Well, that was a bad game, but at least it was also long.

The Mariners reshuffled their rotation to have Logan Evans make this start instead of against the Phillies, and while that is probably a good idea on paper, it didn’t work out in practice. 90s kid alert: did you ever play the game Thin Ice? Players take turns placing wet marbles on a tissue and the person who puts the marble that breaks the tissue loses the game. (What do you mean, this is not at all a foundational mental trope of mine.) Today Logan Evans played his own game of Thin Ice with the Orioles, walking hitters and tossing wild pitches, until the Orioles finally broke through in the fourth inning for a lead that would prove insurmountable for the Mariners, despite a half-hearted post-rain-delay comeback. But on the bright side, the game started at 10 AM PT and didn’t end until 3 PM PT, so at least it also occupied the better part of the day in addition to resulting in a loss. Thin ice, indeed.

Despite falling behind hitters and struggling with his command, Evans was able to navigate around trouble thanks to a few well-timed double plays. But the ice finally broke in the fourth inning: Evans walked his leadoff hitter for the third inning in a row, but this time couldn’t get a bacon-saving double play, instead losing the handle on a changeup to allow the Orioles to score their first run on a wild pitch. It was a particularly inelegant way to let the run score, with Evans crashing into home plate and apparently dealing himself some physical damage in addition to the mental damage. The Orioles scored another run without a hit on a double steal where Ryan Mountcastle was able to get around Mitch Garver’s tag at home, and another on a single from Jeremiah Jackson, meaning both walks Evans issued in the inning came around to score. This is the key with Evans: he walks such a narrow line of success because he doesn’t strike anyone out, so he absolutely cannot afford the kind of command lapses seen today.

Not that he got help from his offense. The Mariners bats have wilted in the sticky, humid Baltimore heat, with no sign of the team that went 9-1 on their homestand, and that continued today. Dominic Canzone provided most of the Mariners’ threat on offense in the first half of the game, with a nine-pitch walk against Orioles starter Tomoyuki Sugano in the second (he was stranded) and a leadoff ground-rule double in the fifth (stranded again). The Mariners did put some pitches on Sugano early, taking advantage of some shaky command, but allowed him to fall into a rhythm later on, making quick, weak-contact outs.

The Mariners went to the bullpen in the fifth, earlier than ideal, but necessary considering Evans’s shaky performance and the fact that he banged up his pitching hand pretty badly on the play at the plate after the wild pitch. Unfortunately, if you were hoping for a sharper pitching performance, those hopes were quickly dashed by Carlos Vargas, who also struggled with commanding the zone, walking and hitting a batter. Gunnar Henderson doubled to push the Orioles’ lead out to 4-0, and suddenly the skies opened up, absolutely drenching everyone on the field. A sac fly brought in another run to make it 5-0. A pitch timer violation in a full count meant another walk. The rain kept coming down. Around the Northwest, people turned the volume on 710 down and the volume on their Zoom calls back up. The rain rained on.

In a final insult, the rain came down even more heavily in the sixth and the umpiring crew dilly-dallied in calling it, postponing getting the tarp on the field, ensuring everything was good and sodden. I know we say it a lot around here, but teams that don’t have roofs should have to pay some penalty for pain and suffering visited upon opposing teams who have to rearrange their whole schedules to adjust to non-climate-controlled life.

Total time for the rain delay: two hours, eighteen minutes. If you can watch the entirety of Joker 2: Folie à Deux in a rain delay, the rain delay is too. long. Fix it, Manfred, since you’re so obsessed with the runtime of your product. (To be fair, Joker 2 is one minute longer than the rain delay. I’m sure you would miss a crucial plot point by missing even a minute of that movie. Personally, I might rather stare at the tarp on the field.)

Anyway, the Orioles finally had to sit down their starter Sugano, and Julio Rodríguez immediately took advantage of the opportunity against new reliever Rico Garcia.

But that one swing represents most of the offense the Mariners could muster against a Baltimore bullpen that’s lacking most of its impact arms right now. In the seventh, a one-out single by J.P. Crawford and a two-out walk by Randy Arozarena were squandered against Keegan Akin, who also shut the Mariners down last night. In the eighth, they went down harmlessly 1-2-3 against [checks notes] Kade Strowd.

The Mariners had their best shot of the day in the top of the ninth facing veteran reliever Dietrich Enns. Canzone, once again the offensive hero, led off with a single, followed by a single by Mitch Garver, which felt deserved because he’d had some tough calls against him in his last at-bat. J.P. Crawford flew out, though, marking one precious out. Dan Wilson summoned Cal Raleigh away from his off-day Barcalounger to pinch-hit as the tying run—sorry Cal, there will be time to rest at the holidays, may your Thanksgiving plate be plentiful and your cup of eggnog very full and let everyone wait on you hand and foot all winter long—and Cal smartly worked a walk to load the bases with just one out. Randy Arozarena grounded into a force out that was alllllllmost a double play, drawing the Mariners a run closer, but Josh Naylor—playing in his worst game as a Mariner so far—went after the first pitch he saw for an easy groundout.

Boo, and also blah, and also blech. Why the lowly Orioles have been a stumbling block all season for the Mariners truly boggles the mind, and it’s going to be really frustrating to watch if they roll back over against the Astros, who they play in seven of their next nine games. Hopefully the Mariners will find their bats on the way to the bright lights of the big city, because this road trip is already—maybe due to the heat and humidity—on thin ice.