Mariners play Bop It, win 3-1 to sweep Texas

M’s play a children’s game for the seasons’ first Little League Day

Pull it!

Cal Raleigh rode into this game on the heels of hitting home runs in back-to-back games, with the first one of those having broken the franchise record for most home runs by a catcher. Unsatisfied with that “by a catcher” qualifier, Cal decided to open today’s game by making it back-to-back-to-back, pulling a ball over the right-field fence to keep climbing the Mariners leaderboard and give Seattle a 2-0 lead in the first inning. Only one more to catch Ichiro for 16th all-time. With a typical season, he’ll be in the top 10 by August.

Twist it!

Logan Gilbert, meanwhile, rode into this game on the heels of the second-best three-game stretch of his career, and while his performance today did not match up to those three, it was still a great outing. For the third game in a row, the Rangers drove up the Mariners’ starter’s pitch count in the first inning, but for the third game in a row, the Mariners escaped the inning with minimal damage. For Gilbert, the main trouble was that he had a difficult time landing his slider. It was odd though because he didn’t totally lose command of it, throwing several great ones as well, picking up five whiffs with it on seven swings.

After Dustin Harris rocked a slider for a home run to open the second, Cal Raleigh decided to twist things up and have Gilbert throw more of his four-seamer and splitter. This not only worked in its own right, with those two pitches working well, but throwing the fastball more seemed to help Gilbert find his slider again. That makes sense since Gilbert’s slider works best when he’s trying to throw it like a fastball, per Robbie Ray’s advice. After the game, Gilbert acknowledged missing a couple sliders, but said he feels really good about the pitch. And twisting things up was the key, with Logan saying, “You’ve got to have a good mix and go back and forth and stay ahead, and I think Cal does a really good job of that.”

Gilbert only made it through five innings, but it was more deep counts than damage, so other than his IP, you wouldn’t see anything to suggest it wasn’t an All-Star out there, giving up just the one run on three hits and one walk while striking out seven (and moving into seventh place on the franchise leaderboard for career strikeouts along the way).

Pull it!

But though he was effective, with Gilbert at 94 pitches through five and the Rangers’ lefty stack up, Dan Wilson pulled Gilbert after just five innings. Fortunately, that lefty stack strikes no fear into the heart of this Gabe Babe, as Wilson called on Gabe Speier to retire the fearsome Corey Seager and friends, and Speier delivered a 1-2-3 inning. Besides that and a hallucinogenic discussion in the booth about escape rooms, the middle innings mostly passed without note, with the Mariners nursing a 2-1 lead for about an hour.

Twist it!

Then came the bottom of the sixth. Julio opened the inning with his second hit of the day (both on fastballs in the zone, thank goodness). OK, Zach, Julio got a single. Who cares? Turns out Jake Burger cares. The Rangers first baseman was very aware that Julio was on the base paths. Perhaps even too aware. When Jorge Polanco dribbled a ball down the first base line and Burger picked it up, he simply assumed he was tagging Polanco and turned to look at Julio, making sure the speedster wasn’t going first to third on the slowly hit ball. That was a mistake. Polanco did what players always do in this situation, twisting around to try to avoid the tag, which should never work. But with Burger distracted, Polanco skirted the glove and went twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom.

For a guy with some injury concerns, Polanco showed remarkable agility there, and the spin move gets him his first career Sun Hat Award for noteworthy individual contribution to a game. Was it the most impressive thing out there today? Absolutely not, but it was definitely the most delightful.

Bop it!

That brought up Cal Raleigh, who got bopped on the back foot to load the bases with nobody out and put Nathan Eovaldi on the ropes.

Bop it!

Randy Arozarena then got his fourth opportunity in five games to hit with the bases loaded. He fell behind 0-2, but then worked his way back to 2-2 before getting bopped on the elbow. The back-to-back HBPs resulted in an RBI for Randy, as the Mariners took a 3-1 lead and chased Eovaldi with the bases still loaded and still nobody out.

Unfortunately, Bruce Botche brought in the side-arming lefty Hoby Milner to face the Mariners’ own lefty stack. Luke Raley did us a solid by only making one out; Donovan Solano pinch-hit for Rowdy Tellez, but struck out; and Miles Mastrobouni understandably couldn’t do anything with three sweepers coming at an impossible angle. Theoretically, Wilson could have pinch-hit the just-arrived northpaw Ben Williamson there, but that’s an awfully tough first assignment, so I don’t hate the call.

Twist it!

So with the Mariners settling for one run out of the situation, the bullpen would have to lock down a two-run lead over three innings. Like any game of Bop It, it made you hold your breath as the game neared its end. Having already used Speier, and saving Andrés Muñoz for the ninth, the Mariners turned to Carlos Vargas for the seventh. Vargas has been nails so far this season, but he remains untested, and this was probably his highest-leverage outing to date. He rewarded the faith with a scoreless inning, inducing a pair of outs on weak contact and a strikeout on a nasty sequence to Jake Burger: two sinkers high and inside setting up a low-and-away slider that Burger could only hack at.

That left Trent Thornton to handle the eighth, which is not a situation I was personally very excited about. The good news is we may not have to hold our breaths quite so tightly in the future—Troy Taylor showed up after the game with his bags packed for the road trip, and Matt Brash looked good in an inning in Tacoma this afternoon. It turned out fine anyway, as Thorny navigated around the Rangers 8-9-and-struggling-Joc-Pedersen-in-the-1-hole.

While we can forgive him since he had the toughest part of the lineup, it turned out to be Muñoz who had the shakiest outing. But J.P. Crawford came in with the assist, making a nice play on a 103-mph shot from Corey Seager, and, in a twist ending, J.P. also called a mound visit after Muñoz started to lose command against Josh Smith and Adolis García, something you’d usually expect the catcher to do. Muñoz reports that all J.P. told him was to just throw it down the middle, but that the break “really helped me get back into it.” Which he did, ending the game on a perfectly dotted 100-mph heater on the bottom rail.

Bop it!

That fastball not only ended the game, but also the home stand. With the Mariners having taken two of three against Houston and then swept the Rangers, they’ve pulled themselves back up to .500 with 10% of the season in the books. Having spent those first sixteen games exclusively in two of the pitcher-friendliest stadiums in MLB, they’re now off to play three series in Great American Small Park, Rogers Centre, and Fenway Park, where the hitters will finally have a chance to really bop it.