Seattle Mariners
Everybody remembers the Seattle Mariners’ melee with the Los Angeles Angels last season, but that wasn’t the first time the M’s cleared the benches with an AL West rival in 2022.
The other team Seattle squared off against is the same one it renewed its beef with Sunday afternoon at T-Mobile Park.
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The Mariners and the defending World Series champion Houston Astros had a brief and luckily tame interaction in the bottom of the fourth inning Sunday after rookie Seattle second baseman José Caballero and veteran Houston catcher Martín Maldonado got in each other’s face in the middle of a Caballero plate appearance.
Once order was restored, and it didn’t take long as the M’s and Astros didn’t exchange any physicality, warnings were issued to both dugouts.
So what happened? There was a lot of initial confusion about what made tempers flare, but Mariners reporter Daniel Kramer of MLB.com has the most likely scenario. He tweeted that it appeared Caballero and Maldonado had a disagreement related to the pitch clock. Caballero was granted a timeout after not making eye contact with Houston pitcher Brandon Bielak – hitters must do so before eight seconds are left on the pitch clock, otherwise they will be assessed a strike – and it seems Maldonado wanted to see Cabellero penalized rather than granted time.
Caballero has already endeared himself to Mariners fans as a surprisingly effective player who wasn’t very well known before he was called up from Triple-A Tacoma last month, and being in the middle of a skirmish with the hated Astros is only going to help in that regard. He owns a .273 batting average after Sunday’s 3-1 Mariners win, has played good defense and run the bases well, and even had the go-ahead two-run double in the middle of Seattle’s seven-run outburst with two outs in the eighth inning of Saturday’s 7-5 win over Houston.
The Astros and Mariners cleared the benches last June in Houston, and in that instance there was some shoving and even ejections following Houston reliever Hector Neris hitting M’s first baseman Ty France with a pitch. That was a pivotal moment in Seattle’s playoff drought-breaking 2022 season as Julio Rodríguez homered in the first plate appearance after the fracas ended and the M’s won 7-4.
The Mariners’ all-out brawl with the Angels later in June 2022 was seen by some as the real turning point for the team, though, so perhaps this will be a similar situation for a Seattle squad that got back to .500 at 17-17 with Sunday’s win after a disappointing April. And hey, at least the home fans in Seattle got to see this rare brand of excitement up close this time.
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Source: Seattle Sports
