The sun shines down on Safeco Field

Fun fact: in this six game homestand the Seattle Mariners played 23 hours and fifteen minutes of baseball. Fortunately today’s game lowered the average, and featured a concise three hours and nine minutes of baseball with a nice little win tucked in at the end. A win brought to you by major contributions from Dillon Overton, Christian Bergman, and Danny Valencia. Kyle Seager also managed to vanquish his promotional day demons (who else remembers his disastrous performance on his Gold Glove bobblehead night?) with a tie-breaker home run in the eighth. Baseball is bizarre, but sometimes it can be a good kind of bizarre.

As the title says, it’s a gorgeous day here in Seattle (or probably anywhere except San Diego), and I think we’d all benefit from more time outside/less time staring at a screen, so I’m going to keep this short. Fortunately the Mariners offense didn’t really do anything of note until the seventh inning anyway.

Dillon Overton performed admirably in his forced-upon starting role, and his biggest flaw was simply that he got too deep into too many counts and was only able to last three and a third innings. Fortunately new call-up Christian Bergman was ready and waiting, throwing 3.2 innings of one hit baseball. All told, this odd couple partnership combined for seven innings, five hits and three runs. None of the runs came off of hits. Nick Vincent struck out two in the eighth, Marc Rzepczynski swiftly disposed of Joey Gallo with a three pitch strikeout (and somehow earned his first win), and Edwin Díaz had a three-up-three-down ninth inning that netted him his sixth save and caused only minor heart palpitations. I don’t want to waste time complaining about umpiring calls, but please enjoy this hot mess of a strike zone.

The Mariners loaded the bases and scored their first run in the bottom of the seventh with a fielder’s choice by Guillermo Heredia sandwiched between two sets of back-to-back walks. The Rangers brought in lefty Alex Claudio, and that prompted Scott Servais to pinch hit Danny Valencia for Ben Gamel which was probably his best pinch-hitting decision this season. Then Danny, who believes strongly in using positive reinforcement to reward smart decision-making, hit a single into centerfield to tie the game.

In the bottom of the eighth inning Kyle Seager hit his second home run of 2017 and while it was a bummer for all Rangers fans, it was an especially big bummer for this poor guy.

On a beautiful afternoon at Safeco Field the Seattle Mariners beat the Texas Rangers 4-3. With what feels like half their starting lineup (the good half) on the DL they are two games below .500 and half a game back from the Angels.