The proverbial “lights-out bullpen” is the desire of every Major League Baseball playoff team. Yet it doesn’t take much for the indicator lights on the dashboard to start blinking.
The Seattle Mariners found this out in Game 4 of their American League Division Series when they bumped up against the two f-words of postseason relief.
Familiarity. And fatigue.
They were up three runs and just 15 outs from dispatching the Detroit Tigers and claiming the first spot in the AL Championship Series when the diminishing returns of relief pitching reared its head.
Detroit struck for seven runs over two innings against Gabe Speier and Eduard Bazardo, who’d been near-perfect in the first three games of the series, to salvage its season and send both teams winging it back to Seattle for a decisive Game 5.
Where presumed Cy Young Award winner Tarik Skubal will await the Mariners.
That’s how quickly these things can turn: From comfortable lead and bullpen security blankets to lightning striking, the Tigers evening the series with a 9-3 victory that squares this ALDS 2-2.
And to think the Mariners nearly rocked these Tigers to sleep.
Comerica Park was a funeral parlor into the bottom of the fifth, with Mariners right-hander Bryce Miller outkicking his 2025 statistics to allow just two hits through four innings. Then things got loud – and unsuspecting fans were about to see nine unanswered runs on the board.
Dillon Dingler’s double scored Spencer Torkelson, who’d singled. It was 3-1. Dan Wilson, in his first full season as manager, prudently hooked Miller for the lefty Speier – only to get outflanked by his counterpart.
Sure, Speier had seen eight Tigers hitters in this series – and retired all eight of them, striking out four. But increased exposure brings adversity for even the more immortal pitchers.
‘There are no secrets,’ says Tigers manager A.J. Hinch, ‘when you get this deep into a series.’
And Speier suddenly looked like a mere mortal.
Hinch threw up righty-swinging Jahmai Jones to pinch-hit in Parker Meadows’ place, and he hooked an RBI double down the left field line. A 3-2 game.
No. 9 hitter Javy Baez reawakened the echoes of 2016 with a solid single to plate Jones. A 3-3 game.
Speier worked around a Baez stolen base, got a groundout, issued an intentional walk to Gleyber Torres and escaped the jam with the score tied.
That should have been it.
But Wilson opted to bring back Speier, despite having to sit down and run back out there, despite the familiarity that Greene might enjoy, having seen Speier twice already this series.
“Just trying to get it to the next guy. Just trying to get on base for the guys behind me,” the ever-humble Greene, 2 for 14 with no extra-base hits in the series before that at-bat, said after the game.
He did much more – clouting a Speier slider 454 feet into the right field seats. Suddenly, the Tigers had a lead for the first time since the 11th inning of Game 1.
Hey, no worries. Wilson simply turned to Eduard Bazardo, who’d pitched in Games 1, 2 and 3, who’d recorded seven outs and gave up just one hit.
Wilson was asked after the game if he was concerned that the Tigers had seen Speier twice and Bazardo three times before Game 4.
‘These guys have thrown the ball so well, and I don’t think that’s a risk,’ says Wilson. ‘These guys have done the job and thrown the ball extremely well, and today they just – they were able to get to us.’
The Tigers rocked Bazardo for four hits, including a Baez home run, fattening the lead and ensuring they’d only need closer Will Vest for one, not two innings.
Game 5?
Well, they’ll all have a day off as they hop from the D to the Pacific Northwest. The arms should ostensibly be rested. Skubal will be breathing fire, still stinging from his Game 2 loss.
The Mariners? They can only hope one more game of familiarity doesn’t set off the fireworks in Detroit’s lineup.