M’s Take Close, Stable Pitcher’s Duel to Begin Road Trip in Kansas City
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Seattle Mariners pitcher Logan Gilbert (36) pitches during the first inning against the Kansas City Royals at Kauffman Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Jay Biggerstaff-Imagn Images [/caption]
The Mariners have seen games take wild courses in Kauffman Stadium over the past few years, but on Friday night, it was remarkably stable. Both teams struggled quite a bit at the plate, leading to a low-scoring pitcher’s duel, but one home run for the visitors led to Seattle taking a 2-0 lead and the M’s bullpen went all according to plan.
Logan Gilbert threw nearly six shutout innings, recovering from his seven-run disaster against the Padres.
The last time Logan Gilbert had gone out to the mound, he had thrown 21 of his 27 first pitches for strikes, yet the San Diego Padres jumped on them for seven runs in total. Gilbert threw 15 of 21 first pitches for strikes on Friday, yet he kept the opposing Royals scoreless.
Talking with the media before the game, manager Dan Wilson downplayed concerns that the Mariners’ strike-throwing had allowed hitters to sit on and ambush early strikes.
“We do attack the zone, we do want to get ahead, and I think it’s a different at-bat when you do,” Wilson said before Friday’s game. “I think the good always outweighs the bad when it comes to that.”
Of course, the devil is in the details. Looking at a map of these first pitches, with those against San Diego on the left and those against Kansas City on the right, there are a couple things that are clear.
For one, Gilbert was far more willing to throw his secondary pitches to open a count, throwing a mix of sliders, fastballs, a couple of curveballs, and even a cutter and changeup to start hitters off on Friday while mostly sticking to four-seamers and sliders against the Dads. But the biggest shift was location, as he hugged the corners against the Royals and kept away from the business end of their bats.
“He really showed up tonight, man. That was impressive,” M’s catcher Mitch Garver said about Gilbert’s performance. “Had all of his pitches working, there wasn’t a pitch that we didn’t throw. He was confident in all of them, I feel like we were on the same page tonight.”
Gilbert only gave up hits in the first and sixth innings, with a walk in the third being the only intervening baserunner. Meanwhile, the Mariners starter struck out six batters and got plenty of weak contact throughout, with just three hard hits against him during the entire outing, all of which ended up in one glove or another.
Maikel Garcia got a one-out knock in the sixth and got to second on an airmailed pickoff attempt. Despite Bobby Witt Jr. flying out harmlessly, Gilbert found issue against Vinnie Pasquantino, falling behind 2-0. Although he worked back to an even count, he buried three straight splitters to walk the Royals’ number three hitter despite a swing and a foul ball.
Wilson pulled Gilbert at that point. This was the right move, with the specter of many a collapse when Gilbert goes one batter too far. The trio of splitters as soon as he got to two strikes was a telltale sign that he was falling back into old habits. Eduard Bazardo took the game from there.
Rob Refsnyder had another bad day, this time in the cleanup spot.
Whether or not Rob Refsnyder is in his last week or so with the Mariners is unclear. There are legitimate reasons to keep him on the team from a predictive standpoint, but there is a difference between incorporating these types of things in a team’s projections and having blind faith in one good indicator amongst a host of bad things the other way. Given his role, there’s little justification keeping him in the order if he can’t hit, which of course puts its own kind of pressure on him.
In any case, having the struggling righty bat cleanup was an unusual decision. Sure, there’s always the chance that one game in particular will be the one where a guy emphatically breaks out of a slump, but putting him so high in the lineup clearly risked his slump continuing in the worst of circumstances. Granted, Dominic Canzone was set to slot into that role once southpaw Noah Cameron, but the risks were obvious.
Those risks wound up being realized, as all three of Refsnyder’s at-bats came with traffic on the bases. The first inning was the best opportunity for Seattle, with Julio Rodríguez doubling and Randy Arozarena taking a walk to give Refsnyder two men on with one away. To Cameron’s credit, he front-doored a cutter down and in for strike zone, but Refsnyder fouled off a couple hanging secondaries he needed to drive and the strikeout came on the high heat.
Refsnyder struck out thrice in total. Another fouled-off middle-middle breaking ball began the second strikeout and it ended with an ugly swing on the buried hook, but the worst wound up saved for last. This time around, Refsnyder worked the count full, but he fouled off a changeup and, as Cameron dropped a hook towards the top of the zone, the designated hitter internally resigned himself to a walk-at-best mentality. Walk-lust, as it does more often than not, brought on the backwards K.
That last punchout showed the mental side of Refsnyder’s slump. No downturn of such a magnitude comes without sapping the mind’s ability to keep to a good process; a hitter tries to cheat any production they can get and the slump in turn deepens. Given the fact - aside from predictive metrics, his batting average on balls in play is an unsustainably bad .111 - that the M’s should at least see some improvement, there is something of a needle to potentially be threaded.
But it could be simpler and cleaner for the M’s to look elsewhere to find someone to fit that right-handed platoon role in the lineup, rather than trying fighting a two-front war with the currently-struggling Refsnyder.
Seattle’s bats struggled in general against the left-handed Cameron.
The Mariners’ woes against lefties extend further than Refsnyder. Now, having Josh Naylor out of the lineup for an extra day off meant that Patrick Wisdom was batting fifth (and he went 0-4 with two strikeouts) instead of Naylor being in the lineup, but when Cameron was on the mound, the M’s went 4-21 (.190) with eight strikeouts and two walks. Refsnyder, Wisdom, and the newly-returned Víctor Robles accounted for seven of Cameron’s 12 whiffs in a display of the limitations of these players at handling a pitcher that changes speeds.
Rodríguez, who went 2-4 with a double, was the only Mariner to get multiple hits off of the Royals’ starter. Garver and Colt Emerson both knocked a single apiece through the infield, but those hits were not capitalized upon and Seattle went all six of Cameron’s innings without scoring a run.
It was Cameron’s first scoreless outing since August 9, 2025. It was the first time Cameron gave up less than three runs in a game since April 7 of this year. It seems that, regardless of the quality of the left-hander on the mound, they all stymie the Mariners hitters. That fact lends itself to the interpretation that the Mariners have some issue in their coaching or training that is leaving such a blind spot, though the nature of such an issue is unclear.
Garver, as it turned out, knocked in the only two runs either team managed to score. With reliever Nick Mears on the hill in the top of the seventh, Cole Young drew a six-pitch walk and Garver took advantage of a sinker that didn’t sink, bashing a home run well over the left field wall. It was 2-0 for the visitors.
Despite a fair bit of traffic, the M’s bullpen kept the Royals off the board for the rest of the game.
Back to the bottom of the sixth. Bazardo, with Kansas City’s go-ahead run at second, pitched around Salvador Perez and got to a full count. Had Perez laid off the sweeper, it would have been a walk to jam the bags, but his swing sent an easy grounder to Emerson at third and the M’s got out of it.
There wasn’t anything else Bazardo had to work around as he struck out the side in the seventh. Wilson’s solid in-game management on Friday continued as he let his stopper out for another frame, the M’s reaping the rewards of a clean inning and cutting down Kansas City’s out cushion to six.
Matt Brash looked a little shakier, however. A 2-2 changeup hung up in the zone to the leadoff Michael Massey, who plunked it into shallow right center, and with a 1-2 count and an out logged, Brash tried to cheat a double play ball with a sinker on the outside edge. The pitch ran up and Garcia slapped it the other way to put two men on for the Royals. Brash got the second out, but as he struggled to put Pasquantino away, he chucked a sinker right over the heart of the plate.
As might be expected, Pasquantino rocked it, but the ball flew right to Luke Raley in right field. Andrés Muñoz dealt quickly with the ninth and the M’s won their first game in Kansas City.
Rather interestingly, Muñoz didn’t throw a single fastball during his outing. This is something that Garver had apparently pitched to the closer before the ninth, but it ended up working out.
“I even had a conversation with “Muny” before he even went out there, I said ‘would you even be mad if I didn’t call a fastball?’ And it was more of a joke, but the slider is a plus pitch, we love the slider, he’s confident throwing it in any count,” Garver said. “It’s one of those pitches that we can kind of wear out when we want to.”
On Deck
The M’s have two more games in Kansas City before moving on to West Sacramento for a series against the Athletics. George Kirby will take the bump on Saturday followed by Bryan Woo on Sunday, while for the Royals, they will be putting two right-handers on the mound: Stephen Kolek and Seth Lugo.
