Mariners complete the sweep of Anaheim with a 5-1 win

Despite some decent results, it’s been at least a month since Luis Castillo really looked like Luis Castillo. His last four pitch charts, for example, do not show the kind of clear pitch separation or living on the edges that you want to see out of your ace.

You’d think this was a lead-in to describing the first dominant outing in a while, but it’s not. La Piedra once again had the edges sanded down today, throwing too many pitches either down the chute or too far outside the zone to be tempting. Traffic in each of his first five innings, culminated with a grueling, 30-pitch, two-walk fourth inning. Unable to land his slider in the early going, he had to rely on his fastballs, which were down a tick or two from his average. But the Angels being the Angels, he got through those first five innings without allowing a run.

Around this point, Pitching Coach Pete Woodworth noticed that Castillo had been speeding up his rhythm and told Castillo to slow things down a little bit. Polite as ever, Castillo says he replied, “Thank you very much for noticing that.”

That mid-game adjustment allowed Castillo to pitch his first two clean innings, finding his slider and ramping up the velocity on his fastballs too. It helped that he was also doing that thing where he empties the tank because the end is nigh, ending the sixth with his fastest pitch of the day for a swinging strike three.

And despite an epic run of having starters pitch exactly six innings, Scott Servais sent Castillo back out for the seventh. My fun conspiracy theory is that Servais was happy to let Castillo think the sixth would be it, hoping that he’d amp up his game a little, and then sent him back out for a surprise bonus last inning to see if he could get two Final Castillo Frames in the same game. Whether it was a ploy or not (it was not), it’s the result we got, with Castillo getting another clean inning in the seventh.

Those last six outs helped make this look like a more normal Castillo start, with a final line of 7 IP, 0 R, 2 H, 3 BB, 6 K. He also reached 20 whiffs for just the third time this year and induced a ton of weak contact, with nearly half the balls in play at less than 75 mph.

Today’s game also marks Castillo’s tenth start in a row allowing fewer than three earned runs. That’s why you want a guy like Luis Castillo at the front of your rotation. Even when he’s off his game, he has a big enough margin for error that he can still make a run like that.

As Servais said after the game, “The Rock was as good as he was all day in those last two innings he was out there. Veteran pitcher. That’s a guy who knows where he’s at in the game and finds a way to work through a lineup and keep the team in the game.” I think what Scott’s getting at there is that Castillo should get today’s Sun Hat Award.

But Luke Raley made the Sun Hat Award a close call. A fourth-inning bullet gave the Mariners the lead they’d never surrender.

And he tacked another one on in the eighth by getting hit by a pitch with the bases loaded, his second HBP of the day.

It’s worth pausing to reflect on how the bases had come to be loaded in the first place with two walks and an error. That error was actually the Angels’ second of the day, on top of infield “hits” from the lead-footed Raleigh and Garver. The 2024 Angels will give you a game for free, to be sure. But this was an exclamation point on the benefits the team has seen from putting more balls in play lately. To wit, the Mariners struck out just 16 times in this entire series, with 9 walks and 4 HBPs.

Servais thinks this is the result of another adjustment: “I think we’re more aggressive. We look like we’re attacking the baseball, like we’re not so defensive at the plate. I think up and down the lineup, guys are just more on the attack. Let’s be the hunter instead of the hunted. And that’s what it’s looked like to me over the last few days.”

With the bases still loaded, Mitch Garver came through with a bases-clearing double to put the game out of reach for Anaheim and complete the sweep.

That ends 17 games in a row, as the Mariners get just their second off day in a 45 day stretch tomorrow. These 17 games have been a slog, but the Mariners used it to expand their division lead from 1.5 on Texas and 5 on Houston to 4 on Texas and 7.5 on Houston. They slumped a little in the middle there, losing four in a row to New York and Washington, but end it having won seven of their last eight. They’re on the hunt—tridents up and knives out.