Tonight’s game was an exercise in learning to celebrate individual accomplishments even when the overall result doesn’t go your way. Tonight, from a wanting to win games standpoint, was bad; but tonight, from a “wanting every player who is a long-term member of the Seattle Mariners to succeed” was better. Not perfect, obviously—otherwise they would have actually, you know, won the game—but better.
The goal tonight, per Scott Servais, was to get Yusei Kikuchi in the zone with his good velo early on, and Kikuchi answered that call immediately. He struck out the first batter he saw, Austin Slater, on 97, and two batters later left Donovan Solano staring at a slider high in the zone for a called strike three.