The Seattle Mariners secured a 3-1 victory over the Angels in extra innings.
Pitching Shines for Seattle
The M’s pitching staff dazzled and had to wait for aid from their hitters. The Mariners had, by FanGraphs, the best pitching staff in their franchise history that year, amassing 21.2 fWAR and 23.0 bWAR by Baseball Reference.
The club had little in the way of expectation. Watching Seattle’s hitters labour through their eighth game of the season, bearing expectations that would’ve been laughable in every year of the 1980s for a Mariners club, we witnessed a throwback victory.
Broken Bats and Offensive Struggles
Both Cal Raleigh and Julio Rodríguez have started the year frosty. Aptly, against Anaheim southpaw Reid Detmers, both Raleigh and Rodríguez chipped their barrels. Broken bats were a theme.
Seattle’s 2-3-4 hitters have been glacial at the dish, putting the M’s in uphill battles to score runs with their most frequent hitters producing nothing and less. Neither club mustered more than cardboard threats most of the evening. In their home opener, the Angels managed one hit, one walk, one hit by pitch, every ABS.
Echoes of the 1982 Mariners
The Seattle Mariners were breaking bats. The M’s of 1982 were the club’s crowning achievement, a 76-86 assemblage that was, at the time and until 1987, by far the franchise’s most respectable showing. On a night where the M’s pitching staff dazzled and had to wait for fashionably late aid from their hitters, this club was on my mind.
Those M’s were shallow at the plate. Seattle also flipped future rotation stalwart Bud Black for 3B Manny Castillo, who gave the ‘82 M’s what he had: limited defense and awful hitting.
But what those M’s had for the first – and potentially only time – in the Kingdome era, was a club made competent by its pitching staff. While the hitters fumbled their rationed cromulence between one another, Floyd Bannister, Jim Beattie, Wild Bill Caudill, and Ed Vande Berg put together one of the greatest pitching staffs in Mariners history.
The club had little in the way of expectation, nor could it compound their astounding improvements in the years to come. Tonight, we witnessed a throwback victory.