George Kirby missed nearly all of Spring Training and the first six weeks of the season with shoulder inflammation, and when he returned, his first three starts looked like a guy who’d missed nearly all of Spring Training and the first six weeks of the season with shoulder inflammation. But of course, that’s not who George Kirby is. He’s an All-Star with one of the finest combinations of stuff and command in baseball. For the first time in 2025, he looked the part today, something Mariners fans have sorely missed through the rotation’s inconsistency in the first third of the season.

Kirby started off the game with two strikeouts in the first inning, getting both Zach Neto and Mike Trout to swing under high heaters at 97 mph. In the second inning, he kept the good velocity and got Taylor Ward chasing a sharp slider off the plate. Getting erstwhile Mariner Chris Taylor on another 97-mph fastball made it four strikeouts through the first five batters he’d faced. He continued the trend in the third, when he struck out another two batters, along the way collecting career strikeout number 500. It wasn’t until the fourth that the Angels finally got to him, with back-to-back 107.5-mph hits, a single from Mike Trout and a no-doubter from Taylor Ward. But even in the inning that broke up his perfecto, he still struck out the side.

Those two runs wouldn’t have felt so bad if the Mariners’ had been able to cash in more of their base runners, but with only one run on the board, it meant the Angels had taken the lead. Things started out well enough, with Julio Rodríguez immediately erasing any angst from his leaving last night’s game when he easily sprinted around the bases to score on Randy Arozarena’s first-inning double. But Julio would only get to third on Arozarena’s third-inning double. And the team started out 0 for 10 with RISP in the first three innings. Sometimes this was their fault: Julio got TOOTBLANed when he broke for home from third base on the contact play, but then changed his mind once it was too late to retreat to third. But more often, it was not their fault: Nolan Schanuel showed more hops than I knew he had to snare a J.P. Crawford line drive. Overall, this was not a failure to execute situational hitting, and more just reflective of how much traffic they were able to get on the bases in the first place. They finally broke through in the fifth, with Jorge Polanco and Donovan Solano showing signs of life and batting in the Mariners second and third runs of the day.

That gave Kirby the lead back, and it was all he’d need, as he crossed the double-digit strikeout barrier for the fourth time in his career, and tied his career-high 12 to close out the sixth inning. Having thrown just 77 pitches, I was all for sending him back out for the seventh, but it got dicey very quickly. He got away with several mistakes to Mike Trout and fell behind Taylor Ward 2-0. But he ultimately struck them both out for Ks number 13 and 14. A nice play by J.P. cemented his seven innings of two-hit, two-run ball with no walks and his career-high 14 punchouts, along, obviously, with today’s Sun Hat Award.

Kirby did it mostly with his fastball, although his slider was also excellent. Kirby maintained the premium velocity on his fastball through the whole game, and was especially effective at dotting it on and just above the top rail (notwithstanding the ones he left at the belt and below to Trout). He got eight whiffs on the sixteen swings at it, and five whiffs on the 11 swings at his tight slider. Add to that another bonus whiff on a knuckle curve (seemingly just for fun), and twenty-three called strikes, and you’ve got the makings of a gem.

His 14 punchies are the most by a Mariner since James Paxton got 16 A’s in May 2018. King Felix also had a 15 strikeout game in 2014, but other than that, you have to go back to the Twentieth Century. Add zero walks into the equation, and you’ve got just four outings in franchise history: two from Randy Johnson and one from Mark Langston. Replace the zero walks criterion with two or fewer hits, and this is just the sixth start in the Mariners’ five decades with at least 14 strikeouts. The other five belong to Randy Johnson, with one of them also occurring on June 8.

The gaudy totals put him on the leaderboards, but in my personal view, the home run and weak opponent keep this start from matching Kirby’s best starts: his CGSO(ish) against Baltimore in 2023, his 12 Ks and two hits against Arizona last summer, and his seven unbelievably high-leverage innings against Houston in Game 3 of the ALDS. But make no mistake, this start was not merely a return to form for George Kirby, but one of the finest outings of his career. Matt Brash and Andrés Muñoz preserved the one-run lead, and I always love seeing the two of them in the same game as George Kirby because it shows off two different ways to succeed with a great fastball and slider combination. Brash and Muñoz’s version is flashier, but it was Kirby’s version that was impossible to look away from today. With his having reached midseason form, that version looks to once again be appointment viewing for the rest of the summer.