TORONTO — There is a laundry list of problems the Seattle Mariners will take into Game 7 of the American League Championship Series tonight. They have struck out almost twice as many times as the Blue Jays (62–34). They don’t win when they don’t hit a home run (13–30 in 173 games this year). And they must win in the toughest place to win this year in the AL.
None of those issues are their biggest problem. The Mariners have a Vlad problem.
To go to their first World Series, they must figure out how to pitch to a smoking hot Vladimir Guerrero Jr., who is having a postseason for the ages. So hot is Guerrero that the best course of action for Seattle pitchers is to swallow their pride and pitch around him in any spot with a smidgen of meaning.
No offense to Alejandro Kirk, who is swinging a hot bat behind him right now, but there is no way the Mariners can go home allowing Guerrero even a chance of beating them. You pitch to him every time in Game 7 as if there are two outs and first base open. He is that good and that hot.
In a too-easy 6–2 victory over a tight Seattle team Sunday (three errors, three double plays grounded into and 13 strikeouts), Guerrero’s night went like this:
Popped out for only the second time this postseason.Grounded out on a slider on one of the seven hardest hard balls he has hit all year (116 mph).Ripped a curveball for a home run.Shot a classic “how-dare-you” look at the Mariners’ dugout upon scoring after they hit him with a pitch.Hit a sinker twice for a single—once as it broke his bat on the handle and again, on the carom, with his barrel.
“He came in the dugout and said, ‘I hit that twice,’” said Toronto center fielder Dalton Varsho. “That’s how hot he is. He knew he hit it twice.
“It’s amazing to watch this. He’s hitting everything right now. It doesn’t matter where they pitch him—in, out, up or down—and what they pitch him. I mean, he’s so hot right now they flipped him a curveball out of nowhere and he’s on time and hits it out.”
The Mariners have thrown him 77 pitches in this series. Only two have been curveballs. He smoked one for a double and whacked the other for a homer to end the night of a wholly ineffective Logan Gilbert, Seattle’s Game 6 starter.
Seattle quashed Guerrero in Games 1 and 2, getting him on the ground six times in seven hitless at-bats. The Mariners pounded him with right-handed sinkers away. Before Game 3, Guerrero made an adjustment to catch the ball slightly deeper on its way to the plate and to elevate it.
Since then, he is 10-for-17 (.588) with three homers, three doubles and 13 times on base in four games. In the past two games Seattle has tried to pitch him in; that worked no better.
With a PlayStation postseason slash line of .462/.532/1.000, Guerrero is carving a place for himself among the Mount Rushmore of great postseasons in the expanded playoff era. Take your pick from among Reggie Jackson (1978), Barry Bonds (2002), David Ortiz (2004 and 2013), Carlos Beltran (2004) and Yordan Alvarez (2023), but you better have Guerrero in your top four.
Shohei Ohtani, of course, set the postseason afire with his one-man show in NLCS Game 4. But let that not diminish the history in the making by Guerrero, who is having an October of pure hitting excellence like we’ve never seen. He is the first player in the postseason to hit six home runs with only two strikeouts. The fewest strikeouts while hitting six homers in the postseason was six, by Albert Pujols in 2004.
Guerrero has seen 144 pitches in the postseason and swung and missed only nine times on 58 swings. How in the world do you slug 1.000 make contact on 84% of your swings against the best pitchers of the best teams in the most important and most heavily scouted time of year?
A better question was put to Seattle manager Dan Wilson. It was as brief as it was obvious: “What do you do about Vladdy?”
It seemed mostly a rhetorical question, like asking a farmer what you do about a drought or a Manhattan taxi driver about traffic. You bear the misery, is what you do.
Wilson’s answer was perfectly euphemistic: “He’s someone that you have to take note of and that’s for us to do going forward.”
Take note, yes. Paul Revere once took note of the British coming. Guerrero is that dangerous right now. It’s hard to imagine the Blue Jays imaginedwhen they signed him to a 14-year, $500-million extension this year to keep him away from free agency. Your most restful night of sleep could not dream a postseason like this. But the contract did remove the usual “where-is-he-going-and-how-much-will-he-get” parlor game nonsense that is for elite free agents. (Hello, Kyle Tucker and the Cubs.) And it did validate Vladdy, even in his own mind, that he is the rare kind of player who can not only carry a team but also welcome the responsibility to do so.
“I've seen him embrace being the face of the franchise,” Blue Jays manager John Schneider said.
Tonight the Mariners will play their first Game 7 in franchise history. (The Blue Jays have played one, losing in the 1985 ALCS.) There has never been a postseason game to decide the pennant among two teams with a combined wait for one that is this long: 81 years of waiting for the World Series.
This is a series that has whipsawed back and forth in terms of the upper hand, so Seattle can flip it back in its favor to finally retire its status as Only Franchise Never to Have Won a Pennant. But to do so, the Mariners likely must hit two homers (because as Game 6 reminded us with three rally-killing double plays, they are awful at situational hitting) and they must get starting pitcher George Kirby through 18 batters with the game still tight to make use of their bullpen advantage.
Above all their musts, the most pressing one is an answer to that postgame question to Wilson: “What do you do about Vladdy?”
