Monday Morning Mariber is a collection of thoughts on the Mariners week that was, with a focus on the weekend games. Today the column takes a look back to 10 years ago, the greatest Mariner moment of modern times.

Alone, Together

1) It is perfect that it happened on a forgettable Wednesday getaway game. It’s apparent that the people in charge of Major League Baseball find it regrettable that there is so much……….baseball in their sport. That not only are they forced to play a game everyday but, due to Silicon Valley’s continued inability to disrupt the “having to exist in fixed time and place” industry, sometimes at hideously suboptimal start times like 12:40 PM on a weekday (all because “baseball” “players” have to “travel”) must eat them alive. 

That one of baseball’s rarest, most sought after single game accomplishments, one that can instantly be compared to events that happened before World War I, can occur while that vast majority of the populace is filling out TPS reports is a feature, not a bug. 

2) It is perfect that this is the lineup the Mariners assembled that day 10 years ago:

There are many ways for baseball teams to be bad. The 2022 Angels have seemingly dedicated their season to mapping every square inch of defeat’s terra firma. For the Felix Hernandez Mariners their preferred brand of failure was undistilled impotence. 

There was no squandering of sluggers in their prime, no phenoms left to waste. Seattle simply took nine of the most forgettable baseball players you could imagine, every day, year after year after year, and dared Felix to carry them to victory. For a seemingly impossible number of times, he took that dare and pulled it off. 

3) It is perfect that the final score was 1-0. See above. The 2012 Rays won 90 games, and were still at the peak of the Andrew Friedman Era. There was no way the Mariners were going to win that game, against that team, on that day, if they allowed a single run, and the easiest way to avoid giving up a run is to simply never allow a baserunner. That’s just math, which means that for a day Felix took the Rays superpower – being smarter than everyone – and turned it against them. Hail Felix: The Stat Nerd.

4) It is perfect that there hasn’t been another one. Due to an ahistorical confluence of randomness, skill, and baseball diving headlong into a pitching era, 2012 saw a spasm of perfect games. In 150 years, over nearly a quarter million games, a pitcher has thrown a Perfect Game only 23 times. Almost 20% of those occurred within a single five month stretch ten years ago. 

Since then, nothing. As baseball and the concept of the starting pitcher continue to evolve the factors needed for perfection grow increasingly difficult to attain. There is enough baseball, and (hopefully) enough future that at some point it will be achieved again. Until then, though, it feels just out of reach enough for us to dream that Felix Hernandez will throw the last Perfect Game in Major League Baseball History. It’s a good dream.

5) It is perfect that it was at home. Felix Hernandez and Mariners fans were, apart, adrift and alone. The fanbase was years removed from its brief (and only) glory era, and Felix was a 19 year old from Venezuela playing baseball in Seattle, WA.  The Mariners would, over the course of Felix’s 15 years here, accomplish absolutely nothing of note. Year after year, start after start, this unbelievable talent – perhaps the last teenage pitching prospect that will ever, ever be unleashed on the big leagues without significant restriction or inhibition – would face the very best baseball teams in the world, backed by whatever chapter of the Bill Bavasi/Jack Zduriencik Multiverse of Madness he found himself in on that given year, and gave it everything he had. 

In Seattle we want so badly to tell our own story. Our culture is still so new, our history largely a single generation long. It feels like everyone’s narrative has this massive head start on ours. Despite all the money and power that has flowed into the region, we still carry a bit of an inferiority complex around. It makes sense. A lack of history, however, allows us something older communities do not have: the ability to create the foundation of our history in the moment. Felix was that opportunity, and we took it.

There was no other reason to pay attention to the Mariners for so many years. We knew it, The Mariners knew it. Felix knew it. And so we took that relationship and invested in it. We made it clear to Felix that he was enough for us, that as long as he continued to give us everything he had, whatever that was, we would never hold him accountable for his or the team’s failures. 

It was, still, one of the most special relationships between fans and player I know of. Our region is used to our stars leaving, burning out, being traded, being paid so much they couldn’t stay, but Felix stayed. He stayed because he loved playing here, and loved how much we loved him playing for us. He never complained, or hinted he wanted to leave, or did anything outwardly but cherish that relationship, and it’s one I’ll cherish for the rest of my days.

The great periods of sports, and I’d argue life, are the ones where we choose active participation. We see the narrative of existence scroll by and make the conscious choice to not simply be observers, but characters within it. We take hold of something, and pour ourselves into it. For 15 years we chose to scream ourselves hoarse every five days for one man, alone atop the sport’s natural throne. We called him King. The King loved his people. And for one glorious afternoon in August, 10 years ago, it was all perfect.

Long Live the King. May his reign never end.

Three Up

For Whom the Ham Swags

Scientists and sociologists may never fully understand exactly what a “Sam Haggerty” is, but what’s clear is that he is currently saving the Mariners once-fully-jammed-by-logs outfield. Players with Haggerty’s skillset – fast, good at defense, fast, annoying, fast – are only useful insofar as they can avoid embarrassing themselves at the plate. Well:

Haggerty’s defensive competence is a balm for a team that has seen Jesse Winker ritualistically give the concept of defense a corporeal form only to brutally and gruesomely slaughter it game after game. Additionally, his pesky qualities were sufficient to turn Max Stassi into the last frame of a galaxy brain meme for an entire inning.

Do I think this is predictive? Hell no. Do I particularly care? I care about so little already, and see no reason to make this one of the few. Haggerty can ride until the wheels fall off.

Oh. Right. An Ace

You spend your whole life as a baseball fan looking for something like what Luis Castillo is. The desire to find it can make it easy to bestow that future upon young players like George Kirby and Logan Gilbert, or to let your brain turn Robbie Ray into one by only selectively remembering his best moments. The mental gymnastics work only until the moment you watch someone like Castillo pitch, and the facade falls away. 

There is no substitute for 98 with movement, or for an 80-grade power changeup with saucy, Pedro-like leg whip-over on the follow through. There’s no mistaking the way that major league hitters look against all that for the fits and starts against anything else. Castillo is the best Mariner starting pitcher since prime Felix Hernandez, and I don’t think it’s close. A pitching ace is simply a case of you know it when you see it. It’s here.

Hell is hot. Andres Munoz is hotter

I watched last night (Monday’s) game with my kids for a bit. This is the first summer they’ve really started to enjoy baseball, and I’ve tried to largely take a back seat. Those of you who know me in any way will know how hard it is for me to simply shut up at times, but I feel like it’s the best way for them to come to the sport.

That said, I failed last night when Andres Munoz faced Steven Duggar in the 8th. Duggar had already struck out three times, and came into the at-bat with the body language of a man with 15 years until retirement walking to work on a cold Monday morning. I loudly exclaimed “THERE IS NO WAY THIS DORK IS PUTTING THE BALL IN PLAY”. My son giggled. My daughter rolled her eyes. 

While admittedly I said it louder than I anticipated I’m pretty sure Duggar heard me. With two strikes Munoz threw his worst pitch of the night; a spinner in the middle of the plate, belly high. An opportunistic hitter would have swung out of his cleats, but the power of being Andres Munoz and the burden of being Steve Duggar combined to Duggar simply watching the ball sail into Cal Raleigh’s glove, a strike three so obvious that even Laz Diaz couldn’t miss it. 

Three Down

France Weakening Quickly, Per Reports

The Mariners offense, even at full strength, is far from great. It has rarely been at full strength this season, due to injury and Winker brain spiders. By and large the Mariners have scored runs because Julio Rodriguez and Ty France have been wonderful baseball players. 

That reality makes France’s current slump concerning. One of the Mariners’ offensive lodestone is 6-for-46 in August. In 28 games since coming off the IL July 7th his OPS is .643. His swing looks uncomfortable, and his fielding at first indicates he’s still not fully healthy. I have no idea how much that’s impacting his play, if at all. All I know is the Mariners need him to be All-Star Ty France, not right-handed J.P. Crawford at the dish.

Logan “Marco” Gilbert

The Mariners are where they are in large part because their starting rotation has held up phenomenally well until recently. The problem with that “until recently” is that there are nearly two months left in the season. The chief concern, by far, is that for the second straight season Logan Gilbert appears to be running out of gas.

A quick glance of Gilbert’s page at Baseball Savant shows that his hard hit rate is in the……….third percentile? That feels impossible for someone with Gilbert’s generally above average repertoire but also that’s just math! MLB offenses are largely hitting the ever-loving crap of Gilbert’s pitches, and have been doing so for most of the season. Seems bad.

I Hope Jesse Winker Does Not Take Pride In His Defense Because If So I Have Some Bad News

Unlike his bet, at least Winker’s struggles on defense are as advertised. I don’t know if I anticipated quite the Raul Ibanez-level carnival show every fly ball or line drive (or, recently, ground ball?) has brought but no one expected Randy Winn out there. 

That said, Winker’s defense has been atrociously bad this season. It’s to the point where I don’t know how you can let him play nine innings in the field in anything but a blowout. For a team with a high number of low-utility, bat-first players it makes the roster a difficult juggle. 

Really the team is probably stuck praying Sam Haggerty’s BABIP continues to fly north of .400. Winker at DH with Haggerty in left is a perfectly fine arrangement as Haggerty is a glowing incandescent ball of pure light.

The bat has picked up nicely, and must continue to do so. With this year’s defense anything less than elite hitting from Winker is not a starting caliber baseball player. Keep thwocking Jesse. We and you need it.

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

*****

Small little plug: My friend Dan texted me late last week saying he was bored and needed to do something creative. He showed me what he was working on and, after a little back and forth, I think he stuck with a shirt design that a segment of Mariner fans would really enjoy. You can grab the Mariber Reaper (plus sticker) here*

*I get nothing from this. It’s just for fun.

The Mariners are in the middle of one of the easiest stretches of their season. I would say they *must* make hay here but I know perfectly well that they will muck around at .500 before inexplicably playing well against the good teams when they play them. The Mariners are one of the most chaotic evil teams in perhaps the most chaotic evil sport in the world. I expect nothing to make sense, and I encourage you to do the same. See you next week.

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.