Baseball can strain one’s sense of empathy, sometimes. I believe in empathy as the cheapest and best antidote to a world that sometimes seemed designed for, and therefore too often rewards, unchecked greed and narcissism, and at the same time, I don’t often overly concern myself with the feelings of opposing fanbases. The Mariners have been so bad for so long, it’s easy to check empathy at the gates of the ballpark like a bulky backpack. But it is hard not to feel a little sorry for the White Sox, mired in an interminable rebuild, a directionless franchise with no potential finish line to the misery in sight; it’s hard not to empathize with that fanbase, because Mariners fans know what that feels like, and it’s hard not to feel pain on behalf of the players tasked with giving their best effort with the hope they might, if not win the game, at least play well enough to land somewhere else. When the most you hope for is to be somewhere else, that’s a tough feeling, but not an unfamiliar one.

White Sox starter Davis Martin pitched maybe the finest game he’s pitched as a pro—certainly by length if not by number of strikeouts. The Mariners hitters didn’t strike out a lot, but they did make a ton of quick, weak-contact outs that allowed Martin to work into the eighth inning, the deepest any starting pitcher has gone against the Mariners all season (he just edged out Houston’s Hayden Wesneski, who went seven complete back in April before eventually going on the IL with TJ surgery). In a mirror-image of what Logan Evans hopes to do every time he toes the rubber, Martin threw the kitchen sink at the Mariners, keeping them off-balance as he mixed pitches with abandon; they could not square him up. It wasn’t enough.

The Mariners scraped a run off Martin in the third, driven again by the bottom of the lineup, as Ben Williamson checked in with the Mariners’ first hit of the day en route to his second career three-hit day. J.P. Crawford followed him up with a bloop base hit and Jorge Polanco came up with yet another two-out hit:

“Gotta give the kid over there some credit,” said Dan Wilson postgame, before returning to singing the praises of his team.

Martin’s other mistake wouldn’t come until the very end of his day. He started by striking out Dylan Moore to open the eighth, but then Williamson got him again, shooting a sinker at the bottom of the zone right back up the middle. At 92 pitches, White Sox manager Will Venable (pause for all of you who need to feel old for a second) grudgingly lifted his starter, bringing in Cam Booser. I am told by several of you in the comments that Booser has a great story; I cannot look it up right now because my empathy is currently stored in a backpack far away. Baseball makes you a jerk sometimes. I am in my jerk era.

Booser walked J.P. Crawford on five pitches. He gave up a single to pinch-hitter Mitch Garver to load the bases for Julio Rodríguez. He tried to steal a first-pitch strike against Julio, maybe hoping Julio—who does put the ball on the ground—would hit into an inning-ending double play.

The official attendance for the game was 10,380, and maybe one or two of those digits is correct, but certainly not all five of them belong there. It was a quiet game, quiet enough that you could hear individual heckles, quiet enough that you could hear Booser’s reaction to the sound of the ball off the bat.

It’s hard not to feel some empathy for that. But happily, it’s also pretty impossible to not share in the delight of an actual human child being on the receiving end of this baseball, rather than an avaricious collector.

But again, it’s a reminder that as much as one wants to have an abundance mindset, sometimes there is one baseball.

Davis’s valiant effort wasn’t enough because Luis Castillo also kept the White Sox down, working through the seventh inning. Castillo didn’t seem to have a great feel for his slider and barely threw his changeup, going instead fastball-heavy, as he did in the infamous game against the White Sox where he threw 47 straight fastballs against them back in 2023. It wasn’t quite to that extent, but it had a similarly demoralizing effect: “Here it is, hit it” again and again. To their credit, the White Sox tried; only striking out a modest five times, they put balls in play, although most of them wound up as outs. The hits they did connect on went nowhere; a first-inning single, a leadoff double in the second on a hanging changeup, and a one-out single in the third were all squandered as Castillo locked things down; the hit in the third inning was the last time a Chicago hitter would reach against Castillo, although he did get a little help from his left fielder to post a clean final inning.

With Castillo done but the Mariners staked to a comfortable lead, Dan Wilson was able to use his lower-leverage arms, sitting down the Brash/Muñoz duo for Collin Snider and Troy Taylor. Snider sailed through his inning for a clean eighth, but Taylor struggled again with his command, walking the first two batters he saw. That meant that Muñoz didn’t get his full off-day as was hoped, but instead had to get up and start moving around when Taylor allowed an RBI single with two outs, forcing Muñoz into the game to strike out Luis Robert Jr. It was the only mar on what was otherwise a pretty ideal game for the Mariners; somehow, I don’t think anyone will feel too sorry for the Mariners about it. Sorry, kids. There’s only one baseball.