Julio turns on the Joy Machine: Mariners win 5:4

I watched an interview with Stephen Colbert where he talked about how he runs his show like a “joy machine.” Colbert is aware of how arduous producing a nightly comedy show can be and encourages his staff to be determined, collaborative and, most of all, joyful. On a Canadian television show, he said:

“…The only way to tackle something really difficult is with joy, because if you don't tackle it with joy, it's just a machine. And it will wear you down. And the lesson I learned from that is: doing something with joy doesn't make it easier, it just makes it better. And it also makes it communal – that we're all doing it together. When you're working in fear or distress, you often feel alone. But jokes, laughter, humor, joy, whatever you want to call it, it connects people.”

That notion has stuck with me through bad and soul-sapping jobs and better ones and ones that were just plain boring, through days when I felt caught up in a Talking Heads song and days when even putting my feet on the floor in the morning felt like an insurmountable challenge. That's been on my mind lately, especially in the stress of a season, especially in the stress of this particular season. Many hands make the work hard, but many happy hearts make the work worth doing.

At its best, a baseball team is also a joy machine. It's tough, but it's also a collaborative process, night after night. Everyone—from the team on the field to the front office to the ushers to the fans—brings their talents to the final product, including what Colbert calls “the uninvited value”: the little extra that makes the whole more than the sum of its parts, the magic ingredient. In a comedy show, it might be a great idea for a common thread that makes the whole not just funny, but so funny that you laugh until your stomach hurts, look it up on YouTube tomorrow and send it to the group chat. On a baseball team, it might be a lightning rod of a player who turns the game around with a great hit, or a game-winning RBI. There are nine players on the lineup who could add value at any time; any moment could erupt into joyous chaos.

But that's not how the Seattle Mariners have operated this season. The magic of 2022 seems long gone, as night after night the team delivers a lackluster offensive performance and stays in games thanks to superior starting pitchers. There is no joy, just machine.

Not that pitching hasn't done its part to keep the ailing 2024 Mariners machine running. Tonight, however, the Mariners were literally without their rock, as Luis Castillo missed his first start as a Mariner due to a hamstring strain. Emerson Hancock started in his place, giving a little insight into how bad this team's record would be if they didn't have that otherworldly rotation they've enjoyed so much.

This is no insult to Emerson Hancock, who was exactly what a sixth starter should be tonight: He got into trouble in the first inning, partly of his own making, as he hit a batter, fell behind and left some pitches where he shouldn't have put them. But he also had some bad luck with some weakly hit ground balls that went into holes and a ball that was ruled a base hit but that Luke Raley should have played at first base. Still, Hancock controlled the damage, limiting it to two runs, and allowed just one more run in five innings, a solo home run by Wyatt Langford in the fourth inning after a changeup that Hancock mistakenly left on the plate.

That being said, watching Hancock was one of the more entertaining parts of the game for me, especially once he settled down and started attacking the strike zone with more conviction. He set a new career high with 14 whiffs, collected five strikeouts, and threw plenty of strikes on the first pitch. I'm not sure if Hancock has settled into Joy well yet as he continues to fight for a major league spot, but he definitely doesn't live in the grind. It's obvious how much he wants to succeed at this level, and it's hard not to cheer him on as the underdog of this rotation, even though he was the highest pick ever the Mariners had during the Dipoto era.

Hancock was clearly the underdog in this battle, facing the Rangers star making his season debut, the beautiful but fragile spider-web named Jacob deGrom. The Mariners had a little more pressure against deGrom in the fourth inning when he finally reached his 60-pitch limit. Luke Raley hit a one-out double and Justin Turner put runners on the corners with a single, but deGrom was able to get Jorge Polanco out of the game before he reached his pitch limit, meaning the new left-hander on the mound, Walter Pennington, only had to get JP Crawford to take the team out of the game with no damage. Crawford made the full count but rolled over a grounder to end the inning with no damage.

The Mariners got their revenge when Langford hit a home run in the next inning (which gave the Rangers four solo home runs at that point; the Mariners had no home runs, solo or otherwise). In the sixth inning, Trent Thornton and Taylor Saucedo couldn't stop the Rangers from scoring, allowing them to score a decisive fourth run.

This, in turn, came back to haunt the Mariners, as in the seventh inning the offense finally managed to wring a few runs out of the Rangers bullpen. Jose Ureña struck out his second batter of the game, and Victor Robles had to once again pull out his fainting couch and be carried to first base by a team of snow-white stallions, as is customary. Julio Rodríguez, who had already had his second hit of the day, almost gave the Mariners the home run total by sending Leody Taveras into a Tasmanian devil-like spin on the wall, moving Robles to third base; he later scampered home on a sacrifice fly by Cal Raleigh. Randy Arozarena then hit home the Mariners' second run of the game, sending a lively crowd of nearly 33,000 into a frenzy of cheers, because the one thing Seattle fans have always brought, the element that is always present in the Joy Machine, is a dedicated and passionate fan base. The machine may give up in the middle of a mountain pass and send the crowd tumbling over the edge, but the fans will scream the entire ride.

The Mariners had at least come close enough for the Rangers to apply pressure in the home stretch when Jose LeClerc stepped in for Ureña for the last out of the seventh inning and David Robertson scored the eighth inning.

The Mariners' offensive machine may be flawed, but the Rangers' bullpen machine is a cardboard box with gears on it, and tonight the offense capitalized on that. With one out, JP Crawford hit a small fly ball into the Bermuda Triangle in left field, allowing an exit velocity of over 70 to go in the Mariners' favor for once. Robertson then lost all sense of the strike zone against Josh Rojas and walked him after five pitches, but Victor Robles flew out for the second out of the inning, bringing in Julio Rodríguez, who already had three hits on the night. The Rangers opted to throw to right-hander Julio rather than face Cal Raleigh, who was batting from left, and with the score tied at 1-1, Julio made them pay for that decision by sending a ball to Mount Zunino:

Andrés Muñoz, now ahead, had the ninth and began by striking out Marcus Semien at 98 mph. Then Jose Lowe hit 99 mph on the first pitch he saw, probably thinking he would foul off a pitch harmlessly, but BAH GOD THAT'S RANDY'S MUSIC as Arozarena swooped in from left to make an improbable catch, sending the crowd into a frothing roar. Lots of hands and joyous work.

Muñoz made it quick after that, letting Langford fly out gently on the second pitch of the at-bat, reaching for a slider he probably should have left alone, but the power of the City Connects jerseys (now 13-1) forced him to strike. Also of note: After losing 4-5 last night, the Mariners won 5-4 tonight, getting their magic five-run total (now 50-4 in these games). Friday the thirteenth, Schmiday the Schmir-tenth.

But let’s go back to Julio for a moment.

It's hard to talk about joy without drifting into talk of the divine, thereby violating one of the site's cardinal rules, but bear with me for a moment. There's a reason joy is so often associated with front-yard religion, and that's because joy requires faith – faith that things will get better and that there is a reason for joy, whether you find that source in this world or the next. Colbert, a devout Catholic, has a sign taped to his office that reads, “Joy is the surest sign of the existence of God.” His own relationship with joy is interesting to consider; Colbert suffered unimaginable tragedy at a young age when he lost his father and his two brothers, who were closest to him in age, in a plane crash at age 10, which led him to comedy as an outlet for his pain. Especially in the beginning, it served as a defense mechanism: the kind of comedy that made people uncomfortable, or what he described to GQ as a toxic vapor, something you could inhale a little bit of and know it wouldn't kill you, like a microdose of arsenic: “Going through life Rasputin-like.”

I often think about the Mariners about how defensive you are when you're tied to a team that has so often disappointed: You swallow the poison before you can force it down your throat. You Rasputinize it game after game, 162 games a year, over and over again. It's an uphill battle, and not usually a joyful one. But Julio reminds us that any machine can be a joy machine; you just have to flip the switch. Or rather, as Colbert would say, it takes many hands working together to flip it as one.