The Summer of 6 Ft. 6 reigns as the Mariners beat Miami 9-0

Logan Gilbert’s a nerd: He works hard and loves the science of pitching. And while he’s clearly part of the group, it seems to me that he endures a bit more teasing than the other players do. He’s the Mariners’ Lisa Simpson (complimentary).

In the Simpsons’ classic season seven finale, The Summer of 4 Ft. 2, the Simpson family takes off to the beach for two weeks, and Lisa tries on a new cool-kid persona, which helps her make friends in the beach town’s social scene. A jealous Bart tries to sabotage Lisa by showing them her yearbook to evidence her true nature as a teacher’s pet, but they continue to like her anyway, and she learns a valuable lesson about evolving while also being true to yourself.

Like the Simpson family, the Mariners have taken a late-June trip to the beaches, with six games in Florida, and as it was for Lisa, Logan is making the most of it. We talk a lot around here about all the work Gilbert has done to evolve as a pitcher, with his revamped slider and additions of the splitter and cutter. And he primarily relied on that evolution this afternoon, in particular the slider, of which he threw 40.

The spin was tight and the location was control, as Logan picked up 13 whiffs on the pitch, including six whiffs on the first nine of them he threw. Keeping it right at the bottom of the zone, he was utterly in command today. But as the game went on, he returned to the pitch that made him a big leaguer, using the fastball to get ahead of hitters, because when you have a good core, it’s important to be yourself.

As impressive as he was today, though, Logan was not as dominant as he was against the Rangers on Sunday, working around some hard contact thanks to the help of his defense. In the fourth inning, for instance, Luke Raley, covering centerfield today to give Julio a day off, did his best impression of the No Fly Zone, tracking a hard-hit ball to the deepest part of the park and managing to keep his feet on a play that only had a 50% catch probability.

It was part of a grand day for Raley that began with him falling down at first base in a failed effort to run out an infield hit. But he recovered with the Mariners’ fastest home-to-third time of the year on a well-struck triple.

That began a string of five straight hits to open the fourth, which essentially put the game out of reach for the Marlins. Despite Logan’s brilliant outing, Dominic Canzone’s four hits (including a 415-foot upper decker), and Dylan Moore and Ryan Bliss’s two doubles a piece, the contributions on both sides of the ball get Raley today’s Sun Hat Award for a notable individual contribution.

And though defense like Raley’s catch helped, Logan did have to work around two errors from Josh Rojas. For the second time this calendar week, Logan finished eight innings and probably could have gone out for a ninth if it wasn’t so important to prioritize the rotation’s health. His 19 whiffs today add on to the 20 he had on Sunday for what’s probably the best week a Seattle pitcher has had in ages.

Through his first four starts in June, he’s having one of the best months of his career: 28 strikeouts to just a single walk, while allowing only four earned runs over 29.2 innings, bringing his ERA for the season down to 2.71. And just as Lisa’s trip to the beach did, Logan’s ended with fish carcasses after gutting the Marlins.