It’s increasingly funny to me that I opened the year with a post about dismissing past narratives. Because all we’ve really got are past narratives.

Which one do you want? One-Run Magic? Julio the Savior? Power Outage at T-Mobile?

Let’s go with that last one because while this was a classic 2-1 win in which Tyler Soderstrom’s attempt to single-handedly defeat us as the new Kevin Maas with yet another bounce-off-the-yellow-line wall-topper for the A’s in the 4th was thwarted by Julio’s upper-deck tank in the 6th (estimated to go 5,280 feet, approximately) with, mercifully, Victor Robles aboard. It was just in time for the brilliant Bryan Woo to get credited with a win for his quality start and we had some (very small) happy totals to discuss at game’s end.

Meanwhile, the Yankees have hauled out possibly illegal bats to absolutely set the baseball world on fire with a weekend series in which they scored 476 runs, all of them on homers. They are using our beloved erstwhile announcer to celebrate each one, with his co-broadcaster even razzing the Mariners from afar. But of course, it was unseasonably hot in New York this weekend, the right field porch is about 12 feet from home (at least two home run calls began with “a high pop-up…”), and many of the moonshots cleared the wall by a row or two.

Contrast that with this:

The hard truth of today’s game is that while it was a relieving and entertaining 1-run squeaker that fuels narratives of Mariner hitting ineptitude, we would have clocked about 5 homers if this exact game had been played in the Bronx and won one of those satisfying afternoon slugfests that more casual fans adore. Garver’s definitely should have gone out, yes, but JP Crawford and Randy Arozarena also hit warning track shots that sounded like they were gone off the bat. I switched to radio halfway through, so I missed some of the exact locations of loud outs, but overall, there’s no question that park factors (a windy coldish March day in a Seattle park already known for holding balls in the yard) made a huge difference in the look, feel, and final line of this one.

And a lot of folks online say “no excuses!” in demanding that the Mariners be better. They point out what former Mariners Eugenio Suarez and Teoscar Hernandez did in their opening weekends (in Phoenix and LA, respectively, essentially still in Spring Training conditions in much hitter-friendlier parks to boot) and lament that the Mariners can’t evaluate talent and squander it when they have it. We all know (or should) that Geno and Teo would have had a lot of warning-track flyouts in Seattle this weekend and Randy and JP would have both hit multiple dingers. That’s just the nature of a capricious game played outdoors on unique fields in multiple climates across our wide and diverse nation.

What is to be done with this information? Ideally, we’d take a whole different approach at our home ballpark. But that’s not really possible. Baseball is streaky and momentum-driven and changing the whole swing structure for home vs. road is both ill-advised and infeasible. And while I would love for us to build our roster around the Ryan Bliss (or Ichiro) model of crafty on-base speedsters who go from first to third before you realize they reached base, today’s game is built on the longball and OPS and nothing’s going to change that. JP Crawford shouldn’t even be swinging for the fences at all, but in 2023, Driveline helped him shift his game for power because that’s what 2020s baseball demands. His 3 long flyouts this series could have been line-drive base hits with a different approach in a different era. Instead, he’s sitting on .091 after this series and feeling like a failure.

And it’s hard to look at this series objectively and understand that we won the games where we homered and we lost the ones we didn’t (and noting that the A’s hit 7 homers over 4 games in our notorious park, 3 from Soderstrom alone, so it’s not impossible even though most of them tagged the yellow line or cleared it by a foot) and say that dingers don’t matter. I really believe that they shouldn’t, and they don’t as much as their reputation, but if the Mariners are going to hoist a trophy this decade, they need to have the longball as part of the package. It made the difference today, despite T-Mobile’s best effort to neutralize it.

It is tempting to say that we should burn down T-Mobile (figuratively) and turn it into New New Yankee Stadium. Lower the walls, bring them in 30 feet, make the roof permanent. But doing so is not in our interests. We’ve built the team around pitching and defense and it’s working for us. And despite the narrative borne of frustrating games like Saturday’s, we’re actually a great home team.

Do just enough to outscore your opponents at home is a winning formula for the Mariners. In the current Fun Differential Renaissance (2021-??), in which the Mariners have contended for the entire season for four years and broken their playoff drought, the M’s are 188-140 at home with a +95 run differential.

I’ll say that again:

Since the start of 2021, the Mariners have a .573 winning percentage in T-Mobile and have outscored their opponents by 95 runs.

So our ballpark isn’t the problem. Our lack of offense isn’t actually the problem. .573 over a season is 93 wins, by the way, enough to never miss the playoffs in today’s format. We just need to play more consistently on the road. (And yes, most teams win more at home than on the road, but that’s not our reputation if you listen to Mariners Twitter.)

Just for a last positive note, we’re hardly set for our bullpen right now, but the Santos-Thornton-Munoz 7-8-9 in this game was dynamite, posting a line of 3.0 scoreless innings, 1 hit, 1 walk, and 3 Ks. (Of course the hit was to Soderstrom, who leaves Seattle with a 1.633 OPS.) We’re all awaiting the triumphant return of Matt Brash, but the formula of QS plus that bullpen is going to pile up a lot of wins.

Especially as the weather warms up.

Mariners Stats:
Comeback Wins: 2
Comeback Losses: 1
Wire-to-Wire Losses: 1

Multi-Homer Games: 1-0
Single-Homer Games: 1-0
No-Homer Games: 0-2

One-Run Games: 1-0

Personal Stats:
Watched on TV: 1-2
Mixed TV/Radio: 1-0