Mariners Hit More Dingers, Ultimately Outdone by a Dinger

For a very meaningless game, this was actually a pretty exciting game. I mean, as far as A’s/Mariners games go, anyways.

Erasmo Ramirez labored his way through 5 innings, yielding 8 hits, 2 walks, 2 strike outs and left the game down 5-3. This could have been where the game became a real snoozer, it being a get-away day game and all, and no one would have really blamed the Mariners if they just packed their shit and moved on.

The offense, particularly Nelson Cruz and Robinson Cano, said “not today” and decided to put the team on their backs and try to win the dang thing anyways. It didn’t quite work out, but they came close.

But for the most part I just want to talk about Nelson Cruz’s insane line drive home run to left field. Look at this insanity. LOOK AT IT.

In a season of many absolutely crushed baseballs by Nelson Cruz, this one was his hardest hit home run with an exit velocity of 117 MPH.

I mean, damn. Also, peep this angle where it seems that the ball nearly hit a person who had their back turned to the field. Unfortunately, it cuts away right before the ball presumably left a dent in an empty seat, but man, we were mere feet away from either a Sportscenter Not Top Ten moment or perhaps a grisly baseball park fatality. We’ll never know!

That swing is beautiful in its natural violence in the same way the great white sharks are beautiful when they launch seals out of the water to stun and kill them. Please read the last sentence in Werner Herzog’s voice. Thanks.

I was running the LL Twitter account and got a little too excited and typo’d pretty hard.

I was immediately owned by Kate, John, and even Ashley MacLennan from the Detroit Tigers SBNation site.

In other news, I’ve been relieved of my LL duties. It’s been an honor and pleasure.

Moving on, today was catcher Mike Marjama’s first MLB start and he went ahead and collected his first 2 MLB hits, as well as his first put-out at second. Kate sums things up here better than I can:

But, after all that, it was still 5-3 going into the eighth inning. Robinson Cano was all like, “Nah.”

Take that, California Sports.

So it was all tied up at 5. Mariners failed to make much noise in the top half of the ninth inning, so it was either extras or a walk-off or extras with a walk-off later maybe. Shae Simmons saved us the trouble by giving up a walk-off solo shot to Mark Canha and that was that. It was Simmon’s first dinger surrendered in his injury-shortened, but otherwise very good 2017 campaign.

Tomorrow is the last off day of 2017 (yay?) and then it’s the final series of the season in Anaheim or Los Angeles or wherever the fuck it is the Angels play. Burn it all down on your way out, Mariners.