Mariners 5-4 loss to Tornoto defined by The Replacements

Don’t Tell A Soul, but the Mariners got All Shook Down today, and we’ll have to just Let It Be

You could make a case that when he’s been healthy, Bryan Woo has been Seattle’s best pitcher this year. And despite his struggles to begin this season, I think most people would say that Julio Rodríguez remains the team’s best player. Well, the Mariners had to make do without either of them today: Woo left his last game with a hamstring strain, though he makes a Pizza Rehab appearance in Everett this evening, and Julio was supposed to play but was lifted in the bottom of the first with quad tightness. In some ways (enough to frame a recap for a game nobody cares about), the game was defined by the men who subbed in for them, The Replacements.

Emerson Hancock took the mound for Bryan Woo, and while an alternative piedra he was not, this was one of Hancock’s better performances. His changeup was particularly nasty. Playing off an extra tick on Hancock’s fastball, the cambio dove out of the zone late and almost always in the right spot. It even got the Pitching Ninja treatment.

It helped him pick up a decent amount of weak contact and a new career high in whiffs, with 12. All told, Hancock departed with just two runs to his name after stranding most of the runners in each of his four-plus innings. Asked about his performance after the game, Hancock said I.O.U. to his catcher, Mitch Garver: “I thought Garver just caught a really good game. We had a really good plan going into it, and I felt like my changeup was in a really good spot. We kind of mixed in the slider as the game went on, and I felt like he did a really good job back there.”

Still, even if it hadn’t made sense to pull him with two on, nobody out, and Vladito due up to face him for the third time, you’d have pulled him anyway because his pitch count had gotten out of hand. Now, four innings of cromulence is an ok result from your sixth starter, but in his post-game comments, Scott Servais seemed disappointed that Hancock couldn’t get through five. If this is what a good Emerson Hancock outing looks like, then I Can’t Hardly Wait for Woo to get back.

To deal with Julio’s absence, the Mariners moved Luke Raley from first base to center and brought in Ty France. Ty had a miserable day at the plate, accruing the worst WPA while going 0-4 with a strikeout and exemplifying the first seven innings of Mariners’ offense. But Luke Raley was a highlight, with his fifth-inning single releasing us from having to be on a no-hitter watch.

Other than that, it took the Mariners until the eighth inning to finally have a Swinging Party, beginning the inning with their second hit. And then their third. And then, what’s this? Their fourth:

At one point, Mitch Haniger was my Favorite Thing, but it has been painful to watch him play lately, so this bout of terminal lucidity earns him today’s Sun Hat Award, perhaps as more of a lifetime achievement award than anything else. The Mariners couldn’t do more with in the eighth, though Julio’s defensive replacement in center field did hit another nuke in the ninth to put the Mariners On The Ledge of an upset. But running out of outs, the Mariners couldn’t finish it off, and we were left Unsatisfied.