By Charles Hamaker
Seattle, WA – On a day that Seattle was looking to sweep the Oakland Athletics and gain ground in the race for the number one Wild Card spot, the Mariners fell flat on their face. The Oakland Athletics, who have lost 102 games this season, came out and ran the score up on the Mariners. While Seattle has already clinched its first playoff berth in 21 years, there is still the possibility that the Mariners can host games at T-Mobile Park. For that to happen, the Mariners need to sweep the Tigers and need Toronto to lose two of three to Baltimore.
Adam Frazier recorded a double in the bottom of the ninth (Photo by Liv Lyons)
Poor day starts with bad Ray outing
Seattle starting pitcher Robbie Ray, deemed the Mariners ace in free agency when he signed here, has certainly had his ups and downs this season. Ray, in a solid amount of his outings, notoriously has “one bad inning” that derails the majority of his start. In his outing today, Ray had a bad day overall. Robbie was unable to get through six complete innings, and allowed five earned runs on eight hits. The Mariners will need much more help from Ray than an outing like this if they want to even get past the potential of Toronto in the Wild Card round.
Robbie Ray had a poor outing for Seattle on the mound, digging an early hole (Photo by Liv Lyons)
Mariners hitting is far too little, far too late
The Seattle offense only mustered five hits today, three of them coming in the bottom of the ninth inning. The Mariners were locked down by Oakland starter James Kaprielian, throwing one of his best games of the season. The Athletics defense behind Kaprielian was stellar as well, erasing many potential base hits for Seattle. The only Seattle runs came in the bottom of the ninth when left fielder Jesse Winker uncorked a three-run blast to right center field. Hopefully the homer will allow Winker to get into some sort of groove as we get into the final four games of the regular season, and the eventual playoffs.
Jesse Winker watches as his three run blast heads to deep right center field (Photo by Liv Lyons)
What it means?
I have been saying this all season long, but the Mariners offensive inconsistency issues have plagued them and no real concrete changes have been made. Whether this is an issue that hitting coach Jarret DeHart (it was actually his birthday, by the way) has not adjusted around, the players being unable to adjust, the marine layer, the shift, or some other nonsense, things need to get figured out and quickly if Seattle wants to be a dangerous playoff team.
On the other hand, the Mariners have had one of the best starting rotations in all of baseball. That has remained true for the most of the season, but some of the better starts of the five has seen poor starts. Logan Gilbert seems to have gotten his poor outings out of the way a few weeks ago. Luis Castillo’s last few outings before this most recent one had seen issues. Robbie Ray had a really solid streak after an early July outing, but has been rather inconsistent since then. Marco Gonzales.... doesn’t necessarily know the word consistency. This, paired with the Mariners defense making more errors recently than earlier in the season, is a recipe for a poor playoff performance.
Matt Festa was solid in relief of Robbie Ray (Photo by Liv Lyons)
What’s next?
Tomorrow, the Mariners begin a four-game series against the Detroit Tigers. Detroit, touting the third worst record in the American League and the sixth worst in all of baseball, will battle with the Mariners in game one on Monday, October 3rd. First pitch for game one is at 6:40PM PST, as young starter George Kirby will face off against Tigers pitcher Bryan Garcia. The day after, the Mariners and Tigers will play a doubleheader with both games having only 45 minutes between the two.
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