Arozarena, Canzone Crush Stros Pitching, Raleigh Breaks Slump in 10-2 Mariner Win
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Seattle Mariners catcher Cal Raleigh (29) runs to first base on a single during the seventh inning against the Houston Astros at Daikin Park. Mandatory Credit: Troy Taormina-Imagn Images [/caption]
Monday night and Tuesday night represented two very different kinds of Mariners victories. In the bottom of the ninth on the first night, the M’s got a win by the skin of their teeth, with Andrés Muñoz getting the better of Yordan Alvarez to finish out a badly-needed win for the M’s.
When Domingo González wrapped up the bottom of the ninth on Tuesday, things were far less tense. Although the Astros had runners on first and third, the M’s were already up 10-2, and with the final out, that was the final score. It was sublimely special for González, who had just completed his very first inning, but the Mariners’ offensive explosion had long since shattered all but the slightest chance of even the mighty Astros offense clawing back into the match.
Against the whole gamut of Houston hurlers they faced on Tuesday, the Mariners put up numbers. They scored 10 runs on 11 hits, six walks, and two batters hit by a pitch; they got hard hits on 57.6% of their batted balls. With runners in scoring position, the M’s went 2-for-8, but one of those hits was Dominic Canzone’s first career grand slam, which he slammed on the first pitch Astros starter Tatsuya Imai sent his way in the fourth inning.
Seattle took Tatsuya Imai to Randyland and the Can-zone.
The Astros’ big pitching signing of the offseason, Tatsuya Imai, hasn’t turned out how Houston had hoped in the first month and a half of the season. The last time he faced Seattle, he had to be pulled with one out in the first inning due to four walks and one hit batsman, then he wound up on the IL with right arm fatigue. He did better on his return start on Tuesday on account of the fact he went four innings. That’s about the only positive Joe Espada’s club got out of the outing.
The Houston starter is remarkable for his “wrong-way” slider and clearly has strong stuff, also showcasing his jumpy heater at times against Seattle. But although his slider movement may be unusual, his general profile of all stuff and no control is quite common in the MLB. He could still be adjusting to the MLB ball or a myriad other things on this side of the greater pond - as with many high-stuff guys, it would be the opposite of shocking if he puts it all together - but walks were an issue for him back in Japan and they more than remain an issue in the MLB.
The “Dark Triad” means something very specific in psychology, but a pitcher’s dark triad consists of walks, hits, and home runs. Any one of the three can be weathered, but when a hurler starts giving up more than one of them at the same time, he is in big trouble.
Cal Raleigh’s first hit in nearly 40 at-bats would have to wait, but the catcher drew a five-pitch free pass to begin the second inning. Imai worked ahead of Randy Arozarena, but the left fielder wisely laid off a couple bits of junk in the dirt and got his opponent on the hill to throw that backwards slider right over the heart of the dish.
Arozarena can sometimes find himself badly fooled when a pitcher pulls the string, but he visibly held his swing back until the time came - and he whacked it over the Crawford Boxes in left. Seattle led 2-0.
Imai bore down the remaining three guys in the inning and, with the help of a double play, he got through the third despite Josh Naylor turning a single into a double with his eighth stolen base of the year. It appeared that he got revenge on Arozarena to begin the fourth as home plate umpire Jim Wolf called a borderline 0-2 pitch strike three. Arozarena called for the ABS challenge and got a successful overturn.
The challenge became a free pass as the next pitch clocked Arozarena on the wrist. The hit batsman became a double as the Seattle left fielder stole second. The steal wound up mattering little as a slider fell out of Imai’s hands and hit Luke Raley on the foot. J.P. Crawford took his 27th walk of the season to load the bases.
Imai had already been to Randyland, but when he plated a first-pitch spinner to Canzone, Seattle took him to his second bad destination. Canzone walloped the ball about 10 rows up the right field seats. Houston’s fighting offense over the past two innings - more about that in a jiff - may have tied the game in the previous inning, but Seattle was back in the catbird seat with one swing.
Bryan Woo had a shaky third inning, but with the wind at his back, he completed six innings of two-run ball.
Just like they had against George Kirby on Monday, the Astros put the pressure on starter Bryan Woo early on in Tuesday’s game as Jose Altuve got a leadoff single in the first off a misplaced sweeper. But Seattle’s man got the first of his nine strikeouts against Yordan Alvarez with a painted changeup on the lower outside edge and followed that up with two more Ks to end the frame.
Houston kept hunting the fastball. Zach Dezenzo cracked a liner into the opposite field gap for a one-out second inning double and Braden Shewmake knocked another one into the outfield grass for a run-scoring single. That was all the home crew put up in that frame, but as Woo put Altuve and Alvarez on with no-out walks in the bottom of the third, things got dicey again.
For the entire inning, Woo’s pitch chart resembled the inverse of a donut: a cluster right down the middle, nothing along the edges of the plate, and a bunch of pitches well outside the strike zone. Christian Walker took one of these down-the-middle deliveries down the left field line for a one-out game-tying double (were a faster runner than Alvarez on first, the ‘Stros would have had a 3-2 lead) and Woo was in dangerous waters.
Yet Woo got Cam Smith chasing the high heat and Dezenzo going after a big sweeper in the opposite batter’s box. The clouds opened and Woo had a much easier ride over the next three innings, getting 1-2-3 frames in all three despite some fighting and fouling from the home bats.
Woo had basically a three-pitch arsenal of the four-seamer, sinker, and sweeper over those three innings, but he saved his changeup to help him throw Alvarez off-balance for his second strikeout of the game and the final two batters Woo faced went down swinging. It took nine pitches for Dezenzo to fall in the last of the sixth, as the battling never quite went away on the Houston side during the start, but Woo’s final line stood at six innings, two runs, two walks, and nine strikeouts.
By that time, however, Canzone’s rye bread and mustard - and an RBI single by J.P. Crawford in the fifth to knock in Arozarena’s first double - had given Woo quite the tailwind, and he was well in line for the win.
The offense wasn’t done, however, and the M’s finally got contribution from a guy who had been nearing a historic downturn.
Raleigh finally broke his slump after an 0-38 stretch.
On April 27, Cal Raleigh bashed a two-run eighth-inning home run against the Minnesota Twins. He didn’t get a hit in his next three games and then went down with a day-to-day injury in early May. As he went back into the lineup, his bat speed and catching were as usual, but his timing at the plate was all sorts of bad. Raleigh’s big o-fer stretched well into the 30s and began nearing 40 straight at-bats without a hit.
But in the previous couple of games, the slugger had begun to see green shoots crawl out of the rocky crags. His whiff rate in the zone was beginning to dip; the exit velocities were starting to go up. In the top of the seventh, after 38 straight hitless at-bats (just a day out from beating Jarred Kelenic’s team record of 0-42), he finally broke the streak.
The ball flew off his bat at 105.8 miles an hour and dropped into right center for a hit. Raleigh got another in the top of the ninth at 96.4 miles per hour off the bat, getting a multi-hit game to recover at least a smidge of the average he had lost in his big slump.
Raleigh had been choking up on the bat all game to try and recover some of his timing. It’s unclear whether this will be a permanent thing. He was still able to get two 100-plus exit velocities on the night, so it’s not like he was sacrificing everything with the choke-up. But the path forward remains to be seen.
The Mariners catcher came around to score both times. Arozarena crushed his second double of the game right after Raleigh’s seventh-inning single to bring the M’s lead to 8-2, and in the ninth, Arozarena completed his four-hit night with a single and two ensuing walks issued by Astros reliever AJ Blubaugh gave Seattle their ninth run.
Up came Canzone with the chance at a second grand slam. Such a feat hadn’t happened since July 27, 2009, when Josh Willingham of the Washington Nationals did it against the Milwaukee Brewers. Canzone worked it full, but after fouling off a very high fastball, he was ever so slightly off a changeup down the middle, and he sent it to the edge of the warning track for a sacrifice fly.
Still, 10 runs was more than enough offense for the highly-taxed Mariners leverage arms to take a break.
Alex Hoppe threw two strong innings of mop-up duty and Domingo González finished the game in his debut.
While recently called up Mariners reliever Alex Hoppe had struggled when he came into more tightly fought contests, with the team up six runs going into the bottom of the seventh, Mariners manager Dan Wilson was more than comfortable to have him go out for mop-up duty.
It only took nine pitches for Hoppe to get through the seventh, with much of the life seemingly gone from the Astros’ bats. Julio Rodríguez helped him out with a sliding catch in center field and it was the bottom of the order, but it brought the game three outs closer to as foregone of a conclusion as could he had against the Houston offense. Altuve got some hard contact against Hoppe in the eighth, but it went right to Rodríguez and the final two batsmen put up weak fights for two outs to finish Hoppe’s two innings.
The cushion was eight runs by the bottom of the ninth. Even if Houston rocked a grand slam of their own, they would still be down four; Wilson gave González the green light to go out to the mound for his first big league appearance.
Houston quickly fell to two outs as Shay Whitcomb popped out and Cam Smith whiffed at a cookie for González’ first strikeout in the Show. Despite a walk and single with two outs, the rookie hurler got Brice Matthews to fly out and end the game.
Seattle had picked the right game to find their attacking groove. The bullpen had already been constrained by injuries to Matt Brash and Gabe Speier, and with Jose A. Ferrer temporarily out on paternity leave and Eduard Bazardo coming off a big workload over the past few days, the M’s only leverage arm available was Andrés Muñoz.
On Deck
The Mariners are once again one game back of .500, and on Wednesday, Houston’s Daikin Park will play host to Bryce Miller’s long-awaited return. He will have to be on his A-game as he pits a zippy fastball against some of baseball’s premier heater-hunters. Against the Mariners on the mound will be the once-great Lance McCullers Jr., who is in a bad slump for the second straight year as his ERA sits at 7.41 ERA.
