Cleveland rocked, La Piedra rolls, Mariners win 6-1

Despite missing a lot of time to injury, Jake Lamb has 94 home runs in his career. It’s really not that embarrassing to let him go deep on you. Zach Plesac doesn’t feel that way.

It was announced this afternoon that this incident, from last weekend, led to a fractured fifth metacarpal. So it turns out there’s at least one thing more embarrassing than giving up a homer to Jake Lamb. Plesac was supposed to start today’s game against the Mariners, but was replaced by something called a Cody Morris.

I don’t want to dunk on Morris too badly since this was his MLB debut, which is an accomplishment worth celebrating; Lookout Landing is passionately pro-debut, as demonstrated by Lou Fish-Sadin’s tearjerker from June. (I accidentally bookmarked that page when trying to copy the link, but you know what? I’m keeping it.)

Having said that, Cody Morris’s best outings are probably in front of him. He started tonight’s game by giving up a line drive single to Julio. And after recording his first out against Ty France, Morris gave up a double to Mitch Haniger that had no trouble scoring Julio to make the game 1-0 within three batters and continuing the Mariners recent theme of scoring early. After a painful 31 pitches, Morris had recorded his first MLB inning.

The next inning didn’t go much better when he served up this meatball:

That’s a spicy meatball! Sending that ball out of the Jake at 114 mph, I think Cal maybe felt a little bad rounding first.

Morris couldn’t catch a break since after this, Julio reached on an error from the usually sure-handed Amed Rosario. So Julio was on base again for Haniger’s second RBI double of the game, which brought the score to 3-0.

To date, those two innings are the only MLB innings that Cody Morris has pitched: The next seven innings were tossed by the Relieveland Guardians, and I have half a mind to give tonight’s Sun Hat Award to the T-Mobile Park pitching mound.

Cody’s counterpart tonight was Luis Castillo, who Scott Servais apparently writes into the lineup card using his nickname, La Piedra.

Like water eroding a stone, last weekend, the Guardians wasted La Piedra away with unending foul balls. Tonight, Castillo set the tone right away with an eight-pitch first inning, and the Guardians bats overall performed like if your Sims family tried to play a baseball game after you forgot to feed them for a week. To be fair, it took Castillo until the fourth inning to record his first strikeout, which came on a changeup so gruesome even the Saw creators thought it needed to be toned down. All of Castillo’s pitches looked sharp, including this Missed Take on the Lake.

Overall, Castillo’s line looked a little Marco-esque (if Marco could throw 99) with just four strikeouts on the night. But despite less dominant peripherals than we’re used to seeing from Castillo, things only felt tense once, when Andrés Giménez reached on what was ruled a hit-by-pitch in the fourth.

And all the credit to Cal for getting in Jim Wolf’s face. Because that is one ferocious looking Wolf.

Even Charleton Heston thinks guns that big are a bit much. But Cal was right. Let’s pivot to video:

There’s leaning into a pitch and there’s trying to swat at the pitch like this is volleyball. Maybe Giménez just wanted to be #BrokenHandBros with Plesac. At any rate, Castillo got out of it, and he eventually left the game having given up zero runs over a comfortable six innings. He’s now faced the Guardians twice in a row and allowed just one run over 12 innings. The American League isn’t going to like this.

As noted above, Cal was real mad. And apparently he doesn’t believe that vengance is a dish best served cold, because he came back right away.

Those two home runs brought him to 21, and he’s become just the third catcher to go yard 20 times in a season in Mariners history. Congratulations, Cal! In an even more prestigious honor, tonight also earned him his fourth Sun Hat Award for notable contribution. But the biggest honor of all was undoubtedly this:

That’s Manager of the Year front-runner Scott Servais, giving a great big hug to the one, the only, Big Dumper.