Dan Wilson's bizarre Game 6 decision fueled Mariners' Game 7 nightmare

It's the morning after Game 7 of the American League Championship Series, and the Seattle Mariners are still reeling from the Springer Dinger heard 'round the world. The second-guessing is not going to end until the Mariners finally earn the AL pennant that has eluded them for nearly 50 years, and that won't be until at least a year from now.

So, we might as well push the second-guessing party even further and ask: Never mind just Game 7, what the heck was Eduard Bazardo doing out there in Game 6 just a day earlier?

At issue here is not the level of Bazardo's talent, which shouldn't be ridiculed or downplayed even after he served up the George Springer home run that sank the Mariners' season on Monday. He's a darn good pitcher — so much so that the L he took for Game 7 is literally the first loss he's recorded in 131 career appearances.

What is at issue is why Bazardo found himself on the mound in the fifth inning of Game 6 after the Mariners had already fallen behind 5-0 as a result of Logan Gilbert's implosion at the outset. It was a case of a high-leverage arm getting tasked with low-leverage work, and Wilson overcommitted to the bit in asking Bazardo to get six outs instead of just three.

Dan Wilson's trust in Eduard Bazardo came back to bite the Mariners in Game 7

Once the Mariners lost Game 6, this created two concerns related to Bazardo for Game 7: Whether he'd be tired, and whether any Blue Jays hitters might have an edge on him after seeing him just 24 hours previously.

The first concern didn't really pan out after Bazardo relieved Bryan Woo with one out and runners on second and third in the bottom of the seventh. His sinker averaged 96.2 mph, a healthy increase on the 95.5 mph he averaged during the regular season.

Familiarity, on the other hand, did play a role in Springer's go-ahead three-run homer. On Sunday, Bazardo had jammed Springer on an inner-half sinker that resulted in a ground-ball out. He tried to do the same thing on Monday, but this time Springer was ready.

“I went in and tried to get my out, throwing my sinker,” Bazardo said after the game, per Ryan Divish of the Seattle Times. “Yesterday, I threw the same pitch right there and it was a ground ball. And today, he got me.”

There is more to the story in that Bazardo merely personifies a collective failure on the Mariners' part. After he took a Woo fastball to the knee in Game 5, the Mariners tried to exploit Springer's pain by pounding him inside. It mostly worked, but a veteran hitter with Springer's creds was always going to adjust — and he did just in time to send the Blue Jays to the World Series.

Of course, if the game plan was going to be the game plan either way, that naturally raises the question of whether Matt Brash or Andrés Muñoz was ever going to fare better against Springer. And yet, at least the familiarity factor would not have weighed as heavily.

Ultimately, Wilson's answers for why he didn't go with literally anyone else ring hollow. Again per Divish, he spoke after the game of wanting to turn the game over to "our leverage guys," among whom Bazardo is "the guy that’s gotten us through those situations."

But in a spot like that, the best pitcher for the situation is your best pitcher, period. That's Muñoz, who had a 1.73 ERA during the regular season and had held hitters to zero hits in 21 at-bats to that point in the postseason. While he does prefer to have a defined role, it's not like he was hiding out in the bullpen.

“I was ready to go,” Muñoz said. “We were all ready to pitch whenever.”

Even in a series full of what-ifs for the Mariners, this is the what-if to end all what-ifs. It just deserves to be remembered not as one bad call by the manager, but rather the second in as many days.