Mariners Pitchers Lock Down Win Despite Continued Batting Sluggishness
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Seattle Mariners relief pitcher Andres Munoz (75) delivers a pitch in the ninth inning against the Cleveland Guardians at Progressive Field. Mandatory Credit: David Richard-Imagn Images [/caption]
A bobble from Guardians second baseman Travis Bazzana in the top of the seventh seemed like the first piece of good luck the Mariners had gotten in a very long time. It came with two outs and a man on third, turning what would have been an inning-ending grounder into a go-ahead run for the Mariners. It proved the winning run in Seattle’s 3-1 victory against Cleveland.
On the one hand, none of their issues really fixed themselves. The team couldn’t get a fourth run for the 12th straight game, marking just the third such streak in team history. Pitch recognition woes and issues against left-handers continued with no real end in sight. But on the other hand, for the fifth time in those dozen games, it was enough.
Luis Castillo tossed a quality start, with all his pitches in action.
Mariners starter Luis Castillo came into the game with a better track record since the onset of his first piggyback outing, but there had still been notable inconsistencies for him. Despite a 3.38 ERA in his six appearances since the first piggyback, he was still without a quality start aside from his first outing of the year. Going into a game where the M’s did nothing but continue to crawl along on offense, he needed to find his best stuff for a full start.
Luckily for the M’s, Castillo had a firm command of all three of the pitches he needs to build a good outing. The slider was his most common delivery, followed by the four-seamer and changeup in that order, but he threw each quite often with the occasional sinker thrown in.
The degree to which Castillo can play up his changeup has been the key to his performance as of late. When he doesn’t have it, hitters can wait until a dip in slider control and ambush his fastball. But with both the slider and changeup at his disposal, Castillo was free to mix things up and pitch backwards more often than not.
Things didn’t go perfectly for Castillo, however. The Guardians didn’t fall to his two-strike high heat, with all four strikeouts coming low in the zone. And a few minutes after a first-inning decision by Julio Rodríguez in center to hold up on a looper in front of him rather than try to make a difficult catch - perhaps influenced by lingering injury issues, as he seemed fairly banged up on a diving play a few innings later - the Guardians turned that baserunner into a two-out run. Khalil Watson cracked a double off the high wall in left field to put the hosts up 1-0.
It wouldn’t be until the fourth when Cleveland had another baserunner, as Brayan Rocchio shoved a 2-2 heater into center field for a leadoff single. Although Cooper Ingle took a walk two batters later, this didn’t bring Rocchio anywhere; Cal Raleigh had picked him off at first with a heads-up move. Steven Kwan led off the fifth with a single but went nowhere as Castillo got three outs in the field.
When Castillo fanned Khalil Watson to end the sixth (the hurler’s fourth punchout of the game), he finally had the quality start that had eluded him for months.
Seattle changed up the lineup against the lefty starter and allowed Canzone to hit in that role.
With Guardians pitcher Joey Cantillo tossing from the left side of the hill, the M’s could have very well gone to the same old broken way of dealing with the southpaws, depending on the same plays that haven’t happened.
The Mariners - perhaps late in doing so - switched the lineup. Randy Arozarena led off and Julio Rodríguez swapped spots with Cal Raleigh. Dominic Canzone, who has been hitting well in June, took the cleanup spot. Rob Refsnyder hit out of the seven-hole.
It was perhaps a lateral move in the grand scheme of things. Arozarena didn’t do well in his stint at leadoff last year, and Raleigh might be better suited to the cleanup role than hitting third. But it showed a big leap in the team’s understanding of Canzone’s abilities, as it looks like they now trust him to bat against left-handers.
The bats chugged along with their rut continuing, though they scored a trio of runs in the end.
It was a win, but it wasn’t some sort of breakthrough game for the offense. The team scored three runs once again, extending the streak to 12 games without more than a field goal.
Just by being on pace for 82 wins, the Mariners are already outperforming most teams who have historically gone a dozen straight without four runs. The average winning percentage of such a team in the live ball era is .423 (69-93 over a 162-game season) and the median is .414 (67-95), though it’s worth noting that these figures are less drastic in the past 50 years. Even in the past 50 years, however, just two of 11 such teams have finished above .500 while two have finished with 100 or more losses.
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A density chart showing the relative occurrence of full-season winning percentages for teams with 12-game streaks of less than four runs since 1920. Data from Stathead and compiled using RStudio. [/caption]
Incredibly, with the conclusion of Friday’s game, the Mariners did this for the third time, and it was the 12th such instance in baseball since the Mariners entered the league 50 years ago. No other team has repeated the feat in that time, though it used to be a more common occurrence; teams had 34 such streaks between 1920 and 1976. The 1967 Mets even did it twice, to beat an orange and blue horse that the glue factory processed months ago.
Of course, the M’s have what most of these teams (did anyone need a reminder of how bad the St. Louis Browns were in the ‘50s?) surely lacked, that being a pitching staff with an ability to genuinely shove. Seattle has gone 5-7 in these 12 games, the second-best record during such a stretch behind only the 1986 Tigers, who somehow went 6-6 during their own dreary dozen.
If the Mariners finish 87-75 like the ‘86 Tigers did, they’ll probably win the West and likely get the American League’s second seed. All they have to do for the first round bye that comes with such a seeding is have a better record than the White Sox, who are pacing 85-77.
Colt Emerson was the one to tie things up for Seattle in the top of the third, sending his seventh home run on an up-and-in changeup from Cantillo. But that was basically it for what the Mariners could do against the Guardians starter. For most of the rest of the six innings he pitched on Friday, Cantillo went back to a trick that got the Mariners’ goose nearly every time: the curveball.
Half of Cantillo’s 90 pitches were hooks, each one as effective as the last with Mariners hitters up and down the lineup wholly unable to read the pitch out of his hand. Each swing and miss was a fully wound knot, and he had 10 of those on 19 swings the M’s had against the curve. Cantillo ended up with nine total punchouts, five on the curve.
Seattle finally worked up some threats in the sixth, but the sequencing was off for the team once more as Emerson got thrown out at second after a walk and Arozarena’s double came with nobody on. Rodríguez bounced out with Arozarena on second and the game remained tied.
Cantillo was out of the game for the seventh, but it at first appeared like more of the same despite two no-out walks from wild Cleveland reliever Tim Herrin; Josh Naylor swung at the first pitch and grounded into a double play to make Cal Raleigh the lone runner at third.
Crawford’s two-out chopper to second, of course, gave the Mariners a run. It was ruled a hit. Rodríguez added on in the eighth with a single to left, but there wouldn’t be a big inning or a cathartic, solid score. There would also not be the unfulfilling result in the other direction, that being a meaninglessly giant score. It was enough for Friday’s game.
The bullpen shut things down and completed the team’s win.
If there is one thing that has been rock-solid during the Mariners’ recent run, it has been Andrés Muñoz’ performance out of the bullpen. Since his Detroit disaster, he has switched up his plan of attack, with more and harder fastballs forming the bulk of his pitches instead of the slider he usually relies on. The results have been clear: over his past six appearances going into Friday, Muñoz had five saves and a 3.60 ERA with nine strikeouts. He had ceded four walks, but his performances were consistent enough to finish out wins even with small leads.
Jose A. Ferrer and Gabe Speier still had to get the M’s to that position, but that ended up being a quick and painless affair as both pitchers delivered 1-2-3 innings. Muñoz pumped triple-digit fastballs in the ninth and played his slider off of them to punch in another clean inning to end the game. In the end, Cleveland didn’t get a baserunner after Kwan’s fifth-inning single.
On Deck
The Mariners have two more games in Cleveland to complete their two-city road trip. Logan Gilbert and Emerson Hancock will be doing a piggyback on Saturday while Sunday’s game will see George Kirby take the mound for the Mariners.
Although the team won the one game, they did the exact same thing against Pittsburgh before dropping the next two without much fight once things began to bend against them. The Guardians have a weaker offense, sure, but the team can’t afford to continue wasting games already beyond the mathematical midpoint of the year.
