Mariners can’t stick landing, get walked off by Royals 10-9

I finally finished Archer this week, and it’s got me thinking a lot about series finales. Archer came pretty close to a good one, although the plot of the last episode was a little wanting; I would have preferred Conway Stern to Slater as the villain; and while I was fine with not taking time to close Cheryl, Krieger, or Ray’s stories, I thought they owed us more closure for Cyril than we got. But a show like Archer can get away with those errors because even though it had more character growth and emotional stakes than most adult animation, it’s still just a vulgar farce at its core. When it was more than that, it was a pleasant surprise, not the table stakes. A ho hum finale is just fine for a show like that.

I think there’s two axes for considering the ending. Along one axis runs the level that the show tried to set your expectations for the ending, and along the other the quality of the ending.

The worst offenders here are the ones that fail to deliver on a promise. And that’s today’s Mariners game. When the Mariners score seven runs in the top of the seventh, you expect them to win the game. The nerds who made the win probability metrics tell you that a team that does that will win 94% of the time.

It felt like even more considering that it was such a narratively satisfying seven runs. Ty France took the franchise record for most times being hit by a pitch! Mitch Haniger, who connects us to our past, knocked a bases clearing double! Victor Robles got his first hit as a Mariner, a very legitimate 107 mph double to the gap. And Ryan Bliss capped it off with his first big-league bomb, a majestic 421 footer:

By the time it was over, you figured the game was too. And while you maybe let your anxiety get the better of you when the Royals scored four in the fourth, for the most part it was easy to ignore since it had started raining. Bryce Miller had been unimpressive through the first three innings, but in the fourth, he clearly just had no grip on the ball whatsoever. A couple walks and a meatball in the heart of the plate were eminently understandable.

Less forgivable was the sixth, when Bryce just lost it completely. He was getting squeezed on calls that the Royals’ pitchers had been getting, but that wasn’t what made the difference, and he had to be pulled with the bases loaded and no outs. For the second time in a week, Tayler Suacedo came in and let three inherited runners score. That’s why you play nine innings, I guess.

But despite those two bad innings, the Mariners held the lead through the middle of the game thanks to the offense adding on a couple runs. Ty France drove one of those in with his first of two doubles on the night, continuing his absolute dominance of the Royals. He came into the game as the best hitter in the history of Kauffman Stadium (min. 49 PAs) by average, OBP, and wRC+, and he raised all three of those stats tonight, earning him tonight’s Sun Hat Award.

France just barely edged out Trent Thornton for that honor though, since Thornton came in to clean up after Saucedo and proceeded to retire all four batters he faced with some of the nastiest swings and misses I’ve seen him get. There’s no video of those whiffs yet, but I did take a selfie of myself watching:

With Matt Brash out for the year, Gregory Santos only a week into throwing off a mound, and Andrés Muñoz nursing a back injury, the Mariners had to turn to Ryne Stanek to protect a 9-7 lead in the ninth. With runners on second and third and nobody out, J.P. got a slow ground ball with his only play to first. That made it 9-8 with a runner on second, one out, and the Royals’ best hitter coming up.

At this point, the Mariners could have intentionally walked Bobby Witt, Jr. to set up a potential double play. In my view that would have been the right call, but I see why Scott Servais didn’t want to put the winning run on base for free. There’s been a lot of digital yelling about this one strategic call on certain social mediums. Of course, if the Mariners had walked him and that hadn’t worked out, we’d see the same thing. Ultimately one-run victories are overdetermined, and the final bad tactical decision carries more weight with the narrative than it does with the impact on the outcome.

But I understand where people are coming from in their desire to throw their feces all over the Internet (though the LL comments have seemed to keep this in better perspective). The Mariners set these expectations and then didn’t deliver. They ripped this one away from us as much as themselves. The order that this game played out makes all the difference. If they’d started out in a 10-0 hole and clawed their way back to 10-9 you might see it as a moral victory rather than a gut punch. But knowing that doesn’t make it any easier. Sticking the landing matters a lot more when you’ve made your audience a promise.