With their 7-2 victory over the Toronto Blue Jays on Thursday afternoon in Buffalo, the Mariners have moved a game past the numerical halfway point of the season.
From the early days of spring training when the roster seemed so incomplete thanks to a stingy free agency philosophy, in the days following the injuries to James Paxton and Kyle Lewis and in the brutal month of May when they couldn’t string together hits or score runs and seemed to always be on the verge of being no-hit, this version of the Mariners and the current success couldn’t have been envisioned by even the biggest optimist or team apologist.
In their 82nd game of the 2021 season, the Mariners got yet another solid outing from Yusei Kikuchi, who has finally blossomed into the pitcher they hoped he could be when he signed as a free agent before the 2019 season, while scoring five runs off Blue Jays’ ace Hyun Jin-Ryu to improve to 43-39 on the season.
The Mariners wrap up the six-game, two-city road trip with a 4-2 record and three-game series wins over the White Sox and Blue Jays — both teams expected to be much better than them.
Seattle heads home to open a 10-day, nine-game homestand that leads up the All-Star break, the metaphorical halfway point of the season. With T-Mobile Park fully opening to fans with no restrictions or requirements on Friday, and schools adjourned for the summer, will fans come back to see a team that has vastly outperformed expectations and projections?
The idea that this team would be four games over .500 this deep into the season, and still holding out some hope for a wild-card spot, seemed illogical given all the things mentioned above.
If you throw in the myriad other injuries, forcing key players to stints on the injured list and the resulting all-too-frequent use of bullpen starts to maintain a six-man starting rotation, and the somewhat unexpected struggles of top prospect Jarred Kelenic during his call-up and the highly unproductive starts of the season for Tom Murphy, Dylan Moore, Luis Torrens and Justus Sheffield, well, this team’s success doesn’t quite compute to typical baseball thinking or analysis.
Kikuchi is a major reason for this success. After two “seasons” of inconsistency and adjustments with his life, his mechanics, his mentality on the mound and performance, he has finally found himself as a pitcher at the MLB level.
He pitched seven innings, allowing one run on five hits with a walk and six strikeouts to improve to 6-3 on the season and lower his ERA to 3.18.
It was his fourth straight start of allowing one run or fewer and his 10th quality start (six-plus innings pitched, three runs or fewer allowed) in 15 starts this season. He’s only had two starts this season where he pitched fewer than five innings, and one of them came when he took a comebacker off his knee vs. the Angels.
His ability to pitch at least six innings and availability — never missing a scheduled start — has been vital for the Mariners, who have had to place Paxton, Marco Gonzales, Justin Dunn, Nick Margevicius and Ljay Newsom on the injured list for varying time frames in 2021 and pushed their relievers to the brink with the bullpen starts.
