Geno Breaks Out Rye Bread and Mustard in Game 5 Thriller; M’s One Win Away from Fall Classic
SEATTLE, Wash. — The Mariners’ third win didn’t come very easily. Runs, as is so often true in the playoffs, came at a premium for both teams—itself an improvement for Mariners pitching. Seattle and Toronto each had golden opportunities throughout the game, but almost all of them went unfulfilled as each rotation displayed some escape artistry.
But in the end, it was the home side who came through with the win. Fittingly for Seattle, they scored all their runs on big flies, five of their six crossing the plate thanks to the biggest performance of Eugenio Suárez’ career. Dread flipped to hope all across the northwest with two swings of the bat in the bottom of the eighth, one of them the biggest Mariner grand slam of the millennium.
Bryce Miller sets the team up well with a solid start, staring down Jays chances inning after inning to keep Seattle in the game.
The ace up the Mariners’ sleeve in Game 1 was Bryce Miller, who echoed his 2024 self with some zippy heaters up in the zone and a mix of secondary pitches that threw Toronto off their game in a six-inning, one-run gem. Dealing with a lot more Jays traffic in Game 5, he was able to get through four clean innings. Although the Houdini act did not extend into the fifth, he still contained an offense that had blown George Kirby and Luis Castillo out of the water.
Over the first two batters in the first inning, Miller kept his heaters at the roof of the zone and mixed in his secondaries below the knees and away from Toronto’s wheelhouse, setting a good tone with a 98.3 mile an hour four-seamer to strike out George Springer. Despite Vladimir Guerrero Jr. punishing a sinker over the same lower middle part of the plate that the Jays had been feasting on during the previous two days, Miller recovered from the two-out double with a clinic against Alejandro Kirk.
The formula against Kirk—busting him in with heaters before going low and outside with secondaries—brought Miller through the second with relative ease, his only issue a two-strike sweeper that didn’t sweep far enough away from the end of Ernie Clement’s bat with one out. Still, Miller ended up being bailed out of any traffic in that frame thanks to an excellent hopping catch from Leo Rivas.
Miller’s first real test came in the third. Each of the previous two games, the Mariner starter had gotten through the first two innings without much trouble but had given up a double to the leadoff man in the eighth followed by an Andrés Giménez home run to begin a torrent of Blue Jays runs. Once more, Isiah Kiner-Falefa led off the third with a double, but Giménez shot the ball right into Josh Naylor’s glove for an inning-killing double play.
But Miller’s locations were becoming ever less precise as the innings passed, and in the fourth, the Blue Jays set up their thickest pickle yet, loading the bases with nobody out. With Daulton Varsho at the dish, however, Miller buckled down, once again attacking a hitter with high fastballs before going to a splitter that dropped off the face of the earth to complete the strikeout.
Ernie Clement chopped the ball right into Cal Raleigh’s arms to begin a double play on the very next pitch, allowing Miller to pull a Houdini-esque escape and keep the Blue Jays off the board.
Seattle pulls Bryce Miller after one hit in the fifth, but the Jays manage to get a run against Matt Brash due to one too many mistakes.
Although Miller had been firing heat over his first few innings, reaching 98 in the first, his fastball velocity had dropped into the mid-90s by the beginning of the fifth inning. The heaters had also started dropping from the roof of the plate down into that middle third, and Addison Barger took advantage of it for another Blue Jays leadoff hit.
Dan Wilson went out to the mound at this point, not trusting Miller to once again wiggle his way out of a jam. Whether that was the right move or not cannot ever be known, but the Jays managed to get a run against Matt Brash.
Although Brash managed two quick outs against the bottom of the order, Barger found his way to second on an infield chopper to set up a runner in scoring position with two away. George Springer put the Jays on the board with a deep fly ball into the left center field gap. Julio Rodríguez might have been able to make the catch had he risked a collision with the wall, but the Mariners center fielder slowed up as the ball dropped to the base of the fence for a run-scoring double.
All’s well that ends well, but the run made Seattle’s job a whole lot harder.
Lineup Changes don’t produce much of an effect early on as the team struggles to do much with runners in scoring position for seven innings.
Julio Rodríguez went to the top of the order, a position in the order he had not done well in during the 2025 regular season, slashing just .194/.265/.306 in 15 games from the one-hole. However, his stretch of leading off in 2025 overlapped with a rough slump that had little to do with his batting order, and his career slash line out of the one-spot is a far better .283/.336/.513.
Unfortunately for Seattle, Rodríguez didn’t get much done in his new old spot. His first three at-bats were solid enough in process, ending in flyouts where he didn’t quite get enough of the ball, but he was mercilessly fooled by a host of curveballs in the bottom of the seventh.
Bad at-bats were plentiful over the first seven frames, especially with runners in scoring position. A one-out double from Cal Raleigh in the bottom of the first was nearly followed up by a walk, but a Kevin Gausman splitter five inches under the zone that should have been ball four to Polanco was called a strike. Polanco expanded the zone under his knees from that point on, fanning on multiple Gausman splitters underneath the zone.
Randy Arozarena made his way to second in the bottom of the fourth with J.P. Crawford at the dish, but the Mariners shortstop harmlessly flew out to center field to end the frame. Crawford let another opportunity slip through his fingers after a pair of two-out walks in the bottom of the sixth, and with the Jays taking the lead in the top half, the missed opportunities began to look like a massive black eye for a team on the verge of a do-or-die Game 6.
Bryan Woo throws mostly heaters in his first frame, but it’s an offline throw from Dominic Canzone that gives the Blue Jays a late lead.
The long-awaited return of Bryan Woo came in the top of the sixth, and all things considered, he did fairly well. Pitching for the first time in nearly a month, Woo’s four-seamer was just as fast and almost as electric as it had been all year. His one real mistake was a first-pitch meatball to Alejandro Kirk that ended up in the right center field gap, but for a couple innings, it seemed to be of prime importance.
With one away in the sixth, Ernie Clement, who has been a Blue Jays hero all postseason, shot the ball into right. Were Victor Robles manning right field—or were the Jays facing anyone else—Kirk would have been held up at third. But with Dominic Canzone in right and the Mariners’ difficulties with plays at the plate well-known across the league, Kirk trucked around towards the plate. Canzone panicked as he threw, airmailing it up the third base line as Kirk touched home plate.
Woo settled in after that and began to mix in some of his breaking balls, finishing two full innings as he worked around a jam in the seventh. But until the tide finally turned in the eighth, Seattle’s best starter was in line for a loss from relief.
Dominic Canzone, for his part, nearly made up for his misplay on defense with a game-tying shot in the bottom of the seventh—but it fell about two feet foul. Canzone struck out instead, seemingly taking the Mariners’ last hope with him into the dugout.
The game flips in the eighth inning, from a Randy Arozarena catch in the top half to a go-ahead grand slam in the bottom half.
From the third inning of Game 3 on, the Seattle faithful had been given almost nothing to cheer for. Two merciless destructions had been followed up by a close game where the M’s were seemingly missing all the little things in the late innings that could turn a close loss into a close victory.
Randy Arozarena, whose struggles over the previous months had sent him from leadoff to fifth in the lineup, got it going with his glove. Although Arozarena is not usually the pinnacle of outfield defense, he came up big in the top of the eighth as Ernie Clement drilled a fly ball deep to left. Arozarena clinically drove himself back to the wall, timed his leap, and came down with a stolen double.
The Mariners were still down 2-1, but the Seattle crowd finally drowned out the legion of Blue Jays fans that had made a cozy nest in T-Mobile Park for the past few days.
As Cal Raleigh stepped up to the dish in the bottom of the eighth, a packed house held their breath. Mariners fans knew that just six outs remained between them and a very steep hill, while Toronto’s road warriors had seen Raleigh come up big against their team for years on end.
Brendon Little fell behind Raleigh 2-0 and delivered him quite a juicy meatball to try and get back into the count. Raleigh, however, skied the ball a mile high into the air, and it looked for a moment like Myles Straw would pull the ball in for the first out.
But it kept carrying and carrying. Straw drifted back to the warning track and looked up as he reached the wall. Guarded hollers among the home crowd became a veritable earthquake. Raleigh had hit his 64th home run in the 2025 calendar year, but none of his blasts had been as massive as the one on Friday afternoon.
A rattled Little walked the next two men on and Seranthony Domínguez did his team no favors with an errant pitch that struck Arozarena to load the bases with nobody out. Domínguez got two strikes against Eugenio Suárez, a man who, like Raleigh, was in the biggest at-bat of his life.
Suárez hadn’t been sizzling very much during the second half of the season. Far too often trying to do too much, his swings had become extended and inaccurate for the Mariners, and that cold stretch had extended into the postseason. But he kept his swing short and direct on Friday, knowing that only one run was needed to set up a lockdown closer for the ninth inning, and he struck the ball perfectly.
Everything in SoDo was shaking as soon as the ball left his bat, flying high and deep to right field. A tremendous anticipation washed over T-Mobile Park as the crowd realized that a run would surely score, but that energy turned into mayhem as Addison Barger helplessly watched it soar over the wall.
That energy did not dissipate; less than 30 minutes later came three quick outs that confirmed a surreal result to Game 5.
“Obviously, this is the biggest home run of my career,” Suárez said about a half second before being drenched in water after the game.
The Seattle Mariners are one win away from the first World Series berth in team history. The giddy excitement can be felt in the air from Boise to Juneau and Anchorage to Portland, as all of Mariners country gets the closest glimpse of Paradise they have ever had.
