Except for the R&R guys, Mariners punchless in loss to Tigers
Dan Wilson’s Mariners couldn’t muster enough offense in a 3-2, 11-inning loss to Detroit Saturday in the opener of their best-of-five American League Division Series at T-Mobile Park
SEATTLE — If you thought the Seattle Mariners were going to have a smooth ride to the World Series, think again.
Maybe the Detroit Tigers are Major League Baseball’s team of destiny, not the Mariners.
The Tigers got superb pitching and enough clutch hitting to pull out a 3-2, 11-inning victory Saturday night in the opener of their best-of-five American League Division Series.
“We could talk forever about this one,” Detroit manager A.J. Finch said. “A back-and-forth game. Volumes of pitches thrown. Key at-bats. Really good pitching. Pretty good defense. In a one-run game, everything matters. We had one extra punch at the perfect time.”
That punch came in the top of the 11th, when, with the score tied 2-2, Seattle reliever Carlos Vargas walked Spencer Torkelson and wild-pitched him to second base. After a pair of strikeouts, Zach McKinstry singled up the middle to score Torkelson for a 3-2 lead.
That was all the Tigers needed. In the bottom of the 11th, Julio Rodriguez hit a two-out single, but Josh Naylor’s ground-out ended the game and sent the partisans in a sellout T-Mobile Park crowd of 47,290 home unhappy.
Rodriguez had three hits, including a solo home run — the first post-season homer of his career — for the game’s first run in the fourth. Cal Raleigh — serenaded all night with “MVP!” chants — also had three hits, all singles. That was it for Seattle. The rest of the Mariners combined to go 0 for 28 at the plate.
“We had a big blast from Julio, and were able to get some traffic in a couple of innings, but weren’t able to convert as much as we would have wanted to,” Seattle manager Dan Wilson said afterward. “We did grind. That’s how we run our offense, to grind out some at-bats. But we weren’t able to get enough back-to-back to put the damage on that we wanted to.”
Seattle manager Dan Wilson (left) and hitting coach Edgar Martinez (center) watch Jorge Polanco take batting practice prior to Saturday’s Game 1 of the ALDS
I wouldn’t call the Mariners a grind-it-out club. Actually, they dig the long ball. During the regular season, they hit only .244 but with 238 homers, the latter figure trailing only the Yankees and Dodgers in the MLB ranks. Raleigh led the way with 60 four-baggers, but there were also Rodriguez with 32, Randy Arozarena with 27 and Jorge Polanco with 26. And Eugenio Suarez banged out 49, though 36 of them were with Arizona before a July 31 trade.
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The only real traffic the Mariners created was in the sixth, after Kerry Carpenter’s two-run homer had given Detroit a 2-1 lead. Arozarena opened the inning with a walk, Raleigh and Rodriguez followed with consecutive singles and the Mariners had it tied at 2-2 with no outs and runners on first and second. But Naylor hit into a double-play and Polanco flied out to end the inning. The Mariners had only two base-runners the rest of the way, and neither advanced past first base.
While Seattle was playing with nearly a week off after the end of the regular season, the Tigers were playing on short rest. They had finished off Cleveland in three games on Thursday in a wild-card series, and Hinch started reliever Troy Melton, who had started only four games during the regular season.
Melton gave them four innings of two-hit, one-run ball, and except for Rafael Montero, who gave up two hits and a run while facing three batters in the sixth, the Detroit relief crew was lights out. Tyler Holton, Tommy Kahnie, Kyle Finnegan, Will Vest and Keider Montero combined to limit Seattle to two hits and no runs over seven innings.
“Troy gave us four good innings, and how about our bullpen?” Finch said. “That was quite an effort. We used everybody down there (in the pen) but one. (The Mariners) have an explosive offense. When the Seattle fans were looking to help them get anything started, (the relievers) didn’t let them get a rally going.
“A job well-done by all of our bullpen guys, including Troy. There is a lot to like about a win on the road to kick-start a playoff series.”
Seattle got a strong pitching performance, too. George Kirby was electric through four innings with eight strikeouts and no runs before faltering in the fifth. Wilson used all of his top relievers — Edward Bazardo, Gabe Speier, Matt Brash, closer Andres Munoz and Vargas — along with Caleb Ferguson. Over six innings, they combined to give up just the one hit and run in the 11th.
“George gave us the 94 (pitches), threw a great ballgame and gave us a chance,” Wilson said. “And those (bullpen) guys did a great job tonight, too.”
Detroit had a humpty-dumpty-like regular season to play its way out of an AL Central Division title. The Tigers were 59-34 and held a 15 1/2-game lead over Cleveland before going into a tailspin, losing six in a row and 12 of 13. They had another eight-game losing streak late in the season and wound up 28-41 over their last 69 games, including 7-17 in September. The Tigers finished 87-75 and lost the division title by one game to the Guardians.
But Detroit came back to eliminate Cleveland in the playoffs. And now the Tigers have the Mariners — the only current MLB franchise to have never made a World Series — in some trouble heading into Sunday’s Game 2 at T-Mobile Park.
Seattle had a very different type of regular season than Detroit. The Mariners closed 17-4 in their final 21 games, including winning streaks of 10 and seven games, which turned a bid for a wild-card spot into a 90-72 record and their first AL West title since 2001. That was won by the historic 2001 Mariners, who tied the all-time record for regular-season victories but failed to make it to the World Series.
That’s right. The ’01 Mariners went an amazing 116-46 with a lineup featuring Ichiro Suzuki, Edgar Martinez, John Olerud, Bret Boone, Mike Cameron and a catcher named Dan Wilson.
Now Wilson, in his first full season as Seattle’s skipper, goes into what amounts to a must-win situation in Game 2. The Mariners need to win three of the next four games in the series, including at least one at Detroit’s Comerica Park. They can’t afford to go down 0-2 with Games 3 and 4 scheduled for Comerica.
Seattle will send veteran Luis Castillo (11-8, 3.54 ERA) out against Detroit’s Tarik Skubal (13-6 with an AL-best 2.21 ERA) in Sunday’s Game 2. The 6-3, 240-pound southpaw is the presumed Cy Young Award winner, but he had a 0-2 record and a 5.91 ERA against the Mariners in the regular season.
The M’s — especially those not named Raleigh or Rodriguez — need to get their bats going against him. Anything will be better than what they delivered Saturday.
“One of our strengths is bouncing back, and we have to do that,” Wilson said. “Skubal is a guy we have seen a couple of times this year. … we have to come out (Sunday) and come right back at him. That’s what we do, and I think we’ll be ready.”
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