Mariners beat Houston 4-2, the ugly way, which is more fun

In baseball, as in all things, it doesn’t have to be pretty—it just has to work. In a 162-game season, every team will win a few games in the stupidest ways imaginable and also lose in what are somehow even stupider ways. Once in a while, a team will scramble together a whole run of those wins and you end up with the 2021 Mariners and their Chaos Ball. The Mariners teams since then have been too legitimately good to warrant the moniker as a nickname for their style of play. But it doesn’t mean they can’t occasionally drink from the Cup of Chaos.

Tonight had that kind of disorder written all over it, even in the early going. Luis Castillo wasn’t sharp, leaving way too many fastballs over the heart of the plate. But he was nonetheless good enough, thanks to some good luck on balls in play. In the second inning, Luke Raley—the living embodiment of graceless athleticism—rumbled to the left-field wall and brought one back.

After the game, Scott Servias said of Raley, “He doesn’t really do anything pretty, but he gets the job done.” But his goofy grab would actually be upstaged an inning later. A combination of wind and apparent fear of crashing into Julio led Dominic Canzone to make a catch more awkward than that time Taylor Swift made Ed Sheeran try to rap. But it doesn’t have to be pretty—it just has to work.

In the end, Castillo left the game having given up just two runs over six innings. But after a mini-rally in the first inning that led to one run scoring, the bats had gone quiet and those two runs seemed like they’d be enough for Houston to take the win.

But when Ryan Pressley came in to pitch the bottom of the eighth, the Mariners decided that the time had come to once again walk the left-hand path. Haniger led off the inning using what we’ve come to know and love as the ugliest, most finely tuned swing in baseball. After wrinkling up his body like a wet rag, he unwound it into the baseball for a 99-mph line-drive double. Ryan Bliss came up next and failed to keep the sacrifice bunt fair in either try. But despite getting himself into an 0-2 hole, Pressley then did Bliss the favor of throwing his next four pitches with all the accuracy of a mascot wielding a t-shirt canon, and gifted him first base. It was Bliss’s least-impressive at-bat of the night, but the only one in which he reached base. Whatever works.

With one out and runners on the corners, Josh Rojas came up with a chance to play the hero and hit the ball as weakly as one can while still calling it hard-hit. But he hit it to the right place, to first base and Jose Abreu, who I assume is on Houston’s roster because the Astros were trying to get a tax deduction for a charitable donation. Abreu bounced the ball off his glove and down the right-field line. That deflection got Rojas the game-tying RBI as well as tonight’s Sun Hat Award since he also scored the game’s first run after a single and stolen base.

That brought up Julio, who finally got that bunt that Bliss had been trying for, only by accident. But with Bliss meep-meeping his way home, Alex Bregman let the run score and tried to get Julio at first, instead unleashing a little chaos on the throw that let an insurance run score too. Whatever works.

The Astros would eventually return to the dugout the way one does in the aftermath of a freak gasoline fight accident. And Ryan Stanek, facing his former team, closed out the game with a little extra oomph to give the Mariners a 5.5-game lead on the Astros.

Julio’s “hit” is the obvious highlight of the game. But it’s Julio’s reaction we’ll remember. For as great as his little hot streak is for what it portends about the 2024 Mariners’ playoff odds, it’s this that’s got me going to bed with a smile on my face. One of the hardest things to watch as he’s struggled over the first third of the season has been his change in demeanor. The man that burst onto the scene and into our hearts as an avatar for joy has looked sad all year. If you watch the clips from 2022, he’s like a different person. What we’ve seen this season looks like a guy who’s not having fun. I’ve been hesitating to verbalize this thought, but he’s looked a little, just the teensiest bit, well, Jarred-ish. But not tonight, even in a game where he got TOOTBLANed. No, the First-50-Games Julio can’t come to the phone right now. Why? Oh, ‘cause he’s dead.