‘Vintage’ Logan Gilbert, ‘Grind-‘Em-Out’ At-Bats Prove Pivotal in Mariners’ Game 3 Rain-Delayed Victory
DETROIT, Mich. — It was certainly a little annoying when the dizzying droplets kept drenching the field on a Tuesday afternoon in Detroit. The Seattle Mariners, guarded from rain delays at home both by a retractable roof and the west coast’s dry summer, had gone 1-6 in the regular season after interpolations of precipitation. Perhaps the skill of balancing sharpness and stamina had become honed after the team’s week off, but the delay affected the Mariners little in Game 3.
“I thought they did a really nice job during the rain delay staying loose, but staying intense enough to come right out and get after it,” Mariners manager Dan Wilson noted.
The man on the mound for the day, Logan Gilbert, hadn’t gotten fully into the swing of his pre-game warmups, but he made the best of a less-than-preferred situation as the minutes turned to hours with the downpour still going strong.
“Before the game, you get kind of antsy, and we just kept going later and later,” Gilbert said. “It really wasn’t too bad. I tried to assume we were about to play in the next 30 minutes and kept doing that over and over. I tried to stay loose, stretching and throwing plyo balls, and that kind of stuff. Not ideal, but it wasn’t the worst.”
Rain pains were all but absent for Gilbert on Tuesday evening, as he brushed aside some unpunished meatballs in the first to tear down the Tigers through six innings. The slider was his best, most consistent out-pitch, while his heater put in a good amount of grunt work. The split-finger was sometimes hard to locate—as is usually the case for Gilbert—but it stayed away from the middle of the plate and got a good amount of swing-and-miss from hack-happy Tigers. After both George Kirby and Luis Castillo met brick walls in the fifth inning, it was good for “Walter” to log two-thirds of the game.
“[Gilbert] attacked the zone. He got into good counts and let the split and slider do his work for him,” Wilson said about his starter. “It was vintage Logan … to get that on the road, in a big game tonight, after a long rain delay—I think you can’t discredit that either, [being] able to come out and throw an outing like that after waiting around a couple hours is another feather in his cap—he answered the call tonight.”
The intensity Gilbert plays with is something well-noted. He dons a stark grimace, open-mouthed and wide-eyed, each time he delivers a pitch to the plate. It’s almost the polar opposite of the stone-like blank concentration that Luis Castillo has on the mound, but as the Tigers saw in two straight games, both approaches can be effective. Still, there is something more primal, more fear-inducing, when a pitcher lets his craziness leap off from the rubber.
“[Gilbert]’s a cold-blooded killer when he steps on the mound,” Mariners shortstop J.P. Crawford said. “I think that’s why his name’s Walter, it just sounds like a scary name—no offense to the Walters out there. From pitch one to pitch 85, he was coming at their throat, and you need that type of mentality in these games.”
The true origin story of “Walter” is that it comes from “W” as in “win” combined with “alter” as in “alter ego.” But Gilbert’s menacing reputation is certainly aided by the name, both in the inherent eeriness of its sound and in its Breaking Bad-derived cultural associations. For a pitcher, as for a poker player, a reputation affects how opponents will respond, which in turn affects the way to counteract that response.
But even the scariest pitchers will feel fear or uneasiness, even if it is undetectable in their face. The ghost of Game 1’s defining moment surely circled in Gilbert’s head as he saw Kerry Carpenter waltz into the box with two men on in the bottom of the fifth, despite Seattle’s four-run advantage. George Kirby had played with fire against Carpenter and given up a fifth-inning bomb; Gabe Speier had played with fire against him and notched a fifth-inning strikeout. Gilbert avoided the dangerous top of the zone and hung around the bottom edge, trying to chip away at the slugger with sliders and splitters. He didn’t quite have the feel for the latter, dropping it around the zone where Carpenter held off, but he was able to get some strikes with the former.
“I wanted to get the splitter, and it felt like [Carpenter] was tracking it pretty good, actually,” Gilbert said. “Some of them weren’t super competitive—to him especially—but the slider worked pretty good.”
Gilbert got Carpenter to ground into a force out. It should have been an inning-ending double play were it not for a disconnect between Crawford and Josh Naylor, and so a run scored, but the two infielders had already more than made up for it on the other side of the ball. Although the Mariners didn’t have a hit until the third, Tigers starter Jack Flaherty’s evening had already started to go sour due to a lineup-wide peskiness epitomized by Naylor’s 11-pitch at-bat in the second inning.
“We talk about it a lot, just a lot of ‘grind-‘em-out’ at-bats,” Wilson said. “When you look at Josh Naylor and what that at-bat looked like in the second inning … just grinding out, fouling them off. You don’t see the immediate result, but you do see it later on down the line.”
A tired Flaherty gave up four runs and was pulled in the fourth inning, earning the loss as the Mariners held the lead for the rest of the game. Crawford, for his part, studded the back half of the scoring for Seattle, blasting a home run and a sacrifice fly, but the contributions came from all corners of the lineup. Very rare were uncompetitive at-bats, and the pressure tore Flaherty to shreds far too soon for A. J. Hinch’s Tigers to recover.
In a five-game series knotted at one apiece, Game 3 is the inflection point, equivalent to Game 5 in a seven-game set. The victors are put a single game away from advancement while the vanquished are driven to the edge of elimination. And yet, it is Game 4 that determines momentum coming into the final contest, something the Mariners benefited from the last time they played all five in the ALDS. Back in 2001, Seattle was pushed to the cliff-edge after a Game 3 loss to Cleveland, but a thrilling Game 4 victory provided the momentum to advance to the ALDS. The shoe could very well be on the other foot should the M’s get sloppy.
“We just have to focus on tomorrow,” Crawford said. “It’s a big game and we can’t have any distractions; we gotta be all in.”
Treading the rubber for Seattle in Game 4 is Bryce Miller. Although he was available for work earlier in the series as a break-glass reliever in case of emergency, the M’s had planned on starting him on Wednesday once they realized Bryan Woo would not be game-ready during the ALDS.
“It was tentatively the plan from the beginning,” Miller explained. “Whenever the first game went extras, I kinda had a chance to head down there, and if Game 2 would have gone too long, I would have headed to the bullpen as well.”
With a 5.68 ERA and 1.406 WHIP, however, Miller is the shakiest starting option in this series. Despite his stellar 2024 season, injury derailed 2025 early for him, and he hasn’t yet been able to drive down home runs and walks simultaneously. He will almost certainly be on a much shorter leash than his three predecessors, but Seattle will have to trust that he can finally put it together in the defining month of the season.
