SEATTLE — It had been 72 games, 85 days and, based on the way they turned their season around after the last time it happened, it seemed like eons since the Mariners were shut out. But all good things come to an end, and Seattle is in a far better place after a 2-0 loss to the Padres on Tuesday night than the last time it was blanked.
That shutout, on June 19 against the Angels, when the alarm was literally and metaphorically sounding on their season, will go down as the team’s turning point in 2022. Since that game, which dropped the Mariners to a season-low 10 games under. 500, they are 50-23. That’s a .685 winning percentage, the AL’s highest.
Their 72-game streak without being shut out is the fourth-longest in MLB this year and was the second-longest active to only Atlanta, which is on a 77-game run.
Going scoreless is never ideal, but the Mariners have shown that they’re far better equipped to rebound from a stinging defeat than they were earlier this season, when they were shut out a whopping 10 times in their first 68 games, which was tied for most in MLB with the Tigers, baseball’s worst offense.
Tuesday — a game in which they were overpowered by Yu Darvish, one of his generation’s better starters — is one that they’ll flush.
“These are the games we usually find a way to pull it out,” Mariners manager Scott Servais said. “It just didn’t happen tonight, unfortunately.”
After an off-day on Monday that followed an epic walk-off over the Braves on Sunday, Seattle was silenced by trademark Darvish at his best. He unleashed six different pitches, a classification that’s probably selling the five-time All-Star short given his ability to manipulate his grips to create different behaviors on each, making it look like he throws 10 different renditions — if not more.
“I think that makes him better than everybody’s stuff,” Eugenio Suárez said. “He’s got a cutter that he throws 85 [mph], then the same pitch 91. He kind of mixes it all up. He’s got really good stuff, and he doesn’t make a lot of mistakes. Today, he got lucky. We hit the ball really well.”
Suárez had just one of Seattle’s two hits; Ty France had the other. Both were singles, and Seattle wasn’t able to put up another baserunner against the righty, who at one point retired 16 in a row. However, 10 of their 18 batted balls against him were hard-hit (95 mph or higher) and they had eight outs on balls with an expected batting average of .400 or higher.
The elite pitch mix catapulted Darvish through eight scoreless innings before Padres manager Bob Melvin turned to Josh Hader, the lefty who’s thrice been the NL Reliever of the Year but who also sported a 13.50 ERA since being acquired at the Trade Deadline. Hader gave up a single to Julio Rodríguez that created marginal traffic, but Hader overpowered France with a 10-pitch strikeout to end the game, one of three K’s that inning.
Given the way that Darvish was pitching, two defensive miscues in the Mariners’ outfield proved costly.
The first was during the fourth inning via a 79 mph throw from Jesse Winker that short-hopped cutoff man JP Crawford and allowed Jake Cronenworth to score standing all the way from first. The other was on a one-hop fly ball that Rodríguez failed to corral in the ninth, which allowed former Mariner Austin Nola to advance from first to third instead of second. Nola then scored on a swinging bunt by Juan Soto.
Logan Gilbert was charged for the fourth-inning run, his first allowed after two scoreless outings. He labored through an elevated pitch count thanks to some pesky Padres at-bats but finished the fifth inning with his 107th pitch to strand two runners.
The Mariners had won 17 of their past 24 coming into this two-game series dating back to Aug. 15, MLB’s second-best record in nearly a full calendar month. And after the series finale against the NL Wild Card-hopeful Padres on Wednesday, Seattle won’t face a team currently with a winning record the rest of the way.
With MLB’s easiest strength of schedule over their final 20 games — against the Angels (four games), A’s (six), Royals (three), Rangers (three) and Tigers (four) — the Mariners are in decent enough shape to overcome a game like Tuesday’s.
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