The good vibes of the series win against the Astros were bug-squashed tonight at T-Mobile Park with a clunker of a loss against the Brewers, 6-0. This one goes squarely in the “50 games you lose” column, but that doesn’t make it any easier to stomach.
The Mariners had a tough assignment in front of them: slowing down the red-hot Milwaukee Brewers, winners of 10 in a row, facing one of the best pitchers in the game in Brandon Woodruff. But the Mariners were throwing George Kirby, and for six innings—okay, five and change—it looked like a potential World Series matchup, two prizefighters battling to keep the other team off the board. The Mariners flew out harmlessly against Woodruff’s fastball, which only averaged about 93 mph but seemed impossible for them to square up, riding up in the zone; he mixed it effectively with his changeup for swinging strikes along with the weak contact outs. Meanwhile, the Brewers pounded George Kirby’s offerings into the ground, gobbled up swiftly by his infield defense. But the Brewers were able to eventually break through against Kirby in a way the Mariners couldn’t against Woodruff, and they eventually ran out of outs with which to make something—anything—happen.
After trading empty blows, it was the bottom of the lineups that finally got things going for each team in the third inning, spoiling each pitchers’ chances at perfect games/no-hitters. First Blake Perkins worked a four-pitch leadoff walk and later stole second (on a throw where Cal Raleigh had him dead to rights but Cole Young dropped the ball); Kirby was able to wiggle around that trouble. The Mariners answered back with their own mini-rally, as Ben Williamson recorded the Mariners’ first hit of the day on a little two-out bloop single and then stole second, but Julio struck out looking on a perfectly-placed pitch to end that threat.
The Brewers cracked Kirby open in the sixth when Kirby lost his no-hitter, shutout, and the game all in one inning. With one out, Joey Ortiz poked a single just over J.P. Crawford’s head. No biggie, but Kirby made things worse for himself, falling behind Brice Turang 3-1 and then serving up a juicy sinker right on the plate for a double. Kirby had a chance to get out of the inning scoreless from there; Brewers third base coach Jason Lane held up Ortiz at third, but the Brewers then went ultra-aggressive against Kirby, who was trying desperately to throw first-pitch strikes and right the ship. Three times in a row the Brewers swung at Kirby’s first offering, as he failed to get his slider down enough to where it would miss bats, resulting in a sacrifice fly, a single, and a double; another single on the slider made it 4-0.
“Oftentimes you see when a no-hit bid stops, they pick up that first it, it can go pretty quickly,” said Dan Wilson “And it did tonight for George.”
“With runners in scoring position, those guys are going to be swinging, so I have to get it below the zone. No pitch was a bad decision, I just had to get it a little lower to get them to roll it over.”
Perhaps Kirby was a victim of his own early success in this game; he relied exclusively on his two fastballs, curveball, and slider, not mixing in the splitter once tonight, saying postgame he didn’t really see a need for it when the curve and slider were performing so well. But maybe the splitter in the sixth would have given the Brewers hitters another wrinkle since they were clearly hunting the slider first pitch, although Kirby would say that the fault is his for not executing the sliders better.
With the Mariners facing a deep deficit late, Brandyn Garcia made his MLB debut in the seventh and while we do love a debut, Garcia’s inning was…rough, as he struggled with command and location. Two more runs scored, and it felt lucky to get out of that with just the two. While he possesses electric stuff, command has been the sole thing that has held Garcia back and the thing he most needs to harness in order to make his stay at the big league level a long one.
The Mariners had their best run-scoring opportunity in the bottom of the eighth against lefty Aaron Ashby. Once again it was Williamson and Young pairing up to try to get the sluggish top of the offense going, to no avail. They’d had an opportunity in the seventh against Ashby, as well, when a Donovan Solano pinch-hit GIDP ended the threat. Staffer Ryan Blake informs me that Solano has now grounded into four double plays as a pinch-hitter, which ties an AL record since 2002 when FanGraphs began tracking such things. Not the kind of history we hoped to see made tonight.
(The Mariners had one more opportunity in the ninth. It involved Solano and Dylan Moore having a face-off as to who is having a historically worse season. DMo “won.” The rest of us lost.)
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Dylan Moore is in a pinch
