The start to Mitch Garver’s tenure with the Seattle Mariners has been frustrating for the right-handed slugger.

How Seattle Mariners could keep Emerson Hancock when Bryan Woo returns

Through his first 24 games, Garver is slashing a meager .143/.256/.273 with three home runs and seven RBIs. Not exactly what Garver or the Mariners envisioned when he signed a two-year, $24 million deal in the offseason to become the team’s primary designed hitter, a position the Mariners have mightily struggled at since the departure of Nelson Cruz after the 2018 season.

With one swing of the bat – and an 80-grade bat flip that followed – Garver appeared to let some of that frustration go, belting a walk-off two-run home run against the Atlanta Braves on Monday night. Just how good did that moment feel for Garver? He joined Seattle Sports’ Wyman and Bob on Tuesday for a conversation about that and more.

We’re sleeping good tonight 😌 pic.twitter.com/Lc0bk4ID0t

— Seattle Mariners (@Mariners) April 30, 2024

“It felt good to have that moment,” Garver said. “I had a few home runs before this, I’ve been collecting a few knocks here and there, but to have that moment where I could lift the team up and prove to help us win a ball game was a huge relief for me. And it was just that moment where I could take a deep breath and be like, ‘all right, I’m a Mariner. Let’s let this thing ride out.’”

Garver came to Seattle with a track record of hitting at a high level. He mashed 31 home runs in just 93 games in 2019 with an OPS of .995 and an OPS+ of 157, both career bests on his way to winning the Silver Slugger at designated hitter, which he split with Cruz. He also posted an OPS of .870 or higher during the 2021 and 2023 seasons. So hitting has never been a big issue during his career. Like other offseason additions Jorge Polanco and Luke Raley, it just hasn’t been a quick start at the plate for Garver in a Mariners uniform.

“There’s always this desire to try to prove why the Mariners acquired you,” Garver said of joining a new team. “You want to make the fanbase happy, you want to make the team happy, you want to do as much as you can for your teammates and coaches and clubhouse staff, and you always want to make a great impression. I think trying to do more than just who you are as a baseball player is a little detrimental at times.”

Garver said the key to getting past that is trying to “reel it back” and remember there’s a reason a team put in the effort to acquire you. Does Garver think Monday’s clutch home run is going to be what gets his bat back to normal? It’s not that simple.

“This game is such a process,” he said. “Some days you have it, some days you don’t. You could go out and get three, four hits and you can go (hitless) the next day. It’s such a brutal game and it keeps you humble. I’d like to say that things are going to start clicking here and I’ll continue to hit the ball hard and maybe I’ll find a few holes and that average will start ticking up a little bit. But at the end of the day, we’re playing winning baseball right now.”

Speaking of winning baseball, the Mariners entered Tuesday sitting atop the AL West at 16-13 with one-game lead over Garver’s former team. The veteran DH thinks the team is just beginning to tap in to its potential.

“We’re in first place and we haven’t even peaked yet,” Garver said. “The pitching staff has been holding us together, but the offense is going to turn around. We’re going to score some runs, we’re going to strike out less, but there’s going to be some ebbs and flows throughout the season. I think we’re in a pretty good spot if our heads are above water right now and we’re not hitting like we know how.”

Tune in to Wyman and Bob weekdays from 2-6 p.m. or find the podcast on the Seattle Sports app.

More on the Seattle Mariners

• Mitch Garver’s walkoff homer lifts Mariners over Braves 2-1
• In return to Seattle, Braves’ Kelenic says he’s learned from past struggles
• Drayer: Why Mariners are sending Jonatan Clase back to Triple-A
• AL West Check-In: Angels star Mike Trout to have knee surgery
• AL West Check-In: Astros sending down former MVP José Abreu

Follow @ZacHereth

by Cynthia Green

Founded in 2014, today marks the 10th anniversary of this publication. We asked Cynthia Green, one of its founders and past board members, to share what reaching that milestone means to her.

Faith will take you far. That phrase was on my mind as I woke up this morning and reflected on the 10th anniversary of the South Seattle Emerald.

Ten years ago, I sat at the dining room table of my old home and watched my exhausted 30-year-old son furiously type away on a new article. I edited the one he had just finished five minutes ago, and I would soon transcribe an interview for him so he could write another story early the next morning.

Those were the early days of the Emerald. It was just the two of us and his father Phillip back then. Marcus would juggle part-time jobs at the League of Women Voters and Big Brothers Big Sisters and then go out to report, write, and post articles on the Emerald. Phillip would financially support the paper, so Marcus could pay the occasional contributor he could find $50.

I would stay up most of the night transcribing, editing, and copy editing. I’d even sometimes accompany him on interviews and assignments. Now, I think back to how strange it must have seemed to some people: a novice reporter and his 65-year-old mother showing up to press conferences and protests to represent a paper few had ever heard of, while we handed out flimsy homemade business cards we printed at Kinko’s.

But we didn’t care.

We were beyond tired and frustrated with how mainstream media constantly portrayed our community. If you believe the depiction most often found in most media outlets, then our community produced nothing but drug addiction, domestic violence, and crime.

Rarely was that portrayal challenged, and even rarer were there actual voices present in media from our community to speak for themselves, to talk about the beauty, life, and positive aspects of our collective home of South Seattle.

Too often absent from newspaper columns and television screens were the authentic voices of those who have made our community the uniquely vibrant and sensational place it is: People of Color, seniors, youth, working-class residents, activists, educators, and our immigrant, Jewish, Islamic, and LGBTQIA+ community members.

Too often, their lives were reduced to soundbites and statistics. Too often, their concerns were dismissed and deprioritized because of where they lived.

Whether the Emerald lasted 10 hours, 10 days, or, now, 10 years, we knew it needed to exist to tell the stories no one else would tell, either because it wasn’t feasible for them to do so or because they just didn’t care.

Telling those stories and doing it in a way that tells the full story, where human beings are holistically portrayed — and not the fast story that decomposes soon after you finish reading it — remains the vision for the Emerald.

That vision has led us to share the stories of people like Bill Austin. No other media outlet wanted to chronicle his years-long fight to liberate his wrongly convicted son Nathan — who was struggling with drug addiction — from incarceration. Nathan needed treatment, not imprisonment. As Bill would tell me and Marcus, most media viewed his son as “just another Black drug addict,” unworthy of any concern.

It also allowed us to tell the story of Michael Flowers, who was killed during a home invasion. Following his death, most media reports painted him, the victim of an act of murder, as a man deserving of his fate. They resurfaced negative aspects of his past, none of which had any bearing on his murder. His family was infuriated, as no media was willing to correct the record of his life — none but the Emerald.

We presented the story of Michael’s life as a full human being, not a man defined by his worst mistake. To this day, his mother Mary reads our story about Michael whenever she finds herself missing him.

This vision of the Emerald that began as late nights at a dining room table has only endured because of the contributions of so many people from our community through the years. During our early years, people wrote for us, photographed for us, edited for us, reported for us, marketed for us, and advertised for us, while either not getting paid what they deserved or not getting paid at all.

They did this because our vision became theirs: a community claiming its power to tell its own story. A community unwilling to accept falsehoods about itself anymore. A community unafraid to challenge the powerful. A community that will no longer tolerate a muffling of its voice, its concerns, and its brilliance.

This is why I’m not surprised that in our 10 years of existence, so few of our local large foundations and philanthropic organizations (with the acceptation of the Inatai Foundation) have ever given any significant support to the Emerald, despite giving to larger outlets and their proclamations of “prioritizing organizations that serve marginalized communities.”

It’s because we speak too much truth. We challenge systems that produce disparities and inequities. And we don’t pretend that wrong is right, no matter whom the wrong is being done by.

I recently saw a woman about my age while waiting for the bus. She started to talk about the Emerald and said she reads it because it’s where she can find the truth about the community she’s lived in for decades. She only had $5 to donate to us per month, but it’s people like her who have allowed us to persist.

It is our community that we have had to depend on. It is our community that has not let us down in these 10 years, even at times we may have disappointed them.

Though we founded the Emerald, Marcus, Phillip, and I were only ever stewards of its vision. We were never owners of it. The Emerald does not belong to us. It belongs to you. That is why it endures.

It belongs to all those who once lived in South Seattle and have been dispersed throughout King County and Washington but still cling to the Emerald as a point of connection to the sweetest of words: home.

Sacrifice, labor, and, most of all, faith — in and from our community — is what built this home we call the Emerald. And this home will never be for sale, never displace you, and always keep the light on for you.

It has for 10 years. It will for so many more.

The South Seattle Emerald is committed to holding space for a variety of viewpoints within our community, with the understanding that differing perspectives do not negate mutual respect amongst community members.

The opinions, beliefs, and viewpoints expressed by the contributors on this website do not necessarily reflect the opinions, beliefs, and viewpoints of the Emerald or official policies of the Emerald.

Cynthia A. Green is a lifelong South Seattleite. She currently works as a kinship care navigator for Catholic Community Services, helping King County kinship caregivers (including grandparents, aunts, uncles, siblings, and others caring for family members’ children when circumstances prevent their parents from caring for them) find resources and support. Cynthia is also a volunteer tutor with the Lake Washington Youth Tutoring Program. Extremely modest, she will never tell you that the Cynthia A. Green Family Center in Skyway is named after her.

📸 Featured Image: Cynthia Green managing the raffle table at the Emerald’s first anniversary party in 2015. (Photo: Hannah Letinich)

SEATTLE (AP) — Mitch Garver hit a two-run game-ending homer in the ninth inning to give the Seattle Mariners a 2-1 win over the Atlanta Braves on Monday night in a game that was dominated by spectacular starting pitching.

Seattle Mariners 2, Atlanta Braves 1: Box score

The starting pitchers — Atlanta’s Max Fried and Seattle’s Bryce Miller — were the story for most of the game as each threw six no-hit innings. It was just the seventh time in the last 50 years that both teams carried a no-hitter into the seventh inning and the first since 2021.

But the night ended with Garver’s biggest swing to date with Seattle after struggling through the first month of the season, tossing his bat in front of home plate to celebrate the first career walkoff home run.

“That was pretty special for me,” Garver said. “And in a time where things aren’t going my way and I’m not feeling quite like myself, to be able to come through for the team in any way, shape or form is a huge W.”

Mitch Garver walks it off for the @Mariners!!! pic.twitter.com/JZoLyHmsWR

— MLB (@MLB) April 30, 2024

Jorge Polanco led off the ninth with a single on the first pitch from A.J. Minter. Garver worked the count to 3-2 and hit a cutter left in the middle of the plate by Minter (5-2) out to left field for his third homer.

The late dramatics for Seattle took some of the spotlight away from the pitching efforts by Fried and Miler, both of whom were nearly unhittable.

“Their guy tonight was pretty lights out,” Fried said. “He was throwing really well. Really commanding all his pitches and keeping us off balance, so I knew I had to try to match him as much as I could.”

The early season leaders of their divisions played a game worthy of October with both starting pitchers turning in dominant performances. Fried ran his scoreless innings streak to 15 2/3 innings after shutting down Miami in his last start and he carried it over to his effort against the Mariners.

Miller was the equal of Atlanta’s left-hander. He had a perfect game into the sixth and a two-batter sequence in the seventh ended his no-hit bid and led to the only run for Atlanta.

“It’s in the back of your mind, but I’m just trying to go one pitch, one at-bat, one inning at a time,” Miller said.

Looks good from any angle. #TridentsUp pic.twitter.com/8hh42bEp45

— Seattle Mariners (@Mariners) April 30, 2024

Advertisement

Ronald Acuña Jr. led off the seventh with a hard groundball that caromed off the glove of diving shortstop Dylan Moore for an infield hit — the first off Miller. Acuña stole second and third and jogged home when Ozzie Albies doubled to right-center field.

Jarred Kelenic had the only other hit for the Braves when he led off the ninth with a single against reliever Austin Voth (1-0).

Fried was pulled after throwing 100 pitches through six innings and the only two baserunners he allowed were walks to Garver and Cal Raleigh. He struck out seven and followed up on the 92-pitch, three-hitter in his last outing, a 5-0 win over Miami.

Pierce Johnson kept the combined no-hitter going through the seventh by striking out the side, but Seattle finally broke up the no-no in the eighth. Reliever Joe Jiménez immediately walked Ty France on four pitches and Josh Rojas pulled a ground ball through the right side of the infield for Seattle’s first hit.

Seattle eventually loaded the bases, but Julio Rodríguez flew out to shallow left field and Mitch Haniger struck out chasing a slider off the plate to end the threat.

Miller’s perfect game ended when he issued a one-out, four-pitch walk to Travis d’Arnaud in the sixth. Miller, in just his second season, tied his career high with 10 strikeouts. He leaned heavily on his fastball that induced 15 swings and misses from Atlanta batters.

“They did a really good job,” Atlanta manager Brian Snitker said. “It was a really good ballgame. Couldn’t get a big hit. Couldn’t get anything going offensively.”

UP NEXT

Braves RHP Reynaldo Lopez (2-0, 0.72) has allowed only two earned runs in 25 innings this season. Mariners RHP Luis Castillo (2-4, 4.15) goes for his third straight victory after starting the season 0-4.

More on the Seattle Mariners

• Ahead of facing M’s, Kelenic says he’s learned from past struggles
• Drayer: Why Mariners are sending Jonatan Clase back to Triple-A
• Watch: Mariners call-up has memorable first MLB at-bat
• By the numbers: M’s pitching in midst of historically great stretch
• Seattle Mariners ‘concerned’ as reliever Matt Brash shut down