TORONTO — Necessity is the mother of intention.
The Mariners did not want to ask Bryce Miller to pitch on three days of rest for the first time in his professional life. They to do it after using a small village of pitchers to cover 45 outs Friday night to advance to the American League Championship Series.
Three days of rest is the gas station sushi of the pitching world: best to be avoided. When it’s not, the outcome is probably going to be dyspeptic. Starters on three days of rest in the wild card era were 54–73 (.425) entering ALCS Game 1 on Sunday at Rogers Centre.
It’s especially true in the modern game of rest and recovery, when most starts are made on five days of rest, not four. Miller had made 51 of his 75 career starts with at least five days.
Only knowing that do you begin to understand the beauty of what Miller did in Game 1. After a wobbly start in which all-world catcher Cal Raleigh once again rescued one of his pitchers from a burning building, Miller pitched the game of his life.
In the toughest building in the American League for a visiting team to win, against a lineup scoring nine runs per game in the postseason, Miller allowed one run (none after his first pitch) over six of the most aggressive innings you will ever see pitched in a hostile, high-stakes environment. He threw first-pitch strikes to 18 of his 23 batters, including 14 in a row at one point.
“Here it is, hit it,” Miller practically shouted at the Blue Jays. They could not.
Miller and the Mariners won Game 1, 3–1, in what was such a statement game full of conviction that Seattle reliever Matt Brash said, “Getting those six innings from Bryce is series-changing. It was huge.”
Since Patrick Corbin of the Nationals did it in the 2019 World Series, Miller became the first of 180 postseason starters on short rest to go six innings.
The Mariners have the most aggressive pitching staff in the league. They throw more first-pitch strikes, more strikes overall and more pitches ahead of the count than any other AL team. “Count is king” is their mantra. But this? This was the kind of sharpshooting that gets someone banned from a carnival shooting gallery for being too good and cleaning out the supply of plushies.
Seattle throttled the hottest lineup in baseball by throwing 78% first-pitch strikes (25 of 32) and only 100 pitches to get its 27 outs. No team had won a postseason game with so few pitches since the Dodgers beat the Braves in Game 2 of the 2018 NLDS behind Clayton Kershaw and Kenley Jansen. To find the last time a team won so efficiently on the road, you must go all the way back 19 years, when Oakland beat Minnesota in 2006 ALDS Game 1 behind Barry Zito and Huston Street.
“This is what we do,” said Mariners pitcher Bryan Woo, part of the same 2021 draft class in which Seattle also snagged Miller. “It’s been preached to us from Day 1. It’s in our DNA.”
Miller’s midseason adjustmeant bearing fruit
Miller would seem an unlikely candidate to break the bad three-days vibe, not just because he was in uncharted waters but because the guy had a 5.73 ERA when he went on the IL in June for a second time because of a painful bone spur in his elbow.
It was during his hiatus, and as he rehabbed his way back, that the Mariners fixed an issue as troubling as the bone spur. Miller was tipping his pitches. Miller would hold the ball near his belt as he started his delivery and then would keep it there as he went into his leg kick. The Mariners’ staff discovered he was giving away pitches by the angle of the flange of his glove. A secondary concern with his static hand position was that it made it difficult for him to control the running game. Base stealers were 10 out of 13 against him.
Pitching coach Pete Woodworth and his run prevention crew came up with a solution. As Miller began his delivery, instead of leaving his hands at the belt he would raise and lower them in sync with his leg kick.
“Making adjustments like that can be difficult in the middle of the season,” Woodworth said. “In this case because he was working his way back, we had the time to do it in an environment without the same pressure. The other thing is that Bryce is somebody that when you suggest a change, whether it’s mechanical or something about pitch shapes, he makes adjustments very quickly.”
It worked. Miller has a 2.61 ERA this postseason in two starts. His velocity has increased from 94.5 mph before the change to 96.1 this postseason. Teams have stopped running on him (only four steals in 10 starts since the change).
Still, everything looked like it would go haywire when George Springer blasted Miller’s first pitch for a home run. Miller walked two of the next three batters. Rogers Centre was jumping. That’s when the fire alarm went off in Raleigh’s head.
Raleigh’s cool head ices out Blue Jays
The potential AL MVP called timeout. He flipped his mask atop his helmet and took the slowest walk possible to the mound. His gait was the picture of calmness, a slow moving Zen practitioner. His conversation with Miller in the middle of the mayhem was equally a display of equanimity for the purpose of one person, Miller.
Woodworth, as he almost always does, did not hurry to join the mound meeting, as most pitching coaches like to do since mound visits are capped. Why?
“Because this is Cal’s team,” Woodworth said. “I never question anything he does. I trust him completely. I don’t even know what he told him. I just know it was the right thing. It always is with Cal.”
Said Miller, “He usually doesn't have much to say. Sometimes he thinks he has jokes, and I give him a courtesy laugh, a little chuckle, and settle back down and keep going.
“No, he’s always really good with timing, when to come out and when he knows that we need to slow down and get us back in the zone. I don’t remember the convo at all, but I’m sure that’s how it went.”
Turtle-like, especially in his greenish catcher’s gear, Raleigh returned to his office behind the plate. Six pitches later, the Mariners were back in the dugout. The Blue Jays were done. Starting with Cal’s mindfulness session on the mound, Seattle pitchers set down 26 of the final 28 batters.
It was just another night among the scores of nights when Raleigh wins games in so many ways. He also chipped in a game-tying homer, his 62nd on the year. He joined Babe Ruth (1927) and Aaron Judge (2022) as the only hitters with multiple homers in the postseason after 60 in the regular season.
This homer was his fourth in just 17 at-bats against Blue Jays ace Kevin Gausman and his ninth in 14 games at Rogers Centre. Nobody had hit one of Gausman’s wicked splitters for a homer since Aug. 13, covering the last 359 of them. Over this at-bat and the previous one, Gausman threw nine splitters out of 10 pitches to Raleigh. Raleigh is too good of a hitter to see a conveyor belt of pitches like that. He crushed the ninth.
When Gausman then walked Julio Rodríguez, Blue Jays manager John Schneider pulled Gausman, who had thrown just 76 pitches. It reeked of an overreaction. Sure, the bullpen was rested. But why pull your ace so quickly? The decision blew up on Schneider when Brandon Little threw a wild pitch and then served up a run-scoring single to Jorge Polanco. The Blue Jays have made a routine of coming back at teams, especially at a raucous Rogers Centre, but there would be no more runs and no more electricity on this night—not against this staff.
Before the bottom of the ninth inning, as Seattle closer Andrés Muñoz warmed, Raleigh, knowing Vlad Guerrero was leading off for Toronto, went up to Woodworth and said, “Hey, let me run something by you. I’m thinking …” Raleigh had designs of attacking Guerrero, a great fastball hitter, with heaters rather than Muñoz’s best pitch, his slider, which is the toughest pitch to hit in baseball.
Woodworth stopped Raleigh and told him to go with whatever he thought was best.
“With Cal,” Woodworth said, “there is no second-guessing. It’s his team.”
Muñoz missed with a fastball and came back with another fastball. It was right down the middle. Guerrero took it for a strike. Muñoz retired him on a grounder with a slider. He closed the game to get Miller his well-earned win.
“Everything felt really good, really fresh,” Miller said. “I was getting ahead, attacking. And it’s a recipe for success.”
It is the Mariners’ recipe, and it is not a secret sauce. They have a staff loaded with elite movers with outlier fastballs and a catcher who calls pitches and runs games with the total trust of those around him.
Think of what the Mariners just accomplished. They played five hours Friday night, flew more than 2,000 miles after a two-hour ground delay Saturday, fell behind 1–0 to the league’s best home team and won the game to take away Toronto’s home field advantage. The most intentional pitching staff in baseball opened the ALCS with a convincing statement.