Mariners show signs of life but lose to Astros anyway, 4-2

The AL West lead is gone, and now the real work begins

While the vibes are understandably Very Bad to Chernobyl among the Mariners fanbase after a 4-2 loss at the hands of the Astros that saw the Mariners fall out of first place in the AL West, given the choice between the two losses, I’ll take tonight’s, even if it guaranteed a series loss and sets the Mariners up for their first sweep of the season tomorrow. The Mariners are down, worse than they’ve been all season. But for the Mariners—the scrappy team in the forgotten upper left corner of the map of baseball, the team that’s been a punching bag and a running joke for the rest of the league for the majority of its existence, the team that’s served as the crucible for the baseball historians and scribes interested in the weird and bad and goofy, the Seattle Literal Mariners—this might be just where they want to be. To borrow from Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son: “No more pretending for him! He was completely and openly a mess. Meanwhile the rest of us go on trying to fool each other.”

The Mariners are completely and openly a mess. They aren’t fooling anyone. No more pretending for them, or for anyone else.

“We’ve got to execute better int those spots and turn the momentum back in our favor. Because it’s not right now,” said Scott Servais postgame. “But that’s up to us. . . We need to turn it, though. We need to turn it around. . .We need to score runs, bottom line. Our offense needs to do our job.”

Tonight, once again, the Mariners offense did not do its job, by and large, once again allowing a starter to overcome a shaky start—specifically, a shaky first inning—and get comfortable against them. After putting some pressure on Framber Valdez early, with Victor Robles again trying to be his own offense (he singled in the first, and then stole second and third, only to be stranded there when Mitch Garver struck out to end the inning), the Mariners allowed Valdez to climb into his rocking chair after that, putting down the Mariners 1-2-3 without a fight in the second, third, and the first two-thirds of the fourth innings, with weak-contact groundouts and easy flyouts. In the fourth, with two outs, Mitch Garver worked a walk and Jorge Polanco dropped a bunt down the third base line that Valdez couldn’t field in time to put runners on—but once again, with two outs, and with swing-happy Dylan Moore, playing in his first game in a couple days, coming up to the plate. Moore struck out on four pitches, flailing wildly after Valdez’s curveball, to end the threat. It was, completely and openly, a mess.

It took until the sixth inning for the Mariners to get to Valdez, who left a curveball on the plate for Julio to punish for a two-run shot—two runs, because Victor Robles was on board, having taken a five-pitch walk against the occasional command-outage Valdez, who can be flustered by having runners on.

After getting the next two outs—one on a deep flyout to Cal Raleigh—Valdez walked Polanco to push his pitch count to 100 and force Joe Espada to go to his bullpen, getting the South African and former Mariner Tayler Scott, who got pinch-hitter Josh Rojas to pop out easily to end the inning. That would be all the damage the Mariners were able to do in the scoring column today, another day where they struck out double-digit times (11) and mustered just three hits, none of them against the bullpen (although they did take six walks. Encouraging!).

Meanwhile, the Astros illustrated the good you can do by just putting a ball in play and taking advantage of other team’s mistakes. The Astros scored a run in the fourth without making any genuine hard contact off Kirby, who led off the inning hitting Alex Bregman with a splitter. Two batters later, Yainer Díaz poked a single on a slider into right field, throwing his bat at the ball in an 0-1 count and being rewarded with a hit. Bregman stole second as Jon Singleton struck out, and then Jeremy Peña was able to beat out an infield hit on a slow roller to put the Astros up 1-0.

Kirby gave the Mariners two more scoreless innings in the fifth and sixth, but had to work around yet more traffic in the sixth, finishing the inning at 99 pitches. If there’s one ding on Kirby’s day, it would be that he had to use a lot of pitches per at-bat; six hitters forced him to throw six pitches or more in their at-bats, which isn’t a recipe for a long day. Kirby was frustrated with himself about it after the game, saying he wished he’d been more efficient with his pitches and able to work through the seventh. Us too, it turns out.

With Kirby done and the lower middle of the Astros lineup due up, Servais opted to go to former Astro Ryne Stanek for the seventh. Stanek opened by walking Peña, always a bad sign. In a 1-2 count to Jake Meyers, Stanek put a fastball on the edge of the zone and Meyers jumped all over it, mashing it for a two-run home run of his own to put the Astros up 3-2. Servais said pregame that Stanek is 100% recovered from the back spasms that knocked him out of the game in the Angels series, but it’s hard not to notice that his velo was significantly down across the board tonight.

Stanek then allowed a single to Altuve before Servais went to lift him, and Altuve decided to test Garver’s arm, only to be immediately thrown out trying to swipe second before Thornton could even throw a pitch. That’s what 44% sprint speed do, baby.

This was an inflection point for this game: the Mariners had an opportunity to answer back in the seventh against Bryan Abreu, with Mitch Haniger leading off with a walk. Pinch-runner Jonatan Clase got picked off first, however, and then pinch-hitter Luke Raley and J.P. Crawford struck out swinging helplessly to end that threat before it ever really began.

Instead, it was the Astros who seized even more of the momentum, with pesky Yainer Diaz battling Trent Thornton for nine pitches before sending a laser-liner home run over the left field wall, just where Julio’s had gone a few innings earlier, to stretch the Astros lead to 4-2. A home run at just 6 of the 30 MLB parks, but wouldn’t you know, T-Mobile was one of them.

Once again, the Mariners didn’t have an answer for the back end of the Astros bullpen despite seeing this exact lineup of pitchers twenty-four hours before. Abreu was followed by Ryan Pressly, who got his three outs—although he did have a scare as Julio just missed his second home run of the game (a home run at five parks, but not this one), and he also hit Cal Raleigh with a pitch, and also got helped out by a diving catch by Joey Loperfido to take away extra bases from Mitch Garver.

Josh Hader also avoided a scare in the bottom of the ninth, with Jorge Polanco flying out to the deepest part of the park (he also had to work around Jonatan Clase getting himself into a 3-1 count and being awarded first base on a pitch timer violation. Small victories!). It’s encouraging to see the Mariners make more contact, but it doesn’t help the box score, as the Astros move into first place.

If there is a highlight from tonight, it’s not just Julio’s home run, but the way he tipped his cap to Astros outfielder Trey Cabbage, who robbed Julio of his homer and threw up his ‘no fly’ zone sign.

“That’s what it’s all about,” he said, smiling. “I feel like you have two teams clashing out there. And I feel like that’s what was fun to me about the game. We’re all competing for everything. Two teams chasing first place. And game respect game. I respect them. They respect us.”

“And I thought it was pretty cool when he threw up the X sign. I would have thrown it up the same way if I would have caught his. He knows that, so that’s why he did it.”

While speaking about the two teams like they’re on even footing, at the same time, Julio —like everyone else—recognizes the Mariners have now fallen behind their AL West rivals.

“We are a team that’s used to playing from behind. Since I’ve been here in ‘22, that was the first time we were ahead of everyone. So I feel like we’re not strangers to this position, and we all know that we have to step up and we have to keep going, keep showing up. But I feel like this is a team that knows how to play from behind, and everybody is staying together in the clubhouse and we’re going to keep supporting each other.”

Jesus’ Son is not a happy book, if you couldn’t guess from the quote at the top there, or the reference to the Velvet Underground song. It’s a series of connected short stories surrounding a main character who is nicknamed something I can’t type on this website, who lives a life affected by drug and alcohol dependency that is by turns grim and grimly funny. Grim and grimly funny is also a good way to sum up the experience of being a Mariners fan over the past few weeks, part of this community—much like the community the main character of Johnson’s book finds at the end of his journey, working at a home for the aged.

“All these weirdos, and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them. I have never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us.”

There’s a place for the Mariners, and it’s not at the top of the division—not now, at least. And there’s a place for people like us, and it’s here, the community we make watching this frustrating, exhilarating, frustrating again team. There’s a place for all of us weirdos, getting a little better every day.