The Mariners continued their skid today against the Yankees and all their fans in T-Mobile Park. All losses are bad in their own specific ways, but this one was especially so, coming on the heels of a sweep at the hands of the Blue Jays. It’s sad because Emerson Hancock was really good until he wasn’t. It’s frustrating because the offense again looked more like their 2024 selves than the ones who strung together series win after win, making pitchers sweat. And it’s annoying because for a while, the Mariners had control of this game, and had an opportunity where they could have shifted the tides, only to squander away that opportunity and put their starter in a tough spot.
Things didn’t start out badly. The Mariners punished a mistake by Clarke Schmidt early, when in a 1-2 count Schmidt threw a sweeper that was more like an ice-rusted snowplow which Julio very nicely offered up as a souvenir to the fans in the ‘pen:
It’s sure nice to watch a Mariner crush an absolutely crush-able pitch, and doubly nice when it’s Julio.
The Mariners worked Schmidt over a little more in the second, with Randy Arozarena—extending his on-base streak to a career-high 34 games—and Rowdy Tellez working a pair of walks on a combined 15 pitches. Leody Taveras bunted them over for the first out of the inning, because the dream of the ‘90s is alive in T-Mobile Park, but Dylan Moore and Ben Williamson, who is nursing a blister on his left hand that looks like something out of The Substance, couldn’t get the runners home.
That would prove to be costly, as the Yankees were able to tie it up in the next inning. Emerson Hancock, working his second time through the lineup, surrendered a solo shot to Trent Grisham that glanced off of Julio’s glove. Aaron Judge then doubled—maybe the softest double you’ll ever see Judge hit; that 82 is going to drag down his average EV significantly—in a 1-2 count off a sweeper well away but still in the capacious embrace of the twin sequoias attached to Judge’s shoulders. To his credit, Emerson gathered himself neatly, getting Ben Rice to pop out first-pitch swinging and emphatically gesturing for the ball before getting Paul Goldschmidt on a first-pitch comebacker that settled neatly in Emerson’s glove.
The Mariners rewarded their starter with one more solo home run in the bottom of the inning. After striking out on four pitches in the first, none of which approached the zone, Jorge Polanco pounced on the first pitch he saw from Schmidt, annihilating a cutter up in the zone for his tenth homer of the season:
For comparison’s sake, Polanco didn’t have his 10th homer of the season last year until July 30th. Per Tim Booth, Polanco has never had more than eight homers in the first 40 games of any season in his career.
The game then took a turn for the extremely annoying. In the fifth inning, Hancock—who had dealt ably with the Yankees all day, using his slider to great effect—gave up his second home run of the game to Grisham, who probably should have been struck out on pitch three here:
That’s not bad location from Emerson; it’s giving Grisham an extra bite at the apple, and it’s frustrating. This time, though, Hancock wasn’t able to rebound as he had earlier. Judge jumped on a first-pitch slider that didn’t slide so much as it broke into the fat part of the plate, and Ben Rice doubled on a sinker that also wasn’t ideally located, catching way too much of the plate. Goldschmidt got the same pitch Judge had—the slider that didn’t slide—and did the same thing to it, lacing an RBI single that was at the time the go-ahead run. The Yankees would continue to pour it on, beating up on Hancock in a way reminiscent of the drubbing he faced at the hands of the Tigers, the first real snowball inning we’ve seen from him The changeup that had been so good flattened out, the slider wasn’t sliding, and the pitches caught way too much plate, epitomized by a changeup that landed right in the middle of the zone for Austin Wells to crush for a three-run homer, putting the game out of reach at 8-2.
“Sometimes they’re ready for that first pitch, and they made some good swings. I made a couple mistakes and they made me pay for them, but at the end of the day, you got to keep going after them,” said Hancock postgame.
“I’ll wear this one. Didn’t really give us a chance to win. But baseball is what it is, and you move on, you keep working, and show up in the morning and see what happens. Losing sucks, and for me, it’s like I didn’t feel like I did my job. But you have to be able to bounce back. I’ll go back and watch video, see where we could have done things a little bit better, maybe I could execute it better, but you’ve got to keep fighting, you’ve got to keep grinding, and next time out, get the team a chance to win. That’s all you can do.”
It’s a super disappointing result for Hancock, who was so good for four innings, and in a world where the Mariners were not coming off a series sweep and playing some pretty uninspired baseball lately, would be a lot easier to take in stride. Hancock recorded a career high in whiffs with 15, landing himself tied for second on the day’s Savant leaderboard with the Tigers’ Jackson Jobe. He did walk four, although he was able to navigate around that without damage each time, and he struck out five, and probably should have had a couple more strikeouts but for some missed calls. It’s encouraging to think that Hancock might have more to him than just the “contact manager” label—although he did plenty of that tonight as well—which is some war vs. battle thinking, if you’re inclined to be in a positive mindset about what’s been a pretty disappointing stretch of Mariners baseball recently.
It is hard to be more bullish on the offense, which, after the big inning, went into cryogenic sleep against Schmidt, who they’d had on his heels earlier in the game, allowing him to pitch into the seventh inning, when he gave up a leadoff double to Randy Arozarena and was promptly lifted for Jack Leiter Jr. He’d eventually come around to score on a a Dylan Moore parachute shot that Judge couldn’t get to even with a dive, scratching one more run across for the Mariners.
Cal Raleigh made the score look a little more respectable in the eighth with his 13th homer of the season, a two-run shot scoring Mitch Garver, who had walked. This Tim Hill pitch was like a foot off the plate but Cal don’t care:
Remember how T-Mobile was a homer-eating tree not that long ago?
The Yankees would get those runs back and more off Troy Taylor, though, who gave up a leadoff single to Cody Bellinger and a two-run homer to Anthony Volpe. The Yankees got another run off Taylor, who have up another two hits and hit a batter, but it was costly, as Oswaldo Cabrera looked like he broke his ankle scoring on an Aaron Judge sac fly and had to be removed by ambulance.
The game ended without further scoring as the bottom of the lineup couldn’t do anything against non-leverage-arm Ian Hamilton, although to be fair to them, after Cabrera’s injury, the entire stadium had emptied out, with even the remaining Yankees fans mostly subdued*. It’s probably not enough to call it a Pyrrhic victory, but it does make me glad to only be tasked with thinking about the battle-vs.-war element of Hancock’s outing, and the gift of being able to wake up tomorrow and do it all again, even if today’s results weren’t what we hoped for.
*with the exception of a few drunk fartknockers, man Yankees fans, this is why literally no one ever roots with you
