Julio engages the Joy Machine: Mariners win, 5-4

The City Connects come through again

I was watching an interview Stephen Colbert did where he talked about how he runs his show like a “joy machine.” Recognizing the grind that producing a nightly comedy show can be, Colbert encourages his staff to be intentional, collaborative, and above all, joyful. As he told a Canadian TV program:

“...The only way to approach something that is truly hard has got to be with joy, because if you don’t approach it with joy, it’s just a machine. And it will grind you up. And the lesson that I took from that is that: Doing something joyfully doesn’t make it any easier, it only makes it better. And also, it makes it communal– that we’re all doing it together. When you work in fear, or when you work in distress, you often feel alone. But jokes, laughter, humor, joy whatever you want to call it, it connects people.”

That’s a notion that has stuck with me, through bad and soul-sucking jobs and better ones and ones that were just plain boring, through days when I’ve felt stuck in a Talking Heads song and days when even just putting my feet on the floor in the morning feels like an insurmountable challenge. It’s especially been on my mind lately, especially in the grind of a season, especially in the grind of this particular season. Many hands make light work, but many joyful hearts make the work worth doing.

At its best, a baseball team is also a joy machine. It’s a grind, but also a collaborative process, night after night. Everyone—from the team on the field to the front office to the ushers to the fans—brings their talents to bear on the final product, including what Colbert calls “the unasked-for added value”: the little something extra that makes the whole more than the sum of its parts, the magic ingredient. On a comedy show, it might be a great idea for a throughline that makes the whole piece not just funny but uproariously, laugh-until- your-stomach-hurts, look-it-up-on-YouTube-tomorrow, send-it-to-the-group-chat funny. For a baseball team it might be one lightning rod of a player who has one great at-bat that turns the game around, or one clutch RBI. There are nine players in the lineup who, at any moment, could bring their added value to bear; any moment that might erupt in joyful chaos.

But that’s not how the Seattle Mariners have operated this season. The magic of 2022 feels long ago, as night after night the team brings a lackluster offensive effort, hanging in games thanks to superior starting pitching. There is no joy, only Machine.

Not that the pitching hasn’t done its part to keep the ramshackle machine that is the 2024 Mariners running. However, tonight the Mariners were literally without their Rock, as Luis Castillo missed his first start as a Mariner after suffering a hamstring strain. Emerson Hancock made the start in his place, and showed a little glimpse of just how bad this team’s record would be if they didn’t have the kind of otherworldly rotation they’ve enjoyed.

This is not a slight on Emerson Hancock, who was exactly what a sixth starter should be tonight: he got into some trouble in the first, some of which was his own doing, as he hit a batter, fell behind in counts, and left some pitches where he oughtn’t have. But he also got a little unlucky with some weakly-hit ground balls that found holes, and a ball that was ruled a base hit but Luke Raley really should have made a play on at first. Still, Hancock controlled the damage, limiting it to two runs, and gave up only one other run over five innings, on a solo shot home run to Wyatt Langford in the fourth on a changeup Hancock mistakenly left on the plate.

Other than that, watching Hancock was one of the more enjoyable parts of this game for me, especially as he settled down and started to attack the strike zone with more conviction. He set a new career high in whiffs with 14, while collecting five strikeouts and throwing a ton of first-pitch strikes. I’m not sure if Hancock has settled comfortably into Joy yet, as he continues to scrap for a place in the big leagues, but he’s definitely not living the grind. It’s obvious how much he wants to succeed at this level, and it’s hard not to root for him as the underdog of this rotation, despite being the highest-ever pick the Mariners have had during the Dipoto era.

Hancock was definitely the underdog in this fight, matching up against Rangers ace making his season debut, the beautiful but fragile spider’s web known as Jacob deGrom. The Mariners got some traffic on against deGrom in the fourth, when he finally hit his pitch limit of 60. Luke Raley hit a one-out double, and Justin Turner singled to put runners at the corners, but deGrom was able to retire Jorge Polanco before he hit his pitch count, meaning new lefty on the hill Walter Pennington only had to get J.P. Crawford to retire the side without damage. Crawford worked the count full, but rolled over a grounder to end the inning without damage.

That came back to sting the Mariners as Langford homered in the next inning (at the time, putting the tally for this seres at the Rangers, four solo home runs so far; the Mariners, no home runs, solo or otherwise). In the sixth, Trent Thornton and Tayler Saucedo couldn’t keep the Rangers off the board, allowing them to add on a crucial fourth run.

That, in turn, came back to sting the Mariners, because in the seventh, the offense was finally able to claw a couple of runs off the Rangers bullpen. Jose Ureña hit his second batter of the game, causing Victor Robles to have to pull out his fainting couch once again and be carried to first base by a team of snow-white stallions, as is custom. Julio Rodríguez, already on his second hit of the day, almost got the Mariners on the homer total board, sending Leody Taveras into a Tasmanian Devil-like spin at the wall and advancing Robles to third; he’d later scoot home on a Cal Raleigh sac fly. Randy Arozarena then singled home the Mariners’ second run of the game, sending a lively crowd of nearly 33,000 into transports of delight, because the one thing that Seattle fans have always brought, the piece that is always present in the Joy Machine, is an involved and passionate fanbase. The Machine might conk out in the middle of a mountain pass and send them teetering over the edge, but the fans will scream the whole way down.

The Mariners had at least made it close enough that the Rangers had to use leverage arms down the stretch, as Jose LeClerc took over for Ureña for the final out of the seventh and David Robertson had the eighth.

The Mariners’ offensive machine might be faulty, but the Rangers’ bullpen machine is a cardboard box with gears drawn on it, and tonight the offense managed to take advantage. With one out, J.P. Crawford looped a little fly ball into the Bermuda Triangle of left field, making a 70something exit velocity work in the Mariners’ favor for once. Robertson then lost all sense of the strike zone against Josh Rojas, walking him on five pitches, but Victor Robles flew out for the second out of the inning, bringing up Julio Rodríguez, who already had three hits on the night. The Rangers opted to pitch to the righty Julio rather than face Cal Raleigh hitting from the left side, and in a 1-1 count, Julio made them pay for that decision, sending a ball to Mount Zunino:

Andrés Muñoz, working with a lead now, had the ninth, and started by punching out Marcus Semien at 98 mph. Then Jose Lowe swung at the first pitch he saw, 99 in, probably thinking he was harmlessly fouling a pitch away but BAH GAWD THAT’S RANDY’S MUSIC, as Arozarena came barreling in from left to make an improbable catch, whipping the crowd into a frothing frenzy of noise. Many hands and joyful work.

Muñoz made it quick after that, getting Langford to fly out softly on the second pitch of the at-bat, reaching after a slider he probably should have left alone but the power of the City Connects jerseys (now 13-1) compelled him to swing. Also of note: after losing 4-5 last night, the Mariners won 5-4 tonight, catching their magic number of five runs (now 50-4 in those games). Friday the thirteenth, Schmiday the schmirteenth.

But back to Julio for a second.

Photo by Alika Jenner/Getty Images

It’s hard to talk about joy without delving into talk of the divine and thus breaking one of the core site rules, but bear with me a moment. There’s a reason so often joy is tied up in the front yard outside religion, and it’s because joy requires faith—faith that things will get better and there is a reason for joy, whether one locates that source in this world or the next. Colbert, a deeply devout Catholic, famously has a sign taped up in his office that reads “Joy is the most infallible sign of the existence of God.” His own relationship with joy is interesting to consider; Colbert suffered an unimaginable tragedy at an early age, losing his father and two closest-in-age brothers in a plane crash when he was 10 years old, leading him to comedy as a way to express his pain. Particularly, early on, as a defensive mechanism: the kind of comedy that made people uncomfortable, or what he described to GQ as a noxious vapor, something you could breathe in a little and know it wouldn’t kill you, like microdosing arsenic: “Rasputin-ing your way through life.”

I think about this a lot with the Mariners, the defensiveness that comes with being shackled to a team that has so often been so disappointing: swallowing the poison before it can be forced down your throat. Rasputin-ing it one game at a time, 162 games a year, over and over again. It’s a grind, and not usually a joyful one. But Julio is a reminder that any machine can be the joy machine; you just need to flip the switch. Or rather, as Colbert would say, you need many hands, working together, to flip it as one.