The Mariners beat Houston 4-2, in the ugliest way, which is more fun

In baseball, as in all things, it doesn’t have to be pretty, it just has to work. Over the course of a 162-game season, every team will win a few games in the stupidest way imaginable and also lose in even dumber ways. Every now and then a team will put together a whole bunch of these wins and you end up with the 2021 Mariners and their Chaos Ball. Since then, Mariners teams have been too legitimately good to justify that moniker as a nickname for their style of play. But that doesn’t mean they can’t occasionally drink to the Cup of Chaos.

Tonight there was this kind of disorder everywhere, even at the beginning. Luis Castillo wasn’t sharp, leaving way too many fastballs to the heart of the plate. But he was still pretty good, thanks to some good luck on balls in play. In the second inning, Luke Raley – the living embodiment of graceless athleticism – snarled at the left field wall and brought home one A.

After the match, Scott Servias said of Raley: “He doesn’t really do anything pretty, but he gets the job done. » But his awkward catch would actually be overshadowed an inning later. A combination of wind and apparent fear of crashing into Julio led Dominic Canzone to make a trickier catch than the time Taylor Swift made Ed Sheeran try to rap. But it doesn’t have to be pretty, it just has to work.

Ultimately, Castillo left the game after allowing just two runs in six innings. But after a mini-rally in the first inning that led to a run scored, the bats were quiet and those two runs seemed enough for Houston to take the win.

But when Ryan Pressley came on in the bottom of the eighth, the Mariners decided it was time to go back to left. Haniger started the inning using what we know and love as the ugliest, most finely tuned swing in baseball. After crumpling his body like a wet rag, he rolled it into the baseball for a 99 mph line drive double. Ryan Bliss came next and failed to keep the sacrifice bunt fair in either try. But despite finding himself in an 0-2 hole, Pressley then did Bliss a favor by throwing his next four pitches with all the precision of a T-shirt cannon-wielding mascot, and gave her the first goal. This was Bliss’s least impressive fight of the evening, but the only one in which he reached base. Whatever works.

With one out and runners on the corners, Josh Rojas had the opportunity to play the hero and hit the ball as weakly as possible while still calling it a hard hit. But he hit it in the right place, to first base and to Jose Abreu, who I assume is on Houston’s roster because the Astros were trying to get a tax deduction for a charitable donation. Abreu bounced the ball off his glove and down the right field line. That deflection earned Rojas the game-tying RBI as well as tonight’s Sun Hat Award as he also scored the game’s first run after a single, stolen base.

This brought in Julio, who finally got that bunt Bliss was trying to get, only by accident. But as Bliss headed home, Alex Bregman let the run score and tried to catch Julio at first, instead sparking a bit of chaos on the throw that also allowed an insurance run to score . Whatever works.

The Astros would eventually return to the dugout as one does following a gasoline fighting accident. And Ryan Stanek, facing his former team, closed out the game with some extra oomph to give the Mariners a 5.5 game lead over the Astros.

Julio’s “shot” is the obvious highlight of the game. But it’s Julio’s reaction that will be remembered. While his little hot streak is big for what it portends about the Mariners’ 2024 playoff chances, it’s this that made me go to bed with a smile on my face. One of the hardest things to watch as he struggled in the first third of the season was his change in attitude. The man who burst onto the scene and into our hearts as an avatar of joy has looked sad all year. If you watch the 2022 clips, he’s like a different person. What we’ve seen this season looks like a guy not having fun. I hesitated to verbalize the thought, but he looked a little, just a little, well, Jarred-ish. But not tonight, even in a match where he got TOOTBLAN. No, the Julio from the top 50 games can’t come to the phone at the moment. For what? Oh, because he’s dead.