Four runs, two swings, and not a ball that left the yard. That is how the Yankees put away the slumping Mariners 4-1 on Tuesday night in the Bronx, and if you are looking for New York Yankees news that tells you something about this team in August, it is right there in the seventh inning: Ryan McMahon with a two-run single, Trent Grisham with a two-run single, four runs on the board without anybody trying to hit a three-run homer.

That inning was the entire ballgame. Seattle got one run and never got the answer back.

How the Yankees beat the Mariners 4-1

There is a version of this Yankees team that everybody outside New York likes to describe, the one that either hits the ball 430 feet or makes an out. Tuesday was the other version. McMahon and Grisham both did the least glamorous thing available to a hitter with men on base, which is put the bat on the ball and keep the line moving, and it cashed four times.

Grisham has become one of the more quietly useful pieces of this roster, and McMahon is the kind of hitter whose value shows up in exactly these spots, with a crooked number already threatening and the pitcher trying to survive rather than dominate. Two singles. Ballgame.

The pitching side deserves the credit it always gets last. One run allowed to a big-league lineup is a night's work no matter who the lineup belongs to, and the Yankees have spent stretches of this season leaning on that formula because the offense has not always been reliable enough to bail anybody out.

Why the Mariners slump matters in August

It is the Seattle side of this that I keep turning over. The wire calls them slumping and the box score does not argue. One run in the Bronx, and the seventh inning got away from them in the exact way innings get away from teams whose confidence is thinning out.

August is when this stops being noise and starts being a shape. A club can lose four in a row in May and shrug. Lose them in the second week of August, with the calendar closing and the standings hardening, and every at bat starts to feel heavier than it should. Seattle has the pitching to stop this quickly. The question is whether the bats show up before the math gets unfriendly.

checked the almanac: the last time these two franchises met with the season on the line in october, edgar martinez doubled down the left field line in game 5 of the 1995 alds and seattle sent the yankees home. that wound is older than a fair number of the players who took the field tuesday, and it is still the first thing i think of when i see these two on the same card.

What comes next for the Yankees and Mariners

They go again Wednesday at 7:05 ET in the Bronx, and Seattle is the club that needs the night more. A team playing well loses a game like Tuesday's and forgets it by breakfast. A team scuffling loses a game like Tuesday's and carries it into the next one.

It was a good night for grinders across the league, actually. The Blue Jays hung a fourth straight loss on Boston behind Ernie Clement's tiebreaking run. Martin Perez put up six more scoreless for Atlanta in a 4-0 win over the Mets. Kevin McGonigle drove in three as Detroit handled Cleveland. And the Cubs, riding homers from Pete Crow-Armstrong, Alex Bregman and Seiya Suzuki, rallied past Washington 8-6 to get 20 games over .500, which in the middle of August is not a hot streak anymore. That is a real team.

What I am watching next: whether Seattle's bats answer on Wednesday, because a fifth or sixth quiet game turns a slump into a story.