Mariners continue to kill the buzz, lose to Pirates 5-3

I had a much longer explanation of why “I Hate It Here” was unfairly maligned on the meme circuit, but I cut it out of self-restraint

After a particularly bad storm in Aeneid, Virgil’s hero tells his crew, “Haec olim meminisse jubait.” Translations vary, but it basically means, “Someday, we’ll laugh about this.” Dropping four in a row, each in brutal fashion, to the Tigers and Pirates counts as a pretty brutal storm. It caps off a 60-day stretch during which the Mariners set an MLB record for how fast a team has ever blown a 10-game lead. Now they sit 3 games behind a surging Astros team, with their playoff odds having fallen from over 90% to about 1 in 4. You get ironic on the internet to shield yourself from the pain and tell yourself that in days to come, you’ll sincerely laugh about it.

None of the latest four losses was a foregone conclusion, least of all tonight. Logan Gilbert came out punching, striking out the first four batters he faced, throwing the two fastest pitches of his career along the way. With the offense putting together four baserunners in the first two innings against Paul Skenes, it was a tantalizing beginning.

But Gilbert has a habit of coming out hot, especially when facing an elite opposing starter. Like he usually does, though, he faded as the game went along, taking another three innings to record his next strikeout. Along the way, he allowed the first walk he gave up to come around to score and surrendered a dinger to a guy who came into the game with a wRC+ under 60. Aside from that hot start, Gilbert’s line looks pretty pedestrian against an offense as hapless as Pittsburgh’s: 6.1 IP, 4 R, 5 H, 2 BB, 6 K and 14 whiffs.

Meanwhile, despite putting Skenes through his paces and working four walks (plus a hit batter for five free passes), the Mariners could only push two across against him, both scoring on a Big Boy Big Fly from Luke Raley.

Raley gets tonight’s Sun Hat Award for that jack plus a nice grab at the dugout rail in the second. Raley also had a sharp single in the ninth after a Jorge Polanco home run, but it was so obviously pointless, so clearly just a bout of terminal lucidity, that I can’t count it toward the Sun Hat Award.

If the Anti-Sun Hat Award were a thing, it would go to Birthday Boy Dominic Canzone. In his two high-leverage at-bats he grounded into a double play on the first pitch in the sixth and then struck out in the ninth. (He also struck out in a lower-leverage PA.) And on defense, he managed to overrun a ball despite getting a bad first step, with the ball bouncing off his wrist, hitting him in the noggin, and allowing a back-breaking two runs to score.

It was a back-breaking misplay, and Canzone just lay there face-down on the ground afterwards. I assume he lay there imagining the day he’ll laugh about this terrible birthday. But scripture tells us, “Nostalgia is a mind’s trick.” You’ll laugh about this one day, but you’ll be wrong. It was horrible.