The Mariners head to the Lone Star State in their attempt to bounce back from losing two very winnable games in a row. They\u2019ll hand the ball back to their Opening Day starter, Logan Gilbert, who has looked better than he did last season but still shakier than he did in 2023-24.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m increasingly concerned about Gilbert\u2019s slider, which probably warrants its own article. It was his best pitch for about two and a half seasons, but collapsed last year despite having a pretty similar shape. It lost about one mph of velocity, but that shouldn\u2019t be that big a deal, especially for a breaking ball. Yet it started losing its bite, in a way that\u2019s both been hard to for me to articulate and without an obvious cause. (Hence why I haven\u2019t written about it.)<\/p>\n
He\u2019s added some additional drop to it this year, which is a smart idea because with the new cutter, he risks simply having his pitches all blend together. But it still looks more hittable to me. Anyway, this is what I\u2019ll be watching most closely from his start tonight.<\/p>\n
His opponent will be Jacob deGrom, baseball\u2019s most boring star\u2014which is a highly competitive category. Both deGrom and Gilbert attended Stetson College. They\u2019ve never faced off before, nor did either of them ever face Corey Kluber, the other most notable Hatter. So all TV sets in St. Petersberg will be locked in to this game.<\/p>\n
We can all breathe a sigh of relief as Brendan Donovan is back in the lineup today. Presumably in an effort to let J.P. Crawford ease into things a little bit post-injury and because he missed the back half of Spring Training, Leo Rivas will be at shortstop.<\/p>\n
Looking at the Rangers lineup, I\u2019m reminded that for as much as it still feels like the same iteration of the organization, the Rangers have actually experienced a substantial amount of turnover in their roster since their 2023 title run. I enjoy how the Rangers\u2019 social team stretched out the photo of deGrom here to make him look taller\u2014baseballs are not shaped like that. Fraudsters all the way down over there.<\/p>\n
First Pitch: 5:05 PDT
TV: Mariners TV
Radio: Old reliable<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Mariners head to the Lone Star State in their attempt to bounce back from losing two very…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":667260,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2392],"tags":[5,620,4,619,65,77143,38422,3235],"class_list":["post-667259","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-seattle-mariners","tag-baseball","tag-mariners","tag-mlb","tag-seattle","tag-seattle-mariners","tag-seattle-mariners-discussion","tag-seattle-mariners-game-threads","tag-seattlemariners"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116360357678772804","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/667259","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=667259"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/667259\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/667260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=667259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=667259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=667259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}