Parts of this season have felt like a dream for long-suffering Mariners fans, but tonight felt like a straight up simulation. How else to explain the Mariners fan in the “Dump 61 Here” shirt actually catching Dump #61? (Yes yes, it’s the postseason. Yes yes, it’s technically #1. But you and I both know in our hearts that is Dump 61).
But let’s back up, because tonight was a night highlighted, once again, by the battery
of the 2018 Draft, and the Mariners don’t get to a statement 8-4 win over the Tigers without six strong innings from Logan Gilbert. (Ignore that 4 for now. We will talk about that later.) This game started three hours late because of inclement weather, bringing up agonizing memories of the Mariners’ road struggles in rain delays, but the routine-oriented Gilbert was able to keep himself on track by stretching and staying loose up until game time.
Perhaps the Tigers should have rethought playing Gangsta’s Paradise as their strikeout celebration song, as it’s also Logan Gilbert’s song, and has been since his college days. Maybe it was a Pavlovian response, but Gilbert was stellar tonight in his first start of the 2025 postseason, recording seven strikeouts over six innings.
Gilbert didn’t start out crystal-sharp; his fastball command wasn’t pinpoint, and he got away with a few poorly-placed curveballs and sliders in the first couple of innings, working around a first inning single to Gleyber Torres on a curveball that didn’t break and another one in the second to Dillon Dingler. Thankfully, the splitter was in effect, and Gilbert was able to use it to strike out Greene to end the threat in the first. The rest of his arsenal locked in soon after, with Gilbert leaning heavily on the slider, which elicited 17 swings on the 37 he threw, for both whiffs and weak-contact outs. But the star of the show was definitely his splitter, which he used to stave off the lefties in Detroit’s lineup to great effect.
With Gilbert on his game, the question was—as it has been so many times in his career—could he get enough run support from his offense?
Jake said in the series preview that this game would depend on how well Jack Flaherty was able to command his two breaking balls on the day. At first, the Mariners had trouble with picking up Flaherty’s curveball: he struck out Julio on it to end the first, then opened the second by striking out Sunday’s hero Jorge Polanco on the same pitch before closing up the inning by striking out Dominic Canzone on the curveball, all of them flailing after the pitch in the dirt. The lone highlight of the first two innings was that they put almost 40 pitches on Flaherty, 29 of them in the second alone after Josh Naylor had an 11-pitch at-bat, and Eugenio Suárez worked a two-out walk.
With that increased pitch count, the Mariners got on the board in the third against Flaherty, whose command had started to waver. Victor Robles lashed one of those curveballs into the left field corner for a leadoff double. J.P. Crawford followed that up with a line drive single and Robles was able to score on a throwing error from Riley Greene and some heads-up baserunning. Randy Arozarena then drove J.P. home with a single up the middle to give the Mariners two runs. Two whole runs? After scratching and clawing for two precious runs against Tarik Skubal and similarly scuffling for offense in the series opener, two runs at once felt like an unimaginable luxury. And they had the chance for more!
But with runners at first and second with none out, the Mariners couldn’t add on, falling back into some old patterns. Julio Rodriguez struck out flailing after a slider in a full count for the first out, and then Polanco failed to make an adjustment from his first at-bat, striking out on the curveball again. Naylor hit the first pitch he saw hard, but flew out to end the inning.
But the Mariners weren’t going to not homer in this game. Eugenio Suárez picked a perfect moment for his first big hit of the postsesaon:
Flaherty followed that up by walking Dominic Canzone, and after striking out Victor Robles on seven pitches, found himself at the end of his day. Tommy Kahnle, the changeup artist, entered and walked Crawford before striking out Arozarena, bringing up Cal Raleigh in a clutch at-bat. Cal once again came through:
The Mariners’ hitting coaches have to be absolutely tickled by the up-the-middle approach the Mariners took all this game. Four runs! That’s more than either team scored in the first two games of this series, but the Mariners weren’t done yet.
The job for Logan Gilbert in the fifth was to put down the Tigers 1-2-3 and avoid facing Kerry Carpenter in that crucial nineteenth out, although the stakes were lessened with the 4-0 lead. But Gilbert hit Dillon Dingler with a pitch to lead off the inning, and a sac bunt moved him to second to avoid the double play. But as Connor Donovan says “play for one and you get one” and that’s all the Tigers did get, despite a Javier Báez single (ignore the box score that calls that a “line drive”, it was a parachute shot at 75.7 mph EV that plonked into right field) to put runners on the corners with just one out.
That brought up the dangerous Carpenter, moved into the leadoff spot inexplicably for the first time this season for just this situation, to force Dan Wilson to potentially go to Gabe Speier sooner than he might like. But with a 4-0 lead, Wilson opted to stick with his starter, who got the exact ball he needed off Carpenter’s bat—except his infield couldn’t complete the double play and the run scored. But Gilbert was able to get Torres to ground out to quell the threat.
The Mariners got that run right back in the top of the sixth, in the most unlikely of ways: J.P. Crawford, who had made the poor throw just an inning earlier to let the run score, leaned on a sweeper at his knees and lofted it into the right-field seats: 104.5 mph and almost 400 feet.
In 157 regular-season games, J.P. Crawford hit four homers off lefties—although one of them was a walk-off winner against Rangers lefty Robert Garcia. Now he has one in three post-season games. That’s playoff baseball baby!
With a tidy pitch count, Gilbert worked one more inning, putting an exclamation point on his day with a 1-2-3 inning bookended by a pair of strikeouts, both on—of course—the splitter.
Matt Brash was the first pitcher out of the Mariners bullpen to deal with the bottom third of the Tigers lineup, and he put his assigned hitters away tidily with three ground balls, and Eduard Bazardo—with the Mariners now up 6-1 thanks to some small-ball/poor Tigers defense/general Luke Raleying in the eighth—worked a crisp, nine-pitch bottom of the eighth that including striking out Kerry Carpenter on three pitches. This has been a video-heavy cap, but let’s look at that, because I want to remind you that the reason Kerry Carpenter is hitting leadoff is because he crushes righties (.512 SLG) and the whole gambit was to force Dan Wilson to burn Gabe Speier once again, and instead Wilson simply pushed the Eduard Bazardo Button.
Because Cal cannot allow Logan to have all the headlines to himself, he had to check in with a big hit of his own, a two-run shot in the ninth.
Incredibly, the fan who the broadcast had showed wearing a “Dump 61 Here” t-shirt earlier was the one who caught this ball on a bounce from the bullpen, immediately yanking it off to reveal a “Dump 62 Here” shirt. You just can’t make this stuff up.
Now for the nightmarish part of this dream. In the bottom of the ninth, with an 8-1 lead, Dan Wilson thought it would be safe to send out Caleb Ferguson for some low-leverage work. It was not safe. Pinch-hitter Jake Rogers opened with a single, and then Ferguson lost the handle against pinch-hitter Jahmai Jones, walking him. Spencer Torkelson was able to get to a sinker on the edge of the zone and keep it just fair down the right field line for a double, scoring two, and then pinch-hitter Andy Ibañez got a poorly-located sinker he hit solidly into right field to make it 8-4. That forced Dan Wilson to Stop Messing Around and bring in Andrés Muñoz, who shut the door as he so often has, but to even force Muñoz into the game is a victory for the Tigers. That’s the one sour note on what was otherwise a statement win for the Mariners.
Still, all wins are good wins, and seeing the bats come alive after slumbering through the first two games of this series—and stretching back to the Dodgers series, really—is warming to every Mariners’ fan soul. The Mariners now have tomorrow to try to capture a chance to play in the ALCS, and if they can’t do it then, they can return to Seattle and T-Mobile Park—where there are no rain delays—and try to do it in front of the home crowd. Dreamy stuff, indeed.
Programming note: Bryce Miller has been announced as tomorrow’s starter. Tomorrow’s game will start at noon Seattle time if the Yankees hold on and win the game they’re currently playing. If they’re eliminated, the Mariners will move into that prime-time slot and play at 5 PM PT.
