The Mariners found a new way to make a bad week even stranger on Sunday, and it ended with a 19-2 loss to the Cubs that had everything: two grand slams, three position players on the mound, and two of those position players coming from Seattle.
The oddest moment came in the sixth inning, before the scoreboard really blew open. With José A.
Ferrer ready to start the frame, Julio Rodríguez was still tossing a baseball into the crowd after Ferrer had already burned through his warmup pitches. That left Ferrer with a 1-0 count against Chicago second baseman Pedro Ramírez, who then singled and later scored in what became a blowout.
The pitch clock violation was only part of the Mariners’ misery. The defeat followed an even uglier night earlier in the week, when Seattle was hammered 22-0 by the Brewers on Tuesday. That game tied the modern-era MLB record, dating to 1900, for the largest shutout.
Rodríguez was also at the center of that disaster. In Milwaukee, he apparently lost track of the outs and threw a live ball into the stands at American Family Field, helping the Brewers tack on their 21st run on what had started as a routine sacrifice fly.
Bryce Miller started both the 22-0 loss and Sunday’s 19-2 rout, and neither outing lasted long. In each game, he was pulled before he could finish five innings, and he was charged with six earned runs in the first one and five earned runs in the second.
It has been a brutal August for the 28-year-old. Across four starts this month, Miller has given up 21 runs, 20 of them earned, on 22 hits, with 18 strikeouts and 12 walks over 20 innings for a 9.00 ERA.
That slump has opened up questions about where Miller fits going forward, especially now that Seattle has brought up baseball’s No. 1-ranked prospect, Kade Anderson. The Mariners now have six healthy starters on the depth chart, and earlier in the season the club addressed a similar situation by using a piggyback arrangement, with one starter following another out of the bullpen.
“We’re looking at all different kind of options as we approach the end of the season here, and looking at everything,” manager Dan Wilson said. “Obviously want to keep our rotation intact, but we’ll see how things shake down here in the next few days.”
Even after the latest embarrassment, Seattle is still hanging around in the race. The Mariners sit at 62-69, three games behind the Astros and Rangers in the AL West and three games out of the American League’s third and final wild-card spot.
That’s partly a reflection of how uneven the league has been this year. By the end of play Sunday, only four American League teams had winning records - Tampa Bay, New York, Boston and Chicago - while the National League had eight clubs above .500, plus St. Louis sitting right at .500.
The AL West has been especially rough. No team in the division has a positive run differential, and Seattle’s minus-61 mark is still the third-best in the group.
With about 31 games left, there’s a real chance the division winner and the third AL wild-card team both finish with losing records, something that has never happened over a full 162-game season. Blue Jays manager John Schneider pointed to that gap during the All-Star Game, saying, “I think numbers don’t lie sometimes, and I’d be lying if I said the American League was in a different spot for our own standings,”
The current benchmark for the fewest wins by a playoff team in the wild-card era belongs to the 2005 Padres, who won the NL West at 82-80 before being swept by the Cardinals in the NLDS. That year’s NL West, like this season’s AL West, did not produce a team with a positive run differential.
Whether this year’s standings make history is still up in the air, but the Mariners’ latest collapse did nothing to slow the conversation.
In Other News...
Mariners Wild Card Push Just Got A Scary Brendan Donovan Twist
A pregame scare added another layer of uncertainty to Seattles Wild Card chase on Saturday, when Brendan Donovan was hit in the head with a baseball in the batting cages before the Mariners played. Donovan is being evaluated, and the timing matters for a club that can least afford another health question as it tries to stay in the race.
Donovan has already spent much of the season on the injured list because of a left groin strain, though he has been effective when available. For the Mariners, the focus now is less on lineup fit than on his condition, with the organization monitoring every update as the postseason picture tightens. [Read more 🡒]
Kade Andersons Debut Showed Mariners Fans Both Promise And A Warning
Kade Andersons first night in a Mariners uniform offered the kind of mixed snapshot that often comes with a young pitchers debut. Seattles top prospect had already built plenty of momentum in the Minors, and he carried that pedigree onto the big-league stage by working into the sixth inning, showing the poise and stuff that made the organization eager to bring him up.
The warning came just as the outing started to turn. Anderson allowed back-to-back home runs to bring his night to a close, finishing with three earned runs allowed on five hits, along with two walks and five strikeouts. For the Mariners, it was a reminder that the ceiling is real, but so is the learning curve, and the next step will be seeing how quickly Anderson responds after a debut that showed both. [Read more 🡒]
Mariners Now Face A Kade Anderson Question They Didnt Expect
Kade Andersons first big league start gave the Mariners exactly the kind of glimpse they had been waiting for, even if it was not a spotless one. The pitching prospect held things together for 4 scoreless innings before the game tightened on him in the fifth and sixth, finishing with 5 2/3 innings, three runs allowed on five hits and two walks, with five strikeouts in his MLB debut.
For Seattle, the outing was both encouraging and revealing, because it showed the fast-track version of what Anderson might mean to the rotation while also raising the obvious next question about how the club wants to use him from here. The Mariners still walked away with a 5-4 win on a walk-off homer, but Andersons debut made it clear the team now has a real decision to make about a pitcher it may need sooner than expected. [Read more 🡒]