The Mariners can’t escape quicksand, Oakland walks it off second night in a row

Seattle continues their season ending slide, dropping the second of their few remaining games at the Coliseum.

I love the Seattle Mariners. And that makes this season so damn hard to process. Games like this.

I am usually ever the optimist. I look for the upsides, the ceilings, the what-ifs. I dare to live in those horizons and know that many times my hopes might be let down, but sometimes that faith may instead be rewarded.

Not this fucking year.

Not this Seattle Mariners team. 2024, year of the Tridents Up, and then with the dark magic that this accursed season hath wrought, Pitchforks Up.

Despite every force of nature, every devoted fan shouting at it, this Mariners team just keeps finding ways to sink away as the season ever wanes. They descend closer to elimination than competition, and the games they have to take advantage and gain ground, they are falling apart at the seams.

They aren’t just sinking into quicksand, they are sinking into the swamp of fucking sadness from The Neverending Story. And we can shout and shout at this horse all we want, there may be no pulling out of this one. For the second game in a row, in a four game set that will be their last at the Coliseum, the Mariners not only lost the game they lost it by being walked off. Today with a final score of 3-2 in the bottom of the ninth,

If you want to futilely, hopefully, angrily shout with me at the sad, dying horse that is the Seattle Mariners, there were good things in today’s game before it’s dismal end.

Luis Castillo struggled with finding too much of the middle of the zone today, but overall posted a solid line. Seven innings pitched, five strikeouts, and only four hits and one walk. And two earned runs, on two home runs.

Those home runs were both solo jobs in the first and the fourth, but we’re not here to indulge the melancholy marshes, we’re here to shout at emo equines.

So, one by one, here are all five strikeouts from Luis Castillo.

We can’t escape this beleaguered bog, actually, and so here are also both those home runs.

The first few steps on this horse were actually cheerful, but that’s just how the swamp fucking gets you.

Alas, the top of the first started with a JP Crawford single, a Julio Rodríguez double to move JP to third, and then a Cal Raleigh double to score them both and give the Mariners a 2-0 lead before a single out against them. That’s how you feel safe. That’s how you let the sadness slowly creep in, unnoticed.

But it doesn’t matter what you do. Once you reach a certain point in the descent, all that is left is to accept what has happened, and give in.

You can slide to try and stop it.

You can press up against the edges trying to get out.

You can leap up, hoping to grab onto anything to pull yourself out of the quaking quag.

In the end, you’re just shouting at a horse that was dead all along.