Mariners bounce back, cook Cardinals, win 6-1

something brewing in the kitchen

I have a Samsung smart TV that features a kind of free internet TV streaming thing. There are a few hundred channels, but none of them are normal network TV channels. Some of the funniest ones are one that only shows minecraft youtube videos, one that is exclusively clips of wild animals, and one that is an eSports network.

But the best ones are those that are just binge channels, meaning that they play every episode of a TV show back-to-back. I have them for Top Gear, Wipeout, and Law and Order, but the one I’ve been putting on most days recently is the Hell’s Kitchen channel.

Over the past couple weeks I have been binge watching the reality cooking show and I love it for several reasons. If you’ve never seen it, it’s a competition where ~16 chefs are split into two teams and then work in two separate kitchens at the same restaurant doing fine dining dinner services. At the end of each episode a losing chef goes home and the season continues until one chef is left standing who wins a position as head chef as some prestigious restaurant. The show is hosted by Gordon Ramsay, and it’s the show that gave him his reputation for his, to put it mildly, explosive personality.

Here’s a video to illustrate. Be warned, it contains lots of swearing, hooting, and, indeed, hollering.

At the beginning of each season, most of the chefs and both kitchens are horrible. They can’t cook basic things, they don’t communicate, and they rarely actually serve any food. I cook for myself at home, nothing too fancy, but when I see one of these chefs butcher a risotto — a pretty basic dish that even I can make — it lets me have delusions of grandeur and think that I could have success on the show.

It feels, of course, a lot like sitting on the couch and watching baseball, seeing Jorge Polanco swing through a middle-middle 94 mph fastball and thinking “even I could hit that.”

But of course, we can’t. By the end of the show, when there’s just a handful of chefs left, they all put together excellent signature dishes, cook their hearts out, and serve fantastic food.

Which, inevitably, is like watching these Mariners at the end of the season. For the past half-decade, the Mariners have been right there in September, and play with a surprising intensity. It’s just enough to keep us coming back for more, but for a head chef, repeat customers are the dream.

And while our reactions to the last couple months of Mariners baseball would be right at home in that Gordon Ramsay compilation above, tonight the M’s really cooked.

For one, Bryce Miller continued to pitch his heart out. Like the rest of the starting rotation, Miller has been a bright spot this year. He leads the AL in 6 inning scoreless starts with 9, including tonight’s dismantling of the Cards.

That’s not to say that he was unhittable. In fact, he only had one clean inning tonight. But much like the best cooks on Hell’s Kitchen, he trusted his teammates and bounced back whenever he got into trouble. While he was cooking the steak, Rojas on appetizers and Crawford on fish backed him up and got the order out.

The line cooks did pretty well for themselves, too, giving their head chef lots of support. They got off to a slow start and weren’t able to put anything together for the first four innings. But in the fifth, they turned on the gas.

Victor Robles, who apparently went to the Ty France Memorial School of Getting On Base, got plunked with one out, and then made it to third after a Julio single. Randy Arozarena ran into a cutter and sent it 97 mph to center field. It didn’t drop for a base hit, but it was deep enough to score the speedy Robles and give the M’s the first run of the game.

An inning later, things got even better, as D-Mo followed up a J.P. Crawford single by giving a Matthew Liberatore fastball a good ride to left field to put the Mariners up by 3. It was Moore’s 10th homer of the year, and now he’s just one stolen base away from a 10-30 season. For the 32 year old, that kind of production is still a major leaguer.

After Miller finished his tickets and left the kitchen, it was down to the bullpen to serve desert and end the service. Troy Taylor was first up, and had a good night, even though he sent out a crème brûlée that he probably shouldn’t have, giving up his first run in a long while.

But the desert corps closed out the night easily, especially once the line cooks came off their stations to come help. In the ninth inning, the Mariners put a real rally together and scored another three runs. It’s good to see them putting up a crooked number in an inning where they didn’t hit a home run. That’s the kind of contact they need to make in order to get to the playoffs.

And as the last customers filed out and the kitchen cleared down, the chefs and cooks could take pride in a successful dinner service. And that’s what it’s all about.