8/15/20: Open Game Thread

Today is August 15th, the eight-year anniversary of the last perfect game thrown in MLB and the reason I root against every single perfect game in progress. Here, watch this, because it will almost certainly be better than whatever happens tonight:

Last night the Mariners horrified us to the tune of an 11-1 loss, which honestly I guess wasn’t as bad as last year when they almost got back-to-back perfecto’d and no-no’d and also suffered some blowout losses, but it sure felt bad to watch when the first inning took either fifty-three minutes or 147 years. Quarantine time has trickled over to baseball, it appears. In lieu of recapping that horrible game we instead told stories about our bad dates and asked you for yours, both on Twitter and in the comments, and some good (bad) ones have trickled in if you are looking for a laugh or a cringe or a laugh-cringe.

The great thing about baseball though is unlike football, where we’d have to stew in this for a week, the Mariners will march forward like none of that ever happened, what last night I don’t know her, which is also my strategy for dealing with bad things that happen to me. Baseball: the sport for people with avoidance issues. Here’s who the Mariners are rolling out tonight, and when:

If you can’t see on the tweet preview, the pitchers are cut off. The Mariners will start lefty Nick Margevicius in place of the injured Kendall Graveman, whose neck issues are apparently not something that can be fixed with surgery and he’s going to explore alternate rehabs—Kendall, I have a nice collection of crystals, call me. They probably work about as well as a PRP injection, honestly. The Astros starter is Cristian Javier, one of the various prospects they’ve pressed into service this year. In true Astros prospect fashion, Javier has big stuff with spotty command, although that hasn’t been an issue in the 15 innings he’s pitched so far this year. He does, however, carry a pretty high FIP into this game. You can read more about Javier, and a bunch of other stuff, in the series preview Jake and Tim did:

The Mariners also announced prior to this game that they have DFA’d Bryan Shaw, thanking him for his service in edging the team as close as possible to Kumar Rocker, and placed Nestor Cortes on the IL with an elbow impingement, which could explain his dreadful performance last night. Taylor Guilbeau, human ping-pong ball, returns to the team, and LJAY NEWSOME gets his call-up. Yay Ljay! Read more about the silent assassin here:

In case you’ve read all the way to the bottom of this and forgotten the game info at the top, here it is one more time:

Game time: 4:10 PT

TV: ROOT

Radio: 710 ESPN

Or since it’s a gorgeous sunny day, follow the game on GameDay or Mariners dot com and go walk around. We’ll have the recap for you when you get back.