'We're motivated': Julio, Mariners keep finding new ways to win

KANSAS CITY -- A tense series at Kauffman Stadium continued in an on-brand fashion on Wednesday night, with the Mariners finally pulling away to a 6-5 victory in the eighth inning by giving the pesky Royals a taste of their own medicine.

Dylan Moore scored the go-ahead run when tagging up on a flyout from Teoscar Hernández in foul territory, but he was only in position to do so by reaching on a fielding error to lead off the frame. And Julio Rodríguez pushed across a critical insurance run with an opposite-field single in the ninth to cap a season-high four-hit night and help Matt Brash get to the finish line despite surrendering a leadoff homer in his first outing since Monday’s stinging blown save.

The victory brought Seattle within one game of the third and final AL Wild Card spot behind the Blue Jays, who fell against Philadelphia earlier in the day.

“We're motivated,” said Rodríguez, who also stole his 29th and 30th bases. “We know that there is some work to do, and we know that we've got to close that out -- that it's not just going to happen, that we've got to do it. We cannot stay complacent.”

On a night where the Mariners again jumped out to an early lead only to again watch K.C. tie it, the offensive resiliency they largely lacked in the first half again proved critical.

Moore pushed them ahead by narrowly sliding head first around a tag from Royals catcher Salvador Perez that was close enough to prompt a challenge that upheld the original ruling. The utilityman was installed the inning prior as a pinch-hitter, but had the at-bat cut short when José Caballero was picked off at first base. So he led off the eighth, reached on the error, stole second base and advanced to third on a liner from Eugenio Suárez, who also had two remarkable -- and critical -- outs in the field.

“It’s foul, so I’m definitely tagging no matter what,” Moore said. “As it gets closer and closer to the barrier there, the tarp over there, it’s a little bit of a weird angle. The closer he got, the more in my mind I wanted to go. And as soon as he caught it, I just took off. No hesitation.”

Wednesday also featured just enough pitching to tally 27 outs with the lead. Luis Castillo cleared the seventh for a heavily-taxed bullpen despite laboring through diminished fastball velocity early and hard contact throughout due to locations over the plate. Gabe Speier then worked around a two-out walk and a stolen base to escape the eighth in his return to Kansas City, where he spent four seasons as a reliever.

And Brash exhaled after surrendering a towering, 386-foot homer to the No. 8 hitter Nelson Velázquez to begin his outing by retiring his next three batters in order.

As manager Scott Servais said the night prior, when they eked out a 10th-inning win, “We can screw some [stuff] up, but we don’t give up.”

The Mariners have played some bizarre games at this venue, headlined by maybe their worst loss of 2022, when they blew a nine-run lead in a 13-12 contest last Sept. 25. On Monday, they were no-hit into the seventh inning only to come back for a late lead and then squander it when Brash suffered arguably the team’s toughest blown save of the season in a walk-off. Tuesday was shaping up to be similar, when they squandered leads of 7-0 and 8-5 before Ty France broke through with a two-out, go-ahead knock to silence the alarm in a 10-8 victory.

Seattle is three games into a slate featuring 13 of 16 against teams with a losing record, but this week’s series against a club 44 games under .500 has served as a reminder that navigating an MLB schedule is never as seamless as it looks.

“It's a Major League team, they're at a high level compared to all the other 29 teams,” Castillo said of the Royals through an interpreter. “So for me, there's no easy team out there.”

Seattle’s postseason odds from FanGraphs have dipped from a season-high 43.6% after their resounding win over Baltimore last Friday to 34.8% entering Wednesday. The odds are based on calculations that blend multiple projection systems scaled with more than 10,000 simulations using the actual remaining schedule.

The remaining schedule is a key component to those odds, and the .481 opponents’ winning percentage among their final 42 games is the sixth-lowest (or “easiest”) remaining. But again, odds are just odds, which is why the Mariners must still go out and perform. And on Wednesday, they closed the door late.