Six Pope quotes that explain the Mariners 6-5 win over the White Sox
The Mariners win their seventh road series in a row. You can dance with me, or you can get off my dance floor.
If you’re a baseball fan who hasn’t been living under a rock, you know that the new pope is a White Sox fan. So, since the Mariners just finished a series on the South Side, it felt appropriate to recap this game by doing some Pope-quoting.
“Mediocrity is not an option for me.”
This quote refers to the still-young career of Julio Rodríguez, who continues to both be one of the best players in the game and also short of the player we know he can be. He is a star and ought to play like a star. Today, he did. After White Sox starter Shane Smith walked the first two batters of the game, Julio came up to the plate and hit a three-run jack, a 401-footer to right-center. After his Monday-night grand slam, that gave Julio seven RBIs on two swings this series. While his BABIP is still absurdly low for a guy with his skills, the rest of his offensive game is reaching the heights that no one could ever call a mediocrity.
“Dirty little secrets always come out.”
Staked to a 3-0 lead before even taking the mound, Logan Evans impressed in many ways today. He induced 15 whiffs on 90 pitches and picked up seven strikeouts to just a single walk while going six innings. That last point is critical as it helped keep the bullpen rested for a four-game series in Houston, with a still-not-fully-stretched-out George Kirby starting the first game.
The whiffs were genuinely pretty nasty, but 11 of them came off his sweeper and cutter, and neither of those pitches are all that great on their own. Evans relies on hitters not being able to guess that those pitches are coming by regularly including four other pitches in his arsenal as well. And those other pitches will get him into trouble. We saw that today as a changeup and four-seamer were taken yard by back-to-back hitters in the fourth inning, exacerbating the damage done on a dinger off a rare middle-middle sweeper an inning earlier. Evans can’t succeed without these pitches, but they leave him vulnerable too.
“I am very good at what I do. I am better at it than anyone else. And that is not arrogance; that is a fact.”
So despite Julio giving the Mariners an early lead, they went into the sixth down 4-3 thanks to the big flies off Evans. But the Mariners employ the best catcher in baseball, who wanted to get back into a tie for the AL lead in home runs. It was merely the biggest highlight of Cal Raleigh’s day that also included a double and two walks.
“I don’t want normal, and easy, and simple. I want painful, difficult, devastating, life-changing, extraordinary.”
Baseball wouldn’t be fun to watch if it was stripped of all its tension, and there’s no better way to gain some tension back than by getting the team into a late-inning hole. That happened this afternoon when Casey Legumina came in for the seventh and gave up three incredibly stupid baserunners. The first: an error from Dylan Moore. The second: A walk to Josh Rojas that included a pretty bad missed call. The third: More nonsense from the hobbit Chase Meidroth. two incredibly stupid hits. The first: what probably should have been scored as an error off Dylan Moore. The second: more nonsense from hobbit Chase Meidroth. With a walk to Josh Rojas in between, tThat allowed a run to score and put the White Sox up 5-4 heading into the eighth. (I’m not out on Legumina just from this—the Bean Man also struck out two hitters.) (And h/t Arthur for pointing out the scoring change on the DMo error.)
“I’m never out of options.”
Much has been made of Dan Wilson’s substitutions. And while I would never recommend pinch-hitting Donovan Solano, even for a pitcher, Wilson does it a lot. But I don’t think his choice to leave Rowdy Tellez in to face a south side southpaw in the sixth inning was much of an aberration for Wilson. In the sixth inning, that spot in the lineup is going to come up again, so even if you really believe in the handedness advantage, it still makes sense to leave your left-handed hitter in. We’ve seen him do that before, and I don’t think it portends anything about Solano’s future role. But we all want less Solano, and thank goodness that’s what we got today. Leaving Rowdy in for the sixth meant that you got Rowdy again when his spot came up in the eighth. That proved pretty important, as he doubled, which Leody Taveras followed up with his first home run as a Mariner, plating the fifth and sixth runs to take an eighth-inning lead.
“It’s handled.”
That left the back-end of the bullpen to cover six outs with no margin for error. Carlos Vargas was up first, delivering an easy, breezy, 1-2-3 eighth inning with a strikeout. Andrés Muñoz followed with a scoreless ninth, bringing him up to 22 outings with a 0.00 ERA and 16 saves to begin the year. It also earns him today’s Sun Hat Award. This wasn’t his most dominant outing of the year, but he’s been so good that despite a melodramatic back-and-forth game, the win was never in doubt once there were three outs left and Muñoz available for them. Just like Olivia, the Pope who provided today’s quotes, he’s the guy you call in when you need something handled.