Monday Morning Mariber is a collection of thoughts on the Mariners week that was, with a focus on the weekend games. This morning the column is dodging, weaving, and swinging just like Mariner hero Jesse Winker.

The Glory of Enmity

On April 10th, 2002 I went to watch the Mariners play the Angels in Anaheim. I was going to college 20 minutes away, and a floor mate had access to seats right behind home place. There I watched James Baldwin throw seven innings, Bret Boone and John Olerud take Aaron Sele deep and the Mariners casually and methodically treat the Angels like a biology class frog, in an 8-1 win. It was the Mariners third win in what would be a 10-game streak. After the bitter way 2001 ended they started 13-3, and were ready to right last year’s wrong.

Six months later I was sitting in the hot tub at my apartment complex, sipping a beer, vacantly staring 20 yards ahead as the Angels won the World Series. One of the few franchises as historically woebegotten and failure-ridden as the Mariners had their own personal 1995, only this time they finished the drill, won the ship, and did it over one of the most talented teams Seattle ever had. Living with and around Angel fans that summer birthed a very special, deep, unique kind of sports hate. It’s one of the few I still have today.

That preamble is a long winded way of saying you bet your ass I hooted and hollered like a five year old at a monster truck rally watching J.P. Crawford jump into the fracas throwing punches. I pumped my fist seeing Taylor Trammell get an Angels coach in the headlock. I offered a profound, deeply felt, from-the-very-wellspring-of-my-soul “hell yeah” when Jesse Winker attempted to defeat the entire, hellspawned Anaheim organization single handedly. It felt good as hell to watch my team stand up for itself against obvious petulance from a franchise that seemingly exists solely to answer the question “Where is the precise geographical location through which Satan gains access to our realm?”

Were every single one of these actions foolish, shortsighted, rooted in largely played out stereotypical macho man nonsense? Absolutely. Did it cost the Mariners a win yesterday? Very well maybe yes! Will it cost them future wins after suspensions are handed out? Also very likely! Do I care? Reader I can think of few things I care about less.

Look, you can view the Mariners’ season, or any sporting season really, as a trip down I-5 from The Bay to LA; a miserable, straight, flat, hot, smelly, seven-hour torture whose only real excitement is at the very end when you cross the grapevine and find out if your car overheats or not. Alternatively you can take in a baseball season like a cruise down Highway 101; it’s going to take a long time, there are going to be some weird drugs around at various points, you’ll probably get lost, you may not end up where you thought you were going, but dammit if you won’t have a fine time going nowhere even if that’s all you do.

If the sole concern of this baseball season is the Mariners making the postseason then, mathematically speaking, it is most likely already over. But if your enjoyment of a baseball season can be at least in part about the story it tells then this past week was the best plot twist we’ve seen so far. The Mariners’ went 5-1 and in the one game they lost they physically beat up their opponent. The clubhouse, with its Kevins Padlo and its Drews Ellis, is as united and focused as it has been all season. The fans, an oft-fractured, back-biting crew prone to eating its own, are prepared to cease all interior squabbles to stand astride their baseball team and say, in one voice, together: Screw the Angels. 

Whatever happens the rest of the season that is the unity of the past 24 hours is the gift of a common enemy. Often enough when we find that it’s the Mariners themselves that’s the rallying point. Today it’s the Angels, Phil Nevin, and Mike Trout. What a gift intense dislike can be.

Three Up

Jesse Winker: Seattle Mariner

The Electric Factory thing was not for me. First of all, what the hell is an electric factory? Secondly it was far too early in the season for some kind of defining term or moment to be coined. Lastly, like most things, it was immediately driven into the ground with team hype, t-shirts, and all the rest.

What is for me is this quote:

Also for me it this tweet from former Winker teammate, and fellow Keeping It Real Enthusiast Amir Garrett:

Finally, and definitely most importantly for me, is that Jesse Winker is hitting .269/.436/.474 in the near-complete month of June. I have absolutely no idea why Winker went into the tank the first third of the season but, unlike so many of this year’s Mariners who have struggled, he has the track record that offers hope for a quick and thorough bounceback. I tweeted this week he may just be in a 2015 Robinson Cano situation; a profound, unexplained slump that passes as quickly and completely as it came on.

Jesse Winker has been and can be a great hitter. He was brought here to be a great hitter, and for the past month he has been one. He also seems like a completely awesome dude and teammate. Any level of sustained success here and he’ll be a fan favorite. Keep it up, Jesse.

Mariners Twitter

Look Mariners Twitter is a nasty hive of petty egotists, failed journalists/athletes, and clueless teenagers hopped up on video games and Mountain Dew Code Red. I say this in love, because I am a far-too-active member of the community. Way too many times I’ve had to delete Twitter from my phone for 48-72 hours just to remind myself that the interactions I have online are not the important ones, and to quit stressing when some rando thinks me wanting my baseball team to be good, finally, please just for once, makes me a bad person.

THAT SAID, as bad and poisonous and unhealthy as this community can be there is a power for positive good in numbers, and social media at its best can harness that with more speed and force than almost anything I can think of. 

Jesse Winker got ejected for defending his team and his own bruised ass, and @SofieBallgame ordered him a pizza. Somehow, the Door Dash guy figured out how to get the pizza to Winker who, being a cool dude, reached out to Sofie to say thanks. That by itself would have been enough to make it one of the best moments of the year. The whole thing kicked into another gear when the Mariners Twitter community figured out the name of the pizza deliverer, and started flooding him with $5 tips. The man’s name is Simjanreet Singh, and he loves you all.

If we nail down the primary purpose most people hang out on the internet its something like “I’m bored and want something to do.” The ways in which that boredom finds its fulfillment can and have wrought unimaginable damage upon our world and society. Yesterday though, as a bit, Mariners fans came together and changed the life of a hardworking Door Dash driver. We should still scrub Twitter and social media from the annals of human existence, but at least it’s not a total loss.

Robbie Ray is Robbie Ray now but also not Robbie Ray so really he’s just a new Robbie Ray that looks like the old Robbie Ray. Or something.

Robbie Ray: Now with two-seamers! I have no idea man. Baseball Prospectus’ Michael Ajeto has a helpful and illuminating breakdown on Rays adjustments this season – from two-pitch slider/four seam guy to the current pound the zone groundball machine – and it’s worth reading. 

On one hand I don’t think it’s great to have your big free agent acquisition obviously needing to immediately and thoroughly tinker with so many things in order to find effectiveness. On the other hand it 1) is clearly working and 2) shows that Ray is not set in his ways and willing to adapt to changing circumstances. 

Pitchers are so weird, man. I’m glad smart people spend so much time trying to understand them. All I really know is Ray’s last three starts have been 20 IP, 4 R, 20 K, 4 BB. He’s been pitching like a top shelf starter and, given the state of the lineup at present, the rotation will have to carry this team for the next few weeks at least. Grunt on, Grunt God.

Three Down

Take My Elbow, I Literally Can’t Think of Anything Useful I Do With It

A quick primer, for those keeping track:

Going 5-1, finally sweeping a bad opponent, and breathing a small gasp of life into an otherwise rapidly decaying corpse of a season – Good!

Having your star first basemen have his elbow involuntarily turned into a double joint through impact with a high speed, large, human form – Bad!

France has been the Mariners’ best hitter the vast majority of his year+ in Seattle, and is now on the IL for an indeterminate amount of time. “Kevin” “Padlo” has started the last two games at 1B. This is, uh, not a great situation!

My People Said Adam Frazier! He Was an All-Star!

As someone who makes a lot of hay out of being hard on the Mariners, let me offer them the credit of saying their best case scenario for the offseason did not result in Adam Frazier being the starting 2B on this team. They went after Trevor Story, offered him at least a comparable deal to the one he ended up taking, and had they acquired him Frazier would have been pushed into a part time utility role, one I imagine he would be well suited for.

That, of course, didn’t happen. Nor has a repeat of 2021 for Frazier, whose bat has utterly cratered over the past month to a, um, pitcher-esque .139/.222/.152 line in June. 

He is better than that, obviously, and should bounce back a bit. But for a team that needed so much to go right having a guy whose most touted bonafides were that he was the lone All-Star representative for the Pittsburgh Pirates, who only with the deepest and most intense disgust agree to field a baseball team every year, be an everyday starter with no real backup plan. 

Hit the baseball, Adam. You have done it before.

The State of the Mariners is Strong

Keeping a vibe going from last week. I’ll make it short since this column is long already and I have to get work done. Here’s the lineup from yesterday:

Here’s this comment:

Ok, Gerard. O……………..K…………………..

The Weekly “Mariners Tweet that Made Me Laugh Most Embarrassingly in Front of My Family” Award

*****

The Mariners are as hot as they’ve been in a month and a half, freshly united and bonded through the glorious power of shared hatred, and are coming back home to play the absolutely (yet still technically superior) Baltimore Orioles. It’s time to rain down another Sweepsmas on these hapless east coast swamp dwellers and their real-life Bluth Family owners.

Y’all did real good yesterday, and this week overall. You make every season a joy. Stay in the shade today, hydrate, donate to Simjanreet. Thrive. The world is what we make it. Goms.

You can follow Nathan on Twitter at @nathan_h_b. Additionally he appears on the Ian Furness show on Mollywhop Mondays on KJR 93.3 FM every Monday at 1:10 PM with Chris Crawford and Kevin Shockey. Please be nice, he is doing his best.