Shorthanded Mariners can’t keep up with Rangers, drop second game of series 5-1

Pitching struggles, offense can’t string together hits, as Mariners fall back down to .500

The Mariners were running shorthanded tonight, with their starting catcher out of commission with a dental emergency and their starting shortstop out with oblique soreness (apparently he felt something during BP; he’ll get an MRI and apparently they’ll know more in the morning). While replacement leadoff hitter Josh Rojas and replacement shortstop Dylan Moore each did their part to chip in (with a combined four hits, one walk, and just two strikeouts between the two of them), there were simply too many times this game that came down to Luke Raley or Seby Zavala needing to come up with a clutch hit.

Bryce Miller did what he could to keep the Mariners in the game, but was battling with his command all night. Miller’s final line—four innings pitched with five strikeouts and four walks, with two runs allowed—isn’t ugly, but he was very inefficient with his pitches, struggling especially to command his off-speed. He needed 28 pitches to clear the first inning, with only 16 strikes, although he made those strikes count, collecting three of his strikeouts there in the first. “It felt like every inning was like twenty minutes long,” Miller said postgame.

But as the game went on, the Rangers saw Miller better and better, making a lot of hard contact against him. While Miller only surrendered two runs on back-to-back solo home runs to Adolis García and Evan Carter, the damage could have been much worse:

Postgame Miller said he struggled with all the deep counts, and was unhappy with the way he mixed his fastballs, pointing out specifically the home run pitch he threw García: “not a bad pitch in a vacuum, but I’d already thrown him like four sinkers that at-bat.” But, always the optimist, Miller pointed to his improvement over his last two starts in Arlington in 2023, when he gave up a combined 13 runs—although tonight’s damage could have been much worse. He also got lucky when Wyatt Langford doubled but tripped trying to get to third base and was tagged out at second.

However, the Mariners couldn’t capitalize on any of that luck despite getting on the board first, when Josh Rojas led off the game with a triple and Mitch Haniger brought him home to score the Mariners’ lone run of the night. Despite working Jon Gray over for 31 pitches in the first and getting traffic on the bases near constantly, the Mariners could not cash in any of those runners. A scoring threat in the second (Dylan Moore singled and stole second) died when Zavala struck out and Rojas grounded out. A two-out threat in the third came to nothing after Haniger doubled and Ty France collected his second hit of the day already, but Luke Raley grounded out easily to end the inning.

Maybe the most frustrating bit of offensive failure came in the fifth, when the Mariners badly needed to answer back after the home runs. The Mariners were able to put runners on the corners with one out after a leadoff single from Rojas and a sharp single up the middle from Jorge Polanco, but Haniger struck out swinging—chasing ball four from Gray, who wasn’t sharp at all with his location but collected seven strikeouts anyway, getting the Mariners to chase after slider after slider. Even though the Mariners chased Gray after that, Ty France grounded out against Jonathan Hernandez to end what would be the Mariners’ best scoring opportunity of the night.

The Rangers went on to beat up on the Mariners’ bullpen some, touching up Tayler Saucedo for a run, Tyson Miller for another, and Austin Voth for one more to put the game safely out of reach at 5-1 and allowing them to revert to their lower-leverage bullpen arms. (For an extra twist of the knife, Grant Anderson, a former Mariners prospect acquired in the Connor Sadzeck trade, closed out the game with a scoreless ninth inning). The less said about all of that, the better, but let’s go ahead and give some flowers to Josh Rojas again, this time for defense:

Tomorrow, Luis Castillo will try to get the Mariners back in the W column against old frenemy Andrew Heaney. And just so we don’t end things on too negative a note, the Mariners do remain tied with the Rangers at the top of the AL West. The rest of the division lost today, including the Astros, who now sit at 7-18, their worst start since 2016.