65-55: Mariners do the (new) Mariner

I wanted to write a bit tonight about Kendrys Morales. He's had a bit of a SSS resurgence the past 5 games because he's on the Mariners and the Mariners are currently the Tesseract and produce boundless, unceasing force and destroy everything in their path. In the classic write up Kendrys Morales won the game for the Mariners tonight. He swung at a (not a strike) in the 1st and hit a home run. It was his 2nd in as many nights.

It's easy to give praise to Morales. Historically he hits and the Mariners, historically, do not. Many clamored for him to be extended during last season and his recent return was spun in places as a sort of mea culpa by the Mariners FO. But while Kendrys Morales drove in 100% of the runs tonight he also had a healthy part to play in keeping those 2 runs to that 100%.

In the bottom of the 3rd Robinson Cano was on 1st and Kendrys Morales ripped another knuckleball down the right field line for a double. He squared it up, hit it off the sweet spot. The only question was would it stay fair? It did and the Mariners were immediately putting pressure on Toronto once again.

Only Morales didn't end up at 2nd. He stayed a 1st.

Watching baseball a lot you start doing mental math as soon as a ball is hit hard. Where is it hit? How hard is it hit? What's the score? What's the inning? How fast is the defender? How strong is his arm? How fast is the runner? In every form of that calculus that doesn't involve a Molina Kendrys Morales smacked a double into the RF corner. Yet he was at 1st after the play ended. Kyle Seager took it upon himself to drive the point home with a 4-6-3 double play: "You are slow and fat, you not very old human. How are you so slow?"

This was my lead for tonight. I don't know if it's because I'm a pessimist, I'm lashing out at all the Bob from Northlakes spending all April-June complaining about not re-signing Morales or if I just really, really dislike no OBP, bat only DHs. The only thing I know is it sucks.

The Mariners just finished this home stand 8-1. They destroyed 2 good teams and the single most annoying team in baseball. There exists the very real possibility that this was the greatest stretch of games at Safeco Field since 2001.  Whereas teams that spent the first 4 months of the season garnering praise are faltering the Mariners are playing baseball better than anyone who isn't the Kansas City Royals. That is a sentence that should make you cherish the glory of chaos.

It just doesn't matter anymore. Mistakes. My god so many mistakes. So much bad luck. So many times we'd pour over the data, struggling to figure out where it went wrong. As a Mariner fan I'm used to dissecting the rotted corpse, finding out the initial location of infection and tracking its inevitable, fatal spread.

Things that work get analyzed too. We look back on what made this greatness, can it be repeated, who garners credit, etc. The difference is that prior to all of that there's a big ass party where we all bask in it. Right now is that party. Not everything has gone to plan. We don't necessarily think our boss did much more than drunkenly hit on 18 with his last $500 at the blackjack table, but we know that for now everyone seems happy, and that orders are up and there's talk of even extending what is usually a cruelly seasonal occupation.

It's been a bizarre, emotional day. I don't know exactly how to end. Consider: Brad Miller was predicted by 84% of Lookout Landing voters to be worth a minimum of 2.5 WAR this year. Brad Miller has been largely terrible, he's lost his job to Chris Taylor, who's peak may include a Jack Wilson impression. Tonight Brad Miller did this.

We're beyond understanding, and despite our pretensions we never knew. We have the flitting hope of the rest of the year, and the bedrocked, foundational memory of the last 9 days, which have actually happened. The Seattle Mariners are one hell of a fun baseball team, and they are going to spend the next 1 1/2 months making the bad things in your life more manageable, the good things better, and the unimaginable visible.