Mariners Survive Skubal, Outlast Tigers to Level Series

The key decision point in Saturday night’s Mariners-Tigers game came in the fifth inning, when manager Dan Wilson left righty George Kirby in the game to face a dangerous lefty, a third time through, with a runner on base. Kerry Carpenter smacked a 400-foot homer, erasing a Seattle lead, and the Tigers won 3-2 in 11 innings. So on Sunday, when righty Luis Castillo found himself in a similar pickle, Wilson found himself in a bind of his own.

The situation: a Gleyber Torres single put runners on first and third with two outs in the fifth inning. The next batter? None other than Carpenter. For the second straight day, the Mariners held a 1-0 lead, and this time, further runs didn’t feel likely, not with Tarik Skubal on the mound. Castillo had bobbed and weaved his way through the Tigers lineup two straight times, but he’d thrown 85 pitches to do so, scattering four walks and that Torres hit through his 4 2/3 innings.

This was no easy decision. Each choice had several points in its favor, but several downsides as well. Why pull Castillo? The situation greatly disfavored him. He’s far better against righties than lefties, and his platoon splits have only increased since he moved to Seattle and started weaning the changeup out of his arsenal. Even worse, Carpenter was up for a third time and had already seen 10 pitches from Castillo, including everything in his arsenal. Carpenter himself has huge platoon splits; in his career, he’s faced righties six times as often as lefties, with a 138 wRC+ against righties and a 69 wRC+ against lefties. Gabe Speier, Seattle’s middle-inning lefty of choice, is outstanding against lefties, and generally just outstanding overall. Finally, Castillo didn’t have his best stuff, and certainly didn’t have his best command. A change would meaningfully improve the matchup for Seattle, in the biggest spot of the game.

Why leave Castillo in, then? The Mariners rode their bullpen hard Saturday en route to that 11-inning defeat. Six different relievers had pitched, including the entirety of the high-leverage group. The Mariners had four more innings to get through after this one, and they’d be stressing their bullpen early in the game, in a must-win situation, with the Tigers likely in much better bullpen shape thanks to Skubal’s stamina and low pitch count. Getting another four outs out of Castillo would meaningfully improve the bullpen math. There was no way that Seattle was going to avoid letting Carpenter face any righties the rest of the way; why not let your solid starter be the righty instead of a tired reliever later on? After all, Speier wasn’t wanting for lefties to face in the Tigers lineup.

Wilson chose to pull Castillo. For the record, I definitely would have as well – the difference in expected outcomes between Castillo/Carpenter and Speier/Carpenter is so large that it outstrips everything else for me. I would even have pulled better pitchers than Castillo for worse relievers than Speier. The subsequent at-bat was an anti-climax; Speier blew Carpenter away in four pitches. But that’s just what the Mariners wanted when they went to their best lefty reliever in the biggest spot they were likely to face all night, with the tying run on third base and two outs.

The real tradeoff of the decision came not in the fifth but as the game wound towards its end. Speier got the next inning, even staying in the game after A.J. Hinch replaced one of his lefties with a righty to try to blunt Speier’s advantage. Next up was Eduard Bazardo, the freshest of the Mariners relievers who had appeared the previous night. He’d thrown only three pitches, and looked no worse for the wear as he notched a scoreless inning.

In the meantime, the Mariners were doing a surprisingly good job of getting to Skubal. Well, scratch that: Jorge Polanco was doing a surprisingly good job of getting to Skubal. For seven innings and 97 pitches, Skubal made eight of Seattle’s nine starters look bad. Those guys combined for three singles, a walk, and nine strikeouts. Polanco cracked two solo homers, staking Seattle to a 2-0 lead.

There’s nothing particular that would make Polanco the most likely Mariner to crack two bombs off of one of the best pitchers in baseball, but Seattle’s offense has enough home run hitters that given enough time, someone frequently breaks through. Stringing together hits against Skubal? Not happening. But one big swing? That’s much more workable, and Polanco and the Mariners’ approach here was downright perfect: hope for enough solo shots to keep the lead until Skubal departed.

That all transpired exactly according to plan, but now the Mariners were facing the consequences of the early hook on Castillo. Matt Brash came in for the eighth inning, a day after throwing 17 high-stress pitches. He doesn’t often pitch on back-to-back days, and he came out a little shaky, walking Torres and then striking out Carpenter in a grueling eight-pitch battle. The Tigers didn’t let up, and after a Josh Naylor error put runners on first and second with only one out, Spencer Torkelson tagged a rare Brash fastball for a game-tying, two-run double. The part of the game where the Mariners would have to use a tired reliever instead of Castillo to face the top of the order? It was right here, and laid the tradeoffs from Wilson’s earlier decision bare. Less Castillo meant more Brash. I’d take that tradeoff. But Saturday, there was no escaping it; no matter what Wilson did, it seemed that the top of the Detroit order was going to come up in a high-leverage spot against a fatigued pitcher.

Is this a recap of nihilism, then? Does nothing matter? Well, no. I still love Wilson’s decision. You can easily imagine a world where Brash’s nasty 2-2 pitch to Torres draws a weak swing instead of a great take, or where Naylor turns a double play instead of kicking the ball. Torkelson’s double was just inside the first base bag. The ball got caught underneath the lip of the protective padding in right field, allowing the trail runner to score. Any number of things could have gone differently that inning to make Brash and Wilson look better. It doesn’t change the fact that the earlier decision put them in the best position to win.

Of course, sometimes the breaks of the game work out anyway. With Skubal out of the game, the Tigers’ pitching advantage vanished. They, too, had to lean on a bullpen that was in shambles after seven relievers threw in the previous night’s extra-innings affair. That meant Kyle Finnegan, who has been operating as a fireman all postseason after a transcendent second half in Detroit, got the top of the Mariners lineup, the same guys who he’d just faced for 15 stressful pitches the night before.

It didn’t take Seattle long to take advantage of their familiarity. Cal Raleigh smoked the first pitch he saw, a hanging splitter, for an easy double. Julio Rodríguez took a splitter way high, then lined the next one he saw into the left field corner for an easy double of his own. Just like that, it was 3-2 Mariners, and the disaster of the previous inning was undone. As it turned out, everyone’s bullpen was hanging on by a thread, and neither side was up to the task of putting up zeroes.

Andrés Muñoz got the ninth inning in a delirious (and perhaps deliriously nervous) T-Mobile Park. You know how I made a big point of how many pitches Brash and Finnegan had thrown the previous day? Muñoz threw way more, 25 over two innings of work. His fastball was down multiple ticks, so he simply stopped using it. He instead started spamming sliders; after a first-pitch fastball down the middle to get ahead against Zach McKinstry, he threw 10 straight sliders.

They were pretty good ones. The first two got McKinstry to wave feebly over them for a strikeout. The next two dealt with Javier Báez via a weak pop-up. The subsequent six brought Muñoz to a 2-2 count against Parker Meadows. After another tentative fastball – 96 mph, above the zone, easily fouled off – Muñoz just went back to what he had. The ninth pitch of the at-bat – and the 12th slider out of 14 pitches – coerced an easy, game-ending groundout. The Mariners had won their first home postseason game in a quarter century. And though the accolades will deservedly go to Polanco, Rodríguez, and Castillo, don’t forget about Wilson and Speier. That fifth-inning decision was the axis around which the entire game turned, and Wilson’s choice to play the numbers and count on his bullpen and offense set the entire thrilling conclusion of the game into motion.