So many WWE-style pyrotechnics you half expect Stone Cold Steve Austin to come sauntering down the ramp and grab a bat.

You know when you try to get a dog to see something, and push their face toward the thing you want them to see, but instead of going with the push they keep pushing back to see what the heck someone is doing to their face? Increasingly, at Mariners games, I feel like that dog.

The pusher is whatever individual or group or AI is now in charge of the sound system and scoreboard and between-innings/pitches shenanigans. These were always bad—so much so that I complained about them in print in 1997—but in the past few months everything has been turned to 11. It’s loud and relentless, and for our first postseason game vs. the Tigers last night it never took a fucking breath:

• Stand up!
• Make noise!
• Flashlights on!
• Foul Ball Dance Party!
• Do the hokey-pokey and turn yourselves around!

You don’t have time to see a player’s batting average or ERA before the scoreboard—all the scoreboards—are pulsating with Mariners messaging. The game itself is being lost behind this noise. There’s no signal in it. It’s so much like WWE pyrotechnics, I half expected Stone Cold Steve Austin or Triple H to come sauntering down the ramp and grab a bat.

And for all the noise we made, which the scoreboard kept reminding us that we in the Pacific NW were really good at making, the Seattle Mariners lost to the Detroit Tigers 3-2 in 11 innings.

In those 11 innings, we got six hits: 3 by Cal Raleigh, 3 by Julio Rodriguez. Julio got both RBIs behind a solo homerun and a run-scoring single. All of it felt familiar. Not in the September-to-Remember way, when the M’s couldn’t lose, but in the usual Pac NW way, when we can lose in stultifying fashion. 

In yesterday’s post, I admitted that I no longer know enough about the Ms to know which managerial decisions are immediately awful, but my friend Tim doesn’t suffer such a deficit. For either team, it turns out. Mid-game, the out-of-town scoreboard took a momentary break from telling us to STAND UP and MAKE NOISE to let us know that Rafael Montero was now warming up in the Detroit bullpen.

“Oh good, yes, put him in,” Tim said.

Montero had played for the M’s for half a season—we got him from Texas in December 2020 and traded him to Houston midseason as part of the Kendall Graveman deal—but Tim has a long memory, maybe particularly for bad bullpen guys, and Montero was that. And apparently he’s remained that. He’s pitched since 2014 and has a -0.6 career bWAR. Somehow he keeps finding teams. Teams keep thinking they can fix whatever problem he has. This season he played for three different teams. He was with Houston for a hot week in March/April before traded to Atlanta, where he threw 34 innings with a 5.50 ERA before being traded July 31 to Detroit, where, hey, he pitched 22 innings with a 2.86 ERA. Not bad! Right, but also a not-good 19-14 K-BB ratio. 

In last night’s game, he came in in the bottom of the 6th with the M’s down 2-1. Julio had led off the 4th with that solo homer to center, Josh Naylor nearly followed it with one to right but got just under it and it died on the warning track. Then with two outs and a man on in the top of the 5th, on a 1-2 pitch from “Summer of George” Kirby, who was shaky at the outset, Kerry Carpenter rocketed a no-doubter to right for the bad guys.

But then came Montero. And Tim was exactly right: walk, single, single. Tie game. Tigers manager A.J. Hinch knew he’d seen enough and signaled for Tyler Holton, who got Naylor to chop a double-play ball up the middle: tag out, Naylor by half a step. Ah, but Mariners manager Dan Wilson called for a review! I guess maybe Julio hadn’t been tagged by Javy Baez? Was that the argument? Whatever the argument was, it lost, and the inning ended with a Jorge Polanco line-out to right.

And that’s where it stayed, 2-2, with hardly a baserunner for either team, until the bottom of the 10th when the out-of-town scoreboard flashed that Carlos Vargas was now warming up in the Mariners bullpen.

“Hurry up and score!“ Tim shouted. ”Vargas is about to come in!”

“Not good?” I asked.

Tim shrugged. “He puts on two guys every inning.”

And when Vargas took the mound in the top of the 11th, Tim shouted his usual: “Prove me wrong!”

Vargas didn’t. He proved him exactly right, giving up a leadoff walk, allowing the guy to advance on a wild pitch, and then, with two outs, Tigers third baseman Zach McKinstry hit a slow roller up the middle that comically evaded everyone’s outstretched gloves.  In “Homage to Catalonia,” about the Spanish Civil War, George Orwell wrote some great lines about a heavy, decrepit gun he encountered:

Its great shells whistled over so slowly that you felt certain you could run beside them and keep up with them. A shell from this gun sounded like nothing so much as a man riding along on a bicycle and whistling.

That was McKinstry’s game-winning hit last night, evading everybody. 

In the bottom of the 11th, facing a better Montero, Keider, Randy Arozarena grounded out to third (McKinstry!), Cal Raleigh fouled out to third (McKinstry!), Julio gave us a momentary reprise with a sharp single, but then Josh Naylor, on a 1-2 pitch, grounded out to first. And that was the ballgame.

And today we face Tarik “Skubal was a racehorse, and I wish he were mine.” Tough row. We’ll see. Crazier things have happened.

I’m almost grateful I don’t have tickets for this one. I can watch it in a bar, where, sure, I’ll stand up and make noise, but I’ll do it when I want to. And as loud as the bar may be, I’ll actually be able to have a conversation with friends between pitches. That'll be a nice change.

Read Tim's account here.