Locked On Mariners - Daily Podcast On the Seattle Mariners - History Suggests Mariners Are Already Playing Must-Win Games

Episode Date: June 22, 2022

The Mariners actually scored runs on their way to a 8-2 blowout of the A's! Hosts Ty Dane Gonzalez and Colby Patnode recap the action, discuss why history suggests Seattle is already playing must-win games and what to expect from Wednesday night's matchup in Oakland.Be sure to follow or subscribe to Locked On Mariners wherever you prefer your podcasts! For questions and other inquiries, email: [e-mail] the show on Twitter: @LO_Mariners | @danegnzlz | @CPat11 | @InsideMarinersFor more of Ty and Colby, check out their Patreon: patreon.com/controlthezone/Sports Card InvestorDownload the Sports Card Investor App today and easily browse over 630K cards from every sport, with hundreds more added each week . Available for free in the Google Play and Apple App stores or go to sportscardinvestor.com/lockedon.LinkedInLinkedIn Jobs helps you find the candidates you want to talk to, faster. Did you know every week, nearly 40 million job seekers visit LinkedIn? Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com/LOCKEDONMLB.Blue NileMake your moment sparkle with jewelry from Bluenile.com, and LOCKED ON SPORTS listeners get $50 off purchases of $500 or more using code LOCKEDON. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Can you believe it? The Mariners actually scored runs last night and like a lot of them. Let's talk about it here on the Lockdown Mariners podcast. Colby, hit it. You are Locked on Mariners. Your daily Seattle Mariners podcast. Part of the Locked on podcast network, your team every day. What's up, everyone? Welcome to the Lockdown Mariners podcast brought to you by the sports card investor app. Welcome to the world of trading cards reimagined. Stay tuned later in the show for more information on this awesome new tool for collectors. You'll want to check out the sports card investor app. It is Wednesday, June 22nd,

2022, and thank you so much for making us your first listen of the day. We are free and available on all platforms. I am your host, Taday Gonzalez. joined as always by my co-coes, Colby Patnode. We cover the Mariners over at inside the mariners.com for Fan Nation over on the Sports Illustrated network. Be sure to follow the show on Twitter at L0 underscore Mariners. You can follow Inside the Mariners at Inside Mariners. You can follow me at Dane Gonzalez. It's D-N-Z-L-Z-L-Z and Colby at Ced PAD 11. That's C-PAT-11. Be sure to also check out our Patreon at patreon.com forward slash control the zone.

We post two additional podcasts on there every week. And if this is your first time joining us here on the Lockdown Mariners podcast, welcome to the show. If you like what you hear, give us a follow or subscribe wherever you're listening to this. And if you're watching us on YouTube, hit the subscribe button, turn on the notification bell, and give this video a thumbs up. We greatly appreciate it.

So we are going to be talking about last night's game. we're going to be talking about tonight's game. Pretty big matchup for the Mariners tonight going up against former mariner prospect, Paul Blackburn. And we're also going to be looking at teams that have had a similar or even worse record than the Mariners do right now that have gone on to make the postseason. Spoiler alert, it's not a lot. But first, let's get into last night's game.

The Mariners win eight to two over the Oakland athletics. And a lot of offense for the Mariners, clearly. Four home runs. Mariners hitters in this game. The first one, breaking the ice in this game, a solo home run by Taylor Tremel. That's his third home run of the season. And then fast forwarding to the seventh inning,

Julio Rodriguez, Jesse Winker, and A. E. E. Henio Suarez go back to back to back. You got to love it. And then on the opposite end, Marco Gonzalez goes seven strong innings. Give us up a two-run, home run. But that's all the damage against Marco. and the bullpen cruised the rest of the way and the bullpen's looking pretty fresh

for the next couple of games here in Oakland and the Mariners are going to go for the series win tonight but we'll be getting into that game a little bit later on but Colby it was just it was nice to actually see some offense from this team for once. Yeah, they decided to wait until one of the worst starting pitchers in baseball was removed from the game after tossing six innings of one-run ball

but I guess better late than never. But yeah, it was still a frustrating eight runs, believe it or not. But at the end of the day, it's eight runs. And you're not going to complain about that. And the Mariners just, I mean, destroyed the A's bullpen, which they should. The A's bullpen is not good. So good for them. It was nice to see Jesse Winker check in not only with the home run,

cadet's center field, but he also had to double earlier in the game. You know, we know better than, we know better by now than to just sit here and say, oh, well, Jesse's coming out of it, that this is the start of it. No, he's got to do this for like another three weeks before we should buy any of that. But it was still good to see. You know, it was Thai France had three hits. That was great to see him kind of get it back on track. Julio had three hits.

Jesse had a couple knocks, like I said, also walked. So Jesse was on base three times last night. And, you know, the bottom of the order came through a little bit. 7, 8, 9 all had hits. You know, Cal Raleigh, I believe, reach base four times, hit by pitch, two walks and a double. So that's nice to see. Pretty much everybody, but your middle infielders, Crawford, Frazier, and Dillamore contributed last night offensively. And that's kind of the effort it's going to take.

So hopefully we see more of this. It gets a little bit harder with Blackburn on the mound tonight. But hey, you know, Caprillion wasn't that good. And you only got two hard hit balls off of them. So maybe facing the more difficult pitcher actually doesn't matter that much. Yeah. And honestly, you know, said this on yesterday's show, maybe it even benefits the Mariners because it seems like they have more success

against good starting pitchers than bad ones for some inexplicable reason. It was a good thing that the Mariners scored as many runs as they did, because like you mentioned, there were some frustrating innings, especially there in the, I believe it was the top of the ninth, where they had bases loaded no-out, and then they recorded two quickouts there. There was like an infield pop, I forget who hit that one, and I believe Dylan Moore struck out or something after that.

And they almost left all those runners straighted. Yeah, and then Justin Upton, though, was his first RBI in a Mariners uniform, scores one run but yeah they they completely fumbled that whole opportunity but at least at that point the game was well in hand for the mariners and they hand the ball off to kin jiles in the bottom of the ninth give him a soft landing in his first game back since september 15th 2020 and of course he's undergone Tommy john surgery since then and had a right middle finger thing as well and he looked pretty good.

I used the slider 10 times out of 15 pitches. The slider has statistically been his best pitch in his career, so maybe the Mariners are having him use that more. Obviously, it's just one outing, so there isn't really a whole lot we can take from that. But maybe that's an indication that he might be using his slider a little bit more than he has, even in the past ball slider combo. But he looked good, induced a couple whiffs,

got a strike out of Sean Murray, Murphy and yeah, it was a good opportunity there to kind of get Giles in a game with really no pressure whatsoever on him in a six-run game against one of the worst offenses in baseball. So, you know, all around good vibes for the Mariners, especially with A. Eugenio Swarres going deep. And like you mentioned, Jesse Winker having a nice game. That's really nice to see. Hopefully he's starting to turn the corner a little bit here. He's had a couple of nice games over the last few days. So, and, you know, Julio, Julio doing Julio things, of course.

So we're going to be talking about, you know, what the Mariners need to do just on this road trip, because honestly, history suggests that they need to at least go 500 over the next five games to keep their postseason hopes, more or less alive, as weird as that is to say on June 22nd. But when you look at just some of the other teams, that have finished with or started the year rather with a similar record to the Mariners. It's not many, not many teams out there that have been able to climb that mountain.

So we'll be talking about that in just a moment. But real quick, a reminder of this episode of Lockdown Mariners is brought to you by the sports card investor app. And, you know, Colby and I have run a few card giveaways in the past and they've always done pretty well. also I would assume we have quite a few investors and casual card collectors tuning in to us. And we have a great new app to tell you about the sports card investor app. It is a one-stop shop for all your card collecting needs. You can check the market activity and trends for over 630,000 cards. You can see all the eBay listings and you can even make purchases right through the app.

And right now, Thai France is going through a, you know, a little bit of a slump. So you might want to check on how the market. for his carts have been impacted, and the sports card investor app will tell you all you need to know. Download the sports card investor app today available for free in the Google Play and Apple App stores, or go to sportscardinvestor.com forward slash locked on. You're listening to Lockdown, Mariners, thank you again for making us your first listen of the day, and one live NBA draft show is not enough for Locked On. So the entire NBA channel is going live on NBA draft night.

And if you have a favorite NBA team, make sure you subscribe now to their locked on YouTube channel. So you get notified when they go live on NBA draft night. So this afternoon, I wrote an article on Inside the Mariners.com, just kind of looking at the Mariners playoff odds as a whole. And I decided to look back through the wild card era, which of course started in 1995. And look at some of the teams that have started out with a similar. or even worse record than the Mariners have started this season with through their first 69 games and only two teams with a record with the same record or worse record as the Mariners at this point in time in the season have actually gone on to make the postseason. That's the 2005 Astros and the 2013 Los Angeles Dodgers, which means the Mariners are more or less going to have to go 500 on this road trip or else their playoff hopes are essentially. go into hanging the balance of them being able to accomplish something that has never been done

before. And of course, you know, this isn't a perfect way to gauge what their chances are because now we're in a, we're in a different time, quite frankly. This is the first season ever that we've had a six-team format in each league. We've had a third wildcard team in each league. So, you know, and there isn't really a filter on stathead or anything like that that can show you, exactly which teams would have made the playoffs in a six-team format. So that's something that's a little more manual that I would have to do. And there's a lot of research that would go into that. So not sure what that would look like as a whole for the last 27 years or so, which teams would actually make it in a five-team, six-team format. But yeah, only two teams, though, that have been

30 and 39 or worse through the first 69 games of the season have made the postseason. So the Mariners are at a pretty incredible disadvantage. So Colby, would you say at this point in the season, despite how early it is, the Mariners are already playing must-win games? Yeah, more or less. We talked about this, you know, last week that they had a 30-game stretch there, and they realistically needed to go at least 18 and 12, and they're right in the middle of that.

And unfortunately, things did knock it off to a good start. You went one and four against the Angels. So, no, you didn't win last night. You won two of six of those 30. And so now you're looking at it and you're going, well, we probably have to go 16 and 6 here over the next 22. 500 is not going to be good enough because at that point, what you're basically begging for is like a 12 game winning streak or winning 17 of 20.

And if you can't do that in this stretch of your schedule, you're just not going to be able to do that. So, you know, it's kind of interesting. because the Mariners are probably going to buy pieces this summer, regardless of how far back they are, because, you know, they still care about 2023. So could they get better in the second half? Sure. And, you know, it's entirely possible if they play their way out of the first half,

but in the second half, post-all start break, they look like a really good, you know, playoff contender, but they just dug themselves too big of a hole. So, yeah, these next, I think we're on game 24. now, or game seven of the 30, which means they have 24 left. They have to make some noise here. I mean, they legitimately have to go, you know, 16 and 8 or something like that. So they have to win series. Basically every series they play from here until the All-Star break, they need to win. Or they need to average a series win. So they lose a series. They got to sweep one along the way. If they get swept in two series, they got to sweep two right back. So, yeah, these are pretty much

must-win games if you're just focused on playoffs only in 2022 and you know since that's what we're talking about i'm going to assume that's that's the focus we're going to take so yeah these are these are essentially must-win games yeah uh so by the all-star break the mariners will have played 93 games and only 10 teams in the wild card era have entered uh or have played 93 games and been under 500 uh and gone on to make the postseason one of those actually be in the 1995 mariner's um but the uh the odds right now are stacked uh against the mariners in a pretty big way and so you would like to get to the all-star break above 500 um by any means necessary and to do that you would have to at least go 17 and 7 over the next 24 games so you have you just got to find ways to to win these games and

you know, we mentioned, you know, we've mentioned a couple times on this show that, you know, the schedule looks pretty favorable for them. You know, only six of these games will be against opponents with a record of, you know, or with a winning percentage at 500 or better. That's the Padres and the Blue Jays. And you play them consecutively at home on the 4th of July weekend. So, you know, there's an opportunity here for the Mariners to certainly, you know, climb this mountain, but they are more, you know, more so looking, looking up at a very, very, very, unlikely and incredibly difficult challenge to, to overcome here, something that really has, has rarely been done before in baseball. But, you know, I've always kind of felt like if the

mariners were going to, you know, when the, when the, when the mariners do in this drought, they were going to do it in the most ridiculous and toughest way possible. So, hey, maybe this is it. Maybe they do, you know, maybe they are the first team to have 43 losses through their first 74 games or whatever and go on to actually make the postseason. Who knows? And plus, you know, you got the extra playoff spot now. Some wild stuff can happen.

But, you know, just kind of looking at the overall playoff picture, it's a lot of good teams ahead of them in those wild card spots right now. Teams they're playing a pretty good ball right now, so it's going to be very difficult. They're going to need to get things going here. They're going to need to go on a stretch. They're going to need a win streak at some point. I don't think that they're going to get a 10-game, 15-game,

you know, 20-game win-streek or what have you, but they need something like a six-game, seven-game win-streek here, and then just take series the rest of the way in order to get this thing going. So hopefully, you know, tonight, is, or sorry, last night was the start of that, and they can just keep that momentum going against Paul Blackburn and the A's tonight. We're going to be talking about that in just a moment.

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And it was the Danny Valencia trade, right? I always forget because they made so many trades with the A's for first base, you know, corner and field types, right? It was the Valencia trade, right? Not the Healy or Alonzo one. Let's see. I believe so. Yeah. So, and he was, of course, acquired in the Daniel Volgobach trade when they sent Mike Montgomery to the Cubs.

So a couple fun connections there, but Blackburn's been really good this season. He might actually be an all-star for the A's. Who knows? But it's going to be a difficult, difficult task for the Mariners and they're struggling offense. And yes, I'm still going to say they are a struggling offense even after last night. One night does not change things whatsoever. George Kirby going on the bump for the Mariners tonight.

And he's been pretty good for the most part in his rookie season. Had some struggles here and there. What would you like to see out of Kirby tonight? Get ahead with the fastball. The athletics line. up is bad. I think we can just say that definitively. It's not a good lineup. It's not a good team. The one thing that's kind of working right now pretty consistently is Paul Blackburn. Even Frankie Montes is having his struggles right now. So you got to be aggressive. You got to go after it.

You can't give him free bases. You know, you can't give them cookies to hit. Like you got to, they got to earn their way on base. The one thing we saw from his last start is he started to throw the curveball a little bit more. And it was pretty good. So that might be a weapon that he goes. to again today. You know, it's going to be a pretty righty heavy lineup. In theory, it should be. So the fastball has to play. And, you know, we've seen what happens.

When the fastball, when Kirby has his best fastball, he can dominate even a good lineup. So it's going to come down to fastball control and command. Don't give up walks. Don't, you know, don't groove fastballs down the middle to try and sneak ahead. You've got to be pinpoint with that pitch early and then expand the zone. with a pretty good curveball and a changeup that's getting a little bit better. And honestly, we've seen Kirby have one really good off-speed pitch to go with his fastball, and just about every outing.

Haven't really seen it where he's had two off-speed pitches, hasn't really needed them for the most part. So maybe that's something he breaks out tonight. Maybe we see curveball slider tonight. But for Kirby and basically every starting pitcher, it's all about getting value out of the fastball, whether that be whiffs or weak contact or the ability to throw it for strikes. You got to get value out of that pitch. And I think Kirby will. Yeah.

And, you know, we know that the fastball is going to be, you know, a pretty big weapon for him as well. It's historically always been. And he's always been able to command that pretty well. So, you know, I would like to see him go up against a, you know, a bad lineup. They're 29th in Major League Baseball in WRC Plus right now. We'd like to see him attack with that fastball and challenge these guys because not a lot of guys are going to be able to do damage against him in this lineup. They're not going to be able to turn a 98 mile per hour fastball and put it over the wall,

especially in the confines of the Oakland Coliseum as well. So long as it's well located. Yeah. So, yeah. Any major leaguer can hit 95 down the middle. Yeah. So, yeah. But yeah, it's a good lineup for him to go out and kind of feast on.

see if he can take advantage of it. But he's been pretty darn impressive for a, you know, for a rookie making this will be his ninth start tonight, believe it or not. So far, a lot to like. No real huge blow-up starts. And I don't think one's coming tonight. He should give the Mariners a chance to win this game. Whether or not the offense takes advantage of that.

I don't know because basically the starting rotation has done exactly that for the last three weeks. And offense is a little hit or miss. So we'll see. But yeah, I feel pretty good about the Kirby and the things. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, I think the Mariners can count on at least being, you know, in reaching distance of a win tonight after Kirby is done.

And so it's just, it's on the offense to finish it off to push this thing across the finish line as it has been for the last few weeks, really. you know, everything really just falls on the Mariners' offense. They have to produce. And, you know, hopefully tonight, Taylor Tremel will be ahead of Justin Upton in the lineup. That is a mind-boggling decision yesterday. I just, like, man, you know, I know that they don't have too many options, but Upton should probably be hitting 8th or 9th this lineup and definitely not ahead of Tremel.

Who's starting to pick things up again after having a little bit of stuff. slump there. Nice home run yesterday. Good to see Tremel producing and good to see Cal Raleigh still producing as well. He's been hot as of late and he stayed hot. And now he's I mean he's getting closer here to a full month's worth of good quality production at the plate. So you know not all bad stuff for the Mariners and the Mariners offense right now. There are some positives. There are some reasons to be optimistic

with this team. And hopefully it all kind of starts to come together and we'll see more wins we can see them rental off some more wins here they need to they absolutely need to and hopefully you know they keep that going tonight and uh give themselves a two game win streak i will i would absolutely take it i believe this will be the or this would be only their second two game win streak since late april remember we got all excited they won two games ago two two games in a row a few weeks and then they just immediately went back to one, one, one, one, one. Yeah, let's maybe push the envelope,

and then I don't know, maybe tomorrow we actually get to three. Ooh, that's very daring. I know, but it has been done before, I promise. All right, I want to do it for our show. Thank you so much for finding us here on the lockdown Mariners podcast. For Kobe Patnode, I'm Tadinole. I'm Tad de Gonzalez. Be sure to give us a follow on Twitter at L0.

underscore Mariners. You can follow inside the Mariners. You can follow me. at Dan Gonzalez, the C-A-N-E, G-N-L-Z and Colby at C-P-A-E-L-Z and Colby at C-P-A-T-1-1. You can also find all that stuff in the description of this episode. And thank you again for making us your first listen of the day, just like you do here every day. The first picks of the Ultimate NBA mock draft have been made.

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