It’s surprisingly rare in baseball for a marquee pitching matchup to deliver on the promise. Today was one of those rarities as All-Stars Paul Skenes and George Kirby went punch for punch in this afternoon’s tilt in Seattle. When they both execute in a game like this, it’s the kind of competition that expands your sense of just how big the world can be.
Kirby bested Skenes over the early part of the game, with five punchouts and eight whiffs through the first two innings, to Skenes’s four Ks and nine whiffs.
The first of those two innings represented the Mariners’ best chance against Skenes, with J.P. Crawford getting a hit up the middle on his first pitch and Cal Raleigh reaching on an HBP. Jorge Polanco followed up with his 1,000th hit, a flare into center field. What happened next had a lot of moving pieces, so I’m goig to give you the video clip first.
The Mariners would challenge this play, which was upheld on review with the crew chief helpfully explaining that although Henry Davis was straddling the plate, he was not “blocking” it within the meaning of the rule because J.P. still had a clear path to slide into home. But there’s certainly a lot going on.
Davis seems to have deked J.P. by acting very casually right up until he caught the ball, not giving away that J.P. needed to slide. Sliding certainly would have been the right thing to do, though it’s important to consider just how quickly this all happened in real time. Certainly the fact that the tag nailed J.P. right in the Crawford Boxes only makes the play look worse. Randy Arozarena, in the area to bat next, was probably the one who should have been signaling for the slide. Sending J.P. from third at all was also a questionable play, but with likely limited chances against Skenes and only one out, it wasn’t completely unjustifiable. Finally, there’s the throw, which was perhaps the best I’ve ever seen not on a replay since Ichiro caught Terrance Long. Oneil Cruz managed pinpoint (Kirbyesque?) accuracy with a throw that came out at 105.2 mph, the second-fastest outfield assist since Statcast started tracking it. This play had a lot of elements that are open to passionate opinion: the send, the non-slide, the throw, the deke, the block, the challenge. All I can say for sure is that whatever your opinion of this play is, nobody agrees completely.
In any event, it left the Mariners with two on and two out, and they could not cash in.
Skenes recovered and started to catch up with Kirby in the third inning, leaving the inning with six strikeouts and 12 whiffs matching up with Kirby’s six strikeouts and ten whiffs.
He then jumped ahead of Kirby over the next two innings, which included the Pirates’ best chance against Kirby. In the fifth, they got a pair of singles, but a couple nice plays from Luke Raley and Kirby himself prevented the Pirates from getting any runs out of it. That left Kirby with six strikeouts and 14 whiffs through five innings, behind Skenes’s ten and 18.
But Kirby went out front for good after that because Skenes was pulled after that fifth inning, where Kirby pitched another 1.1 innings. Thus, Kirby ended his day with nine strikeouts and 19 whiffs to Skenes’s ten and 18. Neither walked a batter or gave up a run. Skenes allowed five hits to Kirby’s four, but added another base runner by hitting Cal on the toe. With such equivalent lines, I’m calling the match in Kirby’s favor thanks to his accruing four more of the most important counting stat for a pitcher: outs. But it was one of the best pitchers duels we’ll see all year.
And those additional innings Kirby covered that Skenes did not would turn out to matter tremendously. On just the third Mariners’ at-bat after Skenes got pulled, Randy Arozarena scraped up today’s only run, on his sixth big fly of the home stand.
Both bullpens otherwise locked the game down. The most impressive performance came from, who else, Gabe Speier. Brought in with a runner on first and having to face three batters from the right side, he started with a swinging strikeout, then got another swinging strikeout, and then, who’da thunk, a third swinging strikeout. I understand the dynamics of the game that prevent Gabe Speier from being an All-Star, but he absolutely deserves to be one. He’ll have to settle for today’s Sun Hat Award.
The dog days came early for the Mariners this year, having just completed a run of 17 games in a row, 10 of them on the road. When you factor in all the extra innings, it was functionally 18 games in 17 days. With Houston on a tear, they failed to make up ground in the division, but the team did as much as could reasonably be expected of them, winning 11 of those 17 games. The exclamation mark comes from this latest series, the first time the Mariners have ever shut out a team over an entire three-game series, or any three games in a row for that matter. The starters were particularly impressive, with Bryan Woo, Luis Castillo, and Kirby combining for 19.1 innings pitched and zero runs allowed on just nine hits and 25 strikeouts to just two walks. It’s the kind of ending that allows them, and us, to go into an off day and actually exhale.