, a ticked-off Kirby bore down and sliced through the remainder of the outing with ease. Home plate umpire Sean Barber’s amorphous strike zone seemed to push the lanky righty to locate pitches even more finely, seemingly daring him to rule them balls.

“I like to be pissed off when I pitch,” said Kirby postgame. “If anything that just fires me up to make that pitch even more fine on the corners.”

While Kirby is fueled by anger on the mound, his manager sees that coming out in between starts as he brings that same intensity to his preparation.

“Last time out there for him, he was a little frustrated, didn’t feel great,” said Servais, “but he made some adjustments between last start and this start in his preparation. Sometimes you gotta back off some of the things you’re doing, sometimes you do more in the training room or in the weight room or whatnot.”

If your eagle eyes spotted some inconsistent velocities on the slider tonight—91s instead of the usual mid-to-high 80s—give yourself an ice cream cone. Kirby confirmed he was toying with a new pitch tonight, a hard, slider-ish cutter he’s been tweaking over the past few weeks. It’s very much a work in progress, but something to monitor going forward. He also confirmed that on the first pitch he threw to Pérez in the sixth that went to the backstop, that was an intentional miss: “He [Cal] called the pitch kind of late and I was already getting another one, so I was like, it’s probably not going splitter here, and it’s hard for me to get back into my glove. So I was like, well I can’t just throw a heater here. So I’m just gonna throw this to the backstop.” So breathe a sigh of relief, any of you who were worried Kirby got bonked on the head by a flowerpot and forgot who he was for a second.

After Kirby left, however, once again the thinned-out Mariners bullpen was tasked with holding a lead that could have been greater than four runs. That lead was quickly halved, as the top of the Royals lineup did damage against Ryne Stanek. He opened the inning allowing a base hit to Maikel García, then got Bobby Witt Jr. to ground into a fielder’s choice that the speedy Witt was able to keep from being a double play but followed that up allowing a base hit to Vinnie Pasquantino to put runners on at the corners with just one out. Stanek was able to get Salvador Pérez looking at a slider, but promptly surrendered a double to Michael Massey that rolled away from both Rodríguez and Haniger in the gap , allowing two runners to score, causing Scott Servais to press the Andrés Muñoz button to try to get the third out against Nelson Velàzquez, which he did, wrong-footing the burly slugger with a series of sliders.

With the lead cut to two, the Mariners offense leaped back into action against Royals reliever Chris Stratton. Mitch Haniger opened the inning by lining out, hitting the ball over 100 mph but directly at a defender, because that’s sort of how things are going for Haniger right now. But Luke Raley continued to see the ball well, poking a single—his least hard-hit ball of the night, at just 80 mph EV, but perfectly located—and then stealing second, an activity that always sends me into transports of delight because I love to see the runaway broken-down stagecoach that is Luke Raley running. Perhaps sensing that Raley has stolen his perpetual Little Brother Energy crown for good, Ty France leaned into his new dad strength, popping his third home run of the season—103.2 mph off the bat and 379 feet, a home run everywhere except...Camden Yards. Man I am not looking forward to this upcoming road trip.

The trident might be on the IL, but Ty’s bat is not:

Tomorrow Logan Gilbert, who like Kirby has been doing a great Atlas impression holding up this team while they struggle to find runs for him, takes the mound. Hopefully the Mariners offense will show up for him, as well.