If it felt 'like the ground was shaking every inning,' it probably was

SEATTLE -- T-Mobile Park hosted a winner-take-all playoff game for the first time in 24 years Friday night. The Mariners were ready. The fans were ready.

And the seismologists were ready.

Friday morning, a group of scientists from the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network (PNSN) got early access to the ballpark to install a seismometer at field level, to see just how powerful the packed crowd could get in Game 5 of the ALDS against the Tigers.

Turns out: Pretty powerful.

And the Mariners gave them plenty of chances to make their presence known, going 15 frames in the longest winner-take-all game by innings in postseason history before ultimately walking off as 3-2 winners on Jorge Polanco’s RBI single to advance to the ALCS.

That hit, as expected, got the park rocking.

But the night -- the long night -- was full of seismic highlights.

Over 15 innings, the crowd, which was announced at 47,025, could be felt routinely, from Mitch Garver’s sacrifice fly in the second inning to the end of George Kirby’s outing, to Leo Rivas’ pinch-hit heroics in his first postseason at-bat. And the players noticed it too.

“[It] feels like the ground was shaking every inning,” Rivas said. “It just feels amazing, feeling like that.”

Seattle fans have built up a reputation for noise. Across the street from T-Mobile Park, the Seahawks most memorably had the “Beast Quake” in 2011, when Marshawn Lynch ran through the Saints defense late in the fourth quarter of a playoff game and the resulting pandemonium in the stands registered as a 2.0 earthquake on the Richter scale. In 1992, Husky Stadium hit 133.6 decibels in a college football game between Washington and Nebraska, which stood as the national record for noise until 2023.

Of course, both Lumen Field and Husky Stadium were built specifically to trap noise in and make things as loud as possible.

Then again, so was T-Mobile Park on Friday. With rain in the forecast, the roof was closed for just the 11th time all season. Per MLB rules, since the game started with the roof closed, it had to remain closed the whole way.

That led to a whole lot of noise in SoDo. And more than a bit of shaking.

“They’ve been doing it the whole season,” closer Andrés Muñoz said. “It means a lot to me … We still have a lot of work to do, but I’ve just got to say thanks to the fans for staying with us the whole season. Not just today, but the whole season supporting us. We’re doing this for the fans, and we’re going to continue.”