SEATTLE — The ace, “the babysitter” and the last-minute fill-in gave a sellout crowd exactly what they wanted when a ticketed 45,190 gathered at T-Mobile Park and watched the Mariners run away with a 4-0 win over Cleveland on Sunday afternoon.
If it seemed like all of Seattle congregated in SoDo on this sun-soaked afternoon, the Mariners had their second straight sellout on this weekend in conjunction with Ichiro Suzuki being enshrined in the club’s Hall of Fame.
Mariners manager Scott Servais even opened his postgame press conference by addressing the environment.
“Let me start with the crowd,” Servais said. “This weekend, our fan base, I’m going to start there before I talk about the awesome job that our team did. Because it is really, really exciting. Really good baseball, day games in August in Seattle — it doesn’t get any better. And then when we get 46,000 people out there, it makes it really, really special. So a big thank you.”
And back to the actual baseball:
• Robbie Ray carved through Cleveland’s contact-heavy lineup with seven shutout innings, over which he struck out seven, walked zero and gave up just three hits. Given the context of the opponent, first-place Cleveland, it was objectively his best start in two months.
• Dylan Moore, who substituted for JP Crawford while the shortstop recovers from a left pectoral injury, lashed a three-run blast in the fifth that broke a scoreless tie in what was shaping up to be a pitchers’ duel.
• Mitch Haniger preserved the shutout with a 92.3 mph throw to the plate that kept Andrés Giménez holding at third base on a would-be sacrifice fly — even though Giménez is in the 94th percentile in Statcast’s sprint speed.
• And “Los Bomberos” — the new nickname for the Mariners’ bullpen — locked down scoreless innings from Erik Swanson and Paul Sewald in the eighth and ninth.
“These fans, they can feel the energy that we’ve got going right now,” Ray said. “And we feed off of that; it’s huge to have our fan base behind us full throttle.”
If the season ended Sunday, these teams would both be in the playoffs, and the atmosphere just six weeks out of the Wild Card Series certainly fit the bill. By then, the air will be crisper and cooler than the picture-perfect, 62-degree temperatures on this Ichiro bobblehead giveaway day before schools go back in session.
The Mariners held onto the second AL Wild Card spot with just 34 games remaining, and after Sunday, their postseason odds were at 94.2%, per FanGraphs. Expectations are high, inside and outside the clubhouse. But it’s clear that, for a hungry fan base, these types of environments might not be exclusive to just a celebratory weekend.
“This whole weekend has been really fun,” Moore said. “The combination of Julio and then Ichiro Weekend and us playing some really good baseball against a really good team — it’s been really fun. …
“The maturation of the fans, knowing the game and knowing what’s going on from my time being here has been really fun to watch. And it’s kind of culminating into a really fun experience this year.”
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