Mariners at Cardinals
Josh Naylor drew a walk in the 4th, stole second base, and scored on Canzone’s single. Then in the 6th, with the game tied, he led off the inning and hit a solo homer to right-center for the go-ahead run. Two of your three runs came directly from a man who decided he was going to handle this himself. The rest of the lineup went 3-for-26. Naylor looked at the other eight guys in that dugout the way a group project leader looks at everybody who didn’t do the reading.
George Kirby went six innings, gave up five hits, two runs, threw 81 pitches. Two strikeouts. Two. The man was not blowing anybody away. He was pitching to contact and trusting his defense and somehow it worked because St. Louis had eight hits and only two runs, meaning the Cardinals were out there stranding fifteen of their own. Both teams were just loading the bases and staring at each other like two guys who forgot why they walked into the room.
Kirby did enough. Brash did his inning clean. Speier gave up two hits in a third of an inning and got pulled before it became a thing. Bazardo cleaned it up. And then Munoz came in for the ninth, gave up a two-out single to Nathan Church — who? — and struck out Ramon Urias to end it.
You can’t keep winning 3-2 with four hits. You can do it tonight. You can maybe do it Tuesday. But this is not a plan. This is a guy falling down a staircase and landing on his feet and calling it cardio.
THE NUMBER: 29
Combined runners left on base. Seattle left 14. St. Louis left 15. Twenty-nine grown men stood on a base, helmet on, ready to run, believing in their heart that the next guy in the lineup was about to do something meaningful. And twenty-nine times, that belief was incorrect. The final score was 3-2. Both teams spent the entire night getting people into position and then forgetting why they were there. It was like watching two families try to take a group photo at Thanksgiving. Everyone’s present. Nobody’s ready. And eventually you just go with whatever you got.
FAN REPORT: Busch Stadium, St. Louis
Attendance: 31,304. Your pitcher struck out eight guys. Your team had eight hits. You doubled the opponent’s hit total. And you lost. Thirty-one thousand people in St. Louis experienced something last night that has no name in sports. It’s not heartbreak — heartbreak requires a dramatic moment. It’s not a collapse — nothing collapsed, nothing dramatic happened at all. It’s just… a slow, polite confusion. Like ordering exactly what you wanted at a restaurant and the waiter bringing it to the table next to you. Andre Pallante struck out eight Mariners and gave up a homer to the one guy he couldn’t afford to let beat him. That’s the kind of night where the organist plays the walk-out music and everybody files toward the exit in total silence, processing. Nobody’s booing. Nobody’s yelling. They’re just doing math in their heads that doesn’t add up.
The Mariners are 12-15, 2.5 back, and have apparently decided the way to make the playoffs is to win every game 3-2 on one hit that matters and sheer institutional stubbornness.
— Bobby Bunt