Jacks Full of Threes: Raley Clubs Seven RBIs, M’s Bash White Sox 12-8
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Seattle Mariners right fielder Luke Raley (20) hits a three-run home run against the Chicago White Sox during the seventh inning at Rate Field. Mandatory Credit: Kamil Krzaczynski-Imagn Images [/caption]
Things go a lot more easily for a baseball team when they hit three home runs to score three or more men each. Good offense over nine innings can more than smooth out a bad inning on the other side, though the Mariners’ 12-8 win on Friday night against the White Sox took a while to get to the coasting stage.
In a sense, it wasn’t nearly as close as the score said; most of the high-end relievers were able to rest as Chicago scored three runs in the final two innings to turn a giant lead into a respectable one.
But in another sense (it was a one-run game until the seventh), the game was closer than its final score. M’s starter Emerson Hancock slipped quite a bit in the third inning and gave up five runs on the night, but recovered enough to go six innings and preserve the bullpen. Seattle’s first chance with the bases loaded didn’t produce anything else, but they broke the gates later on.
The big hero of the night was the still-mashing Luke Raley, who upped his season line to .258/.314/.567 with eight homers and 23 RBIs.
Luke Raley began the barrage with the first grand slam of his career.
The Mariners gave White Sox starter Sean Burke a couple of easy innings on Friday, falling in seven pitches in the first and 11 in the fourth. But crucially, they also put tons of traffic on the bags in the second and third, and though the second was underwhelming, things came together in the following frame.
Josh Naylor took the second pitch he saw and drove a grounder to the right side for a leadoff hit in the second, then Arozarena found himself hit by a 2-1 pitch and the M’s had a man in scoring position. It seemed like things were about to fall off once more with men on, however, as J.P. Crawford struck out - the runners advanced on the wild pitch, but since the curveball kicked off Sox catcher Drew Romo and flew all the way into the dugout, Crawford couldn’t advance - and Luke Raley followed suit.
But Burke’s lack of control caught up with him as he walked Dominic Canzone and hit Cole Young to allow the Mariners their first run. Brendan Donovan worked a 2-2 count on six pitches, but his soft liner on the seventh pitch was easily gloved to end the frame with just a man across.
Oftentimes in 2026, a missed opportunity with the bases loaded has been game-changing for the Mariners, leaving the rest of the contest with a big hole in what could have happened. On Friday, they simply loaded the bases again the next frame. What’s more, they did it with two outs.
Naylor once again started it with a hit and Arozarena singled before Burke walked Crawford to bring Raley up at the plate. In the entirety of the Ohioan’s career up to that point, he had gone 6-34 in bases loaded situations. He had never hit a grand slam. Things didn’t begin well in the at-bat as he whiffed on a fastball up and a curveball down.
“I chased the curveball the pitch before and I knew that I had to get something in the zone and take a good swing at it,” Raley said about what happened on the following pitch. “He [Burke] threw a heater past me in my first at-bat, so I thought he might go back to it, and he just kind of left it over the middle.”
Raley scorched a frozen rope to right field, 113.4 miles an hour off the bat. It was a relatively low line drive, but the right fielder had knocked it hard enough that the ball zoomed over the fence and brought out the rye bread and mustard.
Hancock had a rough third inning but recovered enough to go a full six.
Of the five pitchers who have logged a start for the 2026 Mariners, just one remains who has not suffered a blow-up outing: George Kirby. Logan Gilbert fell first (five runs on March 31), followed by Luis Castillo (seven runs on April 11), then Bryan Woo got shelled in two straight outings (seven runs on April 25 and six on May 1), and on Friday night, Hancock found himself on the business end of five runs in six innings.
It all makes the Bryce Miller question - who, if anyone, goes to the ‘pen when he comes back - very hard to answer. The culprit for Hancock against the White Sox was the free pass, an item which dogged him throughout his previous seasons but had been calmly absent in 2026, that afflicted him on Friday.
Things started off solidly for the hurler. Despite Munetaka Murakami serving up yet another plate of delicious crow to his many offseason doubters, the homer came with nobody on, and Hancock was hitting his spots in the first two innings as he froze Colson Montgomery on a painted heater and got Chase Meidroth to swing under high cheese.
In the third, however, Hancock began missing the strike zone. Of the eight batters Hancock saw in that frame, six got the advantage of a first-pitch ball. Most of the misses weren’t egregious, but his pitches aimed for the corners kept falling away from the zone and the Sox weren’t biting. One cutter after another would be a few inches off the plate or well low without a hack from a batter, and Tristan Peters walked to lead off the inning.
Peters got to second on an impromptu hit-and-run play and scored as Sam Antonacci peppered a hit into center field. An out, a runner, and a run in three batters isn’t the worst thing in the world for a pitcher, but as he danced around Murakami and Miguel Vargas, he gave both of those hitters walks to load the bases with one out.
Even to this point, Hancock had admirably avoided giving in and pumping a meatball down the middle, trusting his good stuff to best opposing batters. But with the bags packed and the go-ahead run at the plate, he finally slipped, unconfidently trying to sneak a heater over the plate to the same Montgomery he had caught lacking on perfect paint back in the first.
Montgomery whacked a left-tailing liner into center field. The Julio Rodríguez of the four years past would have made a “No-Fly Zone” diving catch, but as Rodríguez approached the ball, he went into an awkward backwards slide rather than committing to a full dive - and the ball reached the wall all the same as it would have had he dove and missed.
Rodríguez was in what the poker world refers to as a raise-or-fold situation: he could either turn to his right to cut the ball off and accept two runs, or he could fully commit to a dive and take on the risk of three runs coming home to tie the game. In poker terms, he called, and the three runs scored regardless.
Another first-pitch meatball found itself chopped easily to third, allowing Hancock to settle down and get out of the inning.
Despite the walks and the ensuing mental lapse - indicative of a brief lack of confidence - Hancock recovered once the fourth began. The Sox were sending out weak grounders and fly balls for the most part, though a strikeout to Murakami in the fifth was his third punchout of the evening and he got his fourth against Andrew Benintendi in the sixth.
Rodríguez made up for his defensive miscue as he torched a ball over the center field wall in the top of the fifth to give Seattle a 6-5 lead. The extra score gave Hancock a mental boost, too.
“I think when Julio hit the solo homer to make it 6-5, it’s like, ‘alright, I wanna settle down, I wanna put up some zeros for our guys,” Hancock said.
The strikeout of Benintendi had a special importance, as it came on the heels of a leadoff double from Meidroth. Hancock beared down and got through the sixth despite not quite having the best stuff in that final frame.
It perhaps shows some of the futility of the pitching win as a stat that Hancock’s last start was a seven-inning 14-strikeout no-walk no-decision but a five-run clunker got him the win because the M’s happened to score more on Friday than they did last Saturday.
On the other hand, the official win encapsulated another truth: that Hancock battled through adversity and survived for long enough to allow the injury-strained bullpen a standard three-inning workload.
When Eduard Bazardo went out for the seventh, however, it was only because he had basically already warmed up by the time Luke Raley struck again.
The final streets delivered a couple extra jacks to complete the Mariners’ full house.
Rodríguez’ homer gave the M’s the lead, but with the Sox’ many offensive weapons at their disposal, a few more runs were always going to be well-received. For the second time that night, the rally began with two outs, as Arozarena slapped a seventh-inning single the other way and Crawford drew his second walk of the game. Arozarena had stolen second and reached third on an error during Crawford’s appearance, so Raley had men on first and third against the right-hander Tyler Davis.
Raley was only up because of a good bit of discernment from Mariners manager Dan Wilson. Seattle’s traffic in the top of the fifth hadn’t ended with Rodríguez’ blast, but a pair of singles from Arozarena and Crawford (they both had good nights at the dish) had set up first-and-third for Raley in that inning, too. That time, however, the White Sox brought southpaw Sean Newcomb on the rubber, but Wilson kept Raley in the game with four innings left for opportunities to present themselves and his spot in the lineup due up at least once more.
That decision paid off in the top of the seventh. Unlike his previous blast, he got himself in a good count, ahead 2-1; but just as against Burke, the man on the mound served up a big old block of cheese right down the pipe. Raley unloaded for his second home run of the game, completing a seven-RBI showing and bringing the M’s lead to 9-5.
Seattle still wasn’t finished. The final jack was in the eighth off the bat of Josh Naylor, who had Brendan Donovan and Rodríguez on base against reliever Trevor Richards and took him deep to center field, shaded to the right a little bit as the ball flew over Peters’ head and over the fence. Naylor’s shot gave Seattle a monstrous 12-5 lead.
It was sit-down time for Jose A. Ferrer and Andrés Muñoz as Wilson put Alex Hoppe on the mound in the eighth and Josh Simpson in the ninth. Hoppe took a notable step back from some of his cleaner outings as his very first pitch flew out of his hand early and plunked Vargas. Although he managed the next two outs, things fell out of his control as Beninendi and Jarred Kelenic singled before Peters knocked a run-scoring double to make it 12-7.
Chicago’s massive deficit made all of that moot. Drew Romo put it right in Young’s glove to end the frame, and although Simpson gave up a solo homer to Randal Grichuk, the recent callup calmly worked through the rest of the frame and the score held.
Brendan Donovan and Cal Raleigh both fully returned to their regular positions, but Raleigh’s bad form continued.
Friday marked Donovan’s return to the Mariners roster, with the M’s sending Jhonny Pereda back to the minors in a corresponding move.
The infielder didn’t look much different from when he left. Donovan’s IL stint, related to a surgery he had in the offseason, wrapped up with a rehab game on the Arkansas Travelers. It appears to have gone well, as he returned like he had barely left and went 1-4 with a single. He didn’t hit anything particularly hard, but he did get the bat to the ball as he usually does and generally took good at-bats.
Raleigh, on the other hand, has not looked the same since his return. Even though he was able to do the catching duties and, from all indications, his injury itself is fine, his timing at the plate is still all out of goose. Now, this seems to be a separate slump from his early-season woes, but the 2026 campaign won’t go easy for the M’s if he doesn’t get his ducks in a row soon. He and Rob Refsnyder (who entered the game for Dominic Canzone in the sixth; it seems the M’s really don’t trust Canzone against lefties) were the only Mariners who didn’t reach base on Friday, but Raleigh had five chances.
The Mariners catcher still had a 101.3-mile an hour flyout, though he mistimed the hit and skied it at a 49 degree angle. The hard hit and the bat speed are promising, as once Raleigh gets in a groove, he will return to being a danger at the dish.
Both the guys at the top of the order will go again on Saturday as Seattle tries to get back to .500. Luis Castillo, who is still in need of a real bounce-back, will be on the hill for the Mariners.
