Despite working with some of his worst stuff of the season, Dylan Cease carved through the Mariners’ lineup tonight. The Cy Young frontrunner did it the same way he did when he faced Seattle two months ago: sliders and changeups tumbling, pushing the Mariners to chase the fastball high. The meanest pitch was the one sinker he threw, a beauty that started out of the zone and snuck back in, freezing J.P. Crawford like a statue. Frankly, it was excessive.
Across two starts against the Mariners this season,
Cease now has 17 strikeouts in 13 innings, against two walks and seven hits. For a guy who’s more of a whiff generator, the 33 called strikes stand out as a master class in getting what should be a good offense utterly puzzled as to what’s happening.
But even while he’s been locked in, he has not mastered his own humanity. And a classic human failing is hubris. So when he got Dominic Canzone to just stare helplessly at a middle-middle fastball in the first inning, Cease thought he could do no wrong. He tried it again. It didn’t go as well. A 113-mph rocket to right field gave Dom his 20th home run of the season. He’s gone yard off of four-seamers, two-seamers, cutters, sliders, curveballs, changeups, and splitters. He’s hit ‘em on the road and he’s hit em’ at home, on native soil and abroad, against righties and against lefties. It’s been a minute since we got a Dom bomb, but he’s been looking just fine, and you cannot sneak the same pitch by him twice, even if you’re one of the best pitchers in the game. This big fly, essentially the Mariners only offense in a blowout, and a salve from the barrage of hits off the bat of George Springer, gets Canzone his third Sun Hat Award.
