This was a sleepy slobber-knocking. A stress-free stomping. A yawning you-just-got-knocked-out. The Seattle Mariners came into Fenway Park and delivered brunch-time beatdown on the boys from Beantown from beginning to bottom nine, and it was beautiful.
One night after Yusei Kikuchi labored through five innings in the chilly New England air, Chris Flexen wove a web of well-located funk across the zone for seven innings, with an economical 88 pitches and showing few signs of tiring. He wasn’t impeccable, starting barely half his hitters off with strikes, but his work around those early holes was all the more impresive, with 61 strikes total and 10(!