HOUSTON — Baseball is a game designed to break your heart, as the former commissioner and scholar Bart Giamatti once so poignantly wrote.
Just three days earlier, in another series, another country, and what now seems another lifetime, the Mariners were on the desired side of the delirious joy that comes with pulling a preposterous win out of the ashes.
But Tuesday, in a game that was theirs for the taking, a would-be and should-be win over the Astros that would have set them up beautifully for the rest of the American League Division Series, they absorbed the biggest gut punch in franchise history.
ALDS Game 1
Astros 8, Mariners 7
And in the process, they now have roiling questions about the one area of the team that they believed they could rely on most confidently: the bullpen.
Oh, there will be second-guessing from here to eternity on Scott Servais’ decision to bring in Robbie Ray, who had struggled in his start Saturday in Toronto and been battered repeatedly this season by Houston batters. Called upon by Servais to get the 27th and final out to preserve a two-run Seattle lead — his first relief appearance since the 2020 playoffs and just the seventh of his nine-year MLB career, none in a save situation — Ray instead gave up a shocking, demoralizing and soul-crushing three-run homer to Yordan Alvarez for an 8-7 defeat.
Reliever Paul Sewald, whom Ray replaced, said: “I felt very confident Robbie was going to get him out, and I’m just as shocked as anybody that he didn’t. But it shouldn’t have gotten to Robbie. That’s how I feel. That’s the frustrating part.”
There were a multitude of frustrating parts for Seattle, but the bullpen’s inability to put away the Astros after building a 7-3 lead through seven innings will haunt them. As much as all the players talked afterward of “flushing the game” and moving on, the drawn faces and shocked looks in the clubhouse afterward gave a more accurate indication of how hard that will be.
Servais spoke afterward of being proud of how much they did right in this game. Indeed, they had a relentless offensive attack from the outset against Justin Verlander, the presumptive Cy Young Award winner, knocking him out after four innings. And they got a gutty starting effort from Logan Gilbert, who gave up three runs in 5 1/3 innings. They were on the verge of stealing a vital opening win in the best-of-five series, a matchup that had hugely favored Houston with Verlander on the mound.
When Matt Brash worked out of a jam in the sixth and Diego Castillo got through the seventh unscathed, the Mariners were set up just the way they wanted, with Andres Munoz, as overpowering as any pitcher in baseball for weeks, to work the eighth, and Paul Sewald, the Mariners’ other most vaunted high-leverage relief arm, for the ninth.
That was the blueprint; in reality, that formula has gone sour at just the wrong time. Munoz, whose slider has become a nearly unhittable weapon, gave up a two-run homer to Alex Bregman in the eighth to cut the Mariners’ lead to two. And Sewald, who had a few uncharacteristically rocky outings in September, and then was lit up for four runs in two-thirds of an inning by the Blue Jays on Saturday, couldn’t get the final three outs.
Sewald came excruciatingly close, getting to two strikes on rookie Jeremy Pena with two outs, but Pena drilled a single. Earlier, Sewald had gone 3-2 on another rookie, David Hensley, only to hit him with a pitch. Losing those two batters was a large part of Sewald’s lament, especially after he struck out the dangerous Jose Altuve for the second out.
“It’s frustrating,’’ said Sewald, who was clearly shaken and speaking softly in the silent clubhouse. “We did such a great job to get a lead, and our bullpen has been so good all year. For us not to finish is really frustrating. Yeah, it’s frustrating. We had the lead and coughed it up.”
Servais had numerous options after Pena’s hit. He could have left in Sewald to try to get out the left-handed hitting Alvarez, one of the most fearsome power bats in the league (37 homers, .613 slugging percentage). He could have called for another lefty arm with more relief experience than Ray, Matt Boyd. He could have brought in Erik Swanson, a reliable arm most of the season until struggling down the stretch. He could have walked Alvarez and instead attacked Bregman, though that would have put the tying run in scoring position. He could have brought in George Kirby, who closed out Sunday’s win but is likely slated to start Saturday in Seattle.
Instead, he went with Ray, which Servais said had been the plan he began formulating in about the seventh.
“That was something going into the series — where we were at, looking at our rotation, where we were going to head, and talking with Robbie about using him out of the bullpen as a bullet, so to speak, for that type of scenario,” Servais said. “Bringing in a lefty against Alvarez, although Alvarez is one of the better hitters in the league.
“But we talked about it coming into the series. We talked about it pregame today. I looked at it in the seventh inning and said, ‘Hey, this could happen.’ So that was the plan going in. End of the day, you have a plan, we still got to execute it.”
It was a decision that will be scrutinized and second-guessed to a degree not seen in Seattle since Seahawks coach Pete Carroll’s call for a 1-yard-line pass in the Super Bowl. The stakes weren’t quite as high, but to the Mariners they were massive. If they had won the opener, beating Verlander with their ace, Luis Castillo, up Thursday, it would have just added to their burgeoning confidence and put more than a few seeds of doubt into Houston.
Instead, the Astros now have little reason to believe that their long-standing dominance over the Mariners has waned. And the Mariners are left reeling, wondering what it will take to get past the Astros. They were set up exactly the way they wanted and still couldn’t get it done.
Astros manager Dusty Baker called it one of the most thrilling, exhilarating and satisfying victories of his long career. The Mariners, on the other hand, will be left pondering what could have been while the second-guessers have a field day.
Yes, hearts were broken Tuesday on a day they could have soared in Seattle. And now the Mariners will have to repair their bullpen, fix their psyche and hope the next swing of emotion goes their way. Alvarez might have blasted those hopes into oblivion.