SEATTLE -- Across the street, an atmosphere evolved into pandemonium that was unprecedented in the context of the global sports spotlight that Seattle found itself in.
Yet the momentum of Team USA’s dramatic victory over Australia in the FIFA World Cup on Friday afternoon did not carry over to T-Mobile Park, where the Mariners fell flat in a 6-2 loss to the last-place Red Sox in front of a sellout crowd.
“Tough, tough ballgame tonight,” Mariners manager Dan Wilson said.
The piggyback was back, and to mixed results. Granted, until garbage time, the night was shaping up to a scenario in which Bryce Miller and Luis Castillo might’ve had to throw a combined nine scoreless innings to keep this in reach, given the way Boston’s Ranger Suarez stymied Seattle’s bats.
The left-hander took a no-hitter into the seventh inning, and the Mariners’ flirt with unflattering history ended when Josh Naylor ripped a one-out double to the right-center-field wall. That sparked a bases-loaded opportunity, but the Mariners came away empty.
Seattle’s only other hit came via a massive two-run homer from Julio Rodríguez in the ninth -- well after Castillo coughed up four runs in a runaway seventh that wound up being the night’s inflection point. The rotation’s elder statesman surrendered another run in the ninth that put this one even further out of reach.
“Just a bad inning,” Castillo said through an interpreter. “I was able to put some pitches where I wanted to, but they were able to hit them and find holes in the defense."
How the game unfolded offered critics arguments through hindsight -- be it those of the offense’s continued struggles against left-handed pitching, or those of the piggyback strategy.
Either way, Friday ended in another pallid result within this one-step-forward, one-step-back season that Seattle finds itself.
“It's never easy coming out of a one-run game, especially when I felt like I was rolling,” Miller said. “But it was the plan going into it, so there's not really much I can say to change anybody's mind. So I just did my five innings and came in and threw some plyos against the wall to try to keep the pitch count up.”
Miller was never going to pitch beyond five innings on Friday, a rigid threshold to ensure that Castillo would remain stretched out with the other four. The rest of the rotation will go through a piggyback start, too, with Logan Gilbert, Emerson Hancock, George Kirby and Bryan Woo teaming up in twos for two more such starts through the All-Star break.
It’s what the club believes is a best-case answer to a problem that doesn’t have a perfect solution, an equitable way to allocate innings and keep each of their six healthy starters stretched out. And through the first three times through -- also with Miller and Castillo -- it worked.
Saturday was the first time things didn’t play out as hoped, which created avenues for outsiders to second-guess.
In a standard structure, had Miller remained in the game beyond his 66 pitches and one run allowed, perhaps he pitches deep and hands things over to Seattle’s leverage arms. After all, he went a career-high eight innings on 91 pitches his last time out.
As for Castillo, most relievers would’ve been pulled in the midst of the four-spot he surrendered. Presumably, going to someone else would’ve kept the game more in reach.
But with this piggyback plan, which the rotation has said has buy-in from all starters, the Mariners needed to keep Castillo stretched out, and he finished the ninth on 63 pitches. And he said that the plan is for him to start his next time through.
“Even in a situation like this, nothing changes for me,” Castillo said. “Everything remains the same. The only difference is when I come into the game.”
Friday’s alternate-outcome logic would’ve also hinged on Seattle holding Boston to one run the rest of the way, and that Rodríguez would’ve still pummeled that homer in the ninth to take a one-run lead.
Notably, that deep fly came off Tommy Kahnle and not Aroldis Chapman, as the eight-time All-Star closer explicitly didn’t wind up pitching because of Boston’s four-run lead.
Basically, there were plenty of what-ifs to hyper-analyze. But Friday’s frustrating loss boiled down to an offense that couldn’t get anything going, while conversely allowing the sport’s second-lowest-scoring offense to pounce when the game was still within reach.