> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.emeraldcityspectrum.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Two Electric Homers Give Mariners Comeback Win against White-Hot Braves - URL: https://www.emeraldcityspectrum.com/seattle-mariners-two-electric-homers-comeback-atlanta-braves/ - Published: 2026-05-05T07:57:13.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-08T06:11:45.000Z - Author: Callaghan Bluechel - Tags: News, Analysis, Mariners, J.P. Crawford, Logan Gilbert, Luke Raley, Josh Naylor, Mitch Garver, Cole Young, Randy Arozarena, Dominic Canzone, Rob Refsnyder, Connor Joe, Jose A. Ferrer, Eduard Bazardo, Andres Munoz \[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="6000"\] ![ Seattle Mariners shortstop J.P. Crawford (3) hits a two-run home run during the sixth inning against the Atlanta Braves at T-Mobile Park. Mandatory Credit: Stephen Brashear-Imagn Images ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1d/f2/1df2f77b-83dd-4bc0-a6d2-6d1bb5df89a3/content/images/2026/10/j-p--crawford-go-ahead-homer-format-original.jpg) Seattle Mariners shortstop J.P. Crawford (3) hits a two-run home run during the sixth inning against the Atlanta Braves at T-Mobile Park. Mandatory Credit: Stephen Brashear-Imagn Images \[/caption\] Home runs are thrown, not hit. That is an adage that holds up among the best and most consistent hitters in the game, who take what is given to them and do the most they can with it, whether that means lining one the other way or launching it in the air. When a hitter tries to force a home run on a pitch that won’t allow it, there are a whole lot of outcomes like strikeouts and rolled-over grounders that end up much worse for the hitter. Paradoxically, this also means that home runs are determined by the hitter. Pitchers who allow fly balls will allow home runs, but it’s up to the hitter to put that swing on it when it comes. A lot of hitters tried to hit homers on Monday night in Seattle as the Braves took on the Mariners, the visitors white-hot and the home crew struggling. While nobody could get it done with the bases loaded, six hits left the yard: four for Atlanta and two for Seattle, but the M’s got theirs with men on base and won 5-4\. ### Logan Gilbert got through six innings by the skin of his teeth, with three solo shots coming in the last frame. Gilbert’s efficiency issues over the past two seasons are well documented. After throwing a combined 3.8 pitches per plate appearance from 2022 through 2024, Gilbert threw 5.2 per plate appearance from May 2025 through the end of 2025\. Batters’ adjusted to his style of pitching, laying off the splitter thanks to the predictability of its usage, but they still had issues squaring up the pitches, jacking up his pitch counts thanks to tons of foul balls and good takes. His pitches per plate appearance had gone down to a hair under four over his first seven starts of 2026\. But his pitches per *inning* remained elevated, from 14.6 in 2024 to 16.5 in 2025 and 16.9 in 2026. The cause for this was simple: the foul balls were starting to become balls in play. This has been intentional on the part of Gilbert and the Mariners, with the addition of a cutter to his arsenal meant to draw soft contact. While he had been unlucky on the batting average on balls in play (BABIP) front with the cutter, going into the game with a .412 opposing BABIP on that pitch, he had still given up a 47.1% hard hit rate on the cutter. That wasn’t nearly as much as the 61.5% hard hit rate against Gilbert’s slider going into Monday’s game, however. He still gets plenty of whiffs on it, but as the Braves showed early, it can get mashed. Atlanta’s first hitter was Drake Baldwin, and on a 1-1 slider at the bottom edge of the strike zone, Baldwin teed off, sending the ball 426 feet to center field. At the drop of a hat, it was 1-0 for the visitors. Gilbert’s first nine outs came on a mix of stellar strikeouts and a whole lot of hard contact. Ozzie Albies and Matt Olson looked silly on a buried splitter and slider, respectively, before Mauricio Dubón stung a liner right to Julio Rodríguez in center. The Braves put three balls in play in the second, all above 95 miles an hour, and yet it was lineout, hit, double play to get Gilbert a quick frame. The Braves’ first dink-and-dunk hit, a dribbler to the left side of the infield by nine-hole Jorge Mateo, got a rally going for Atlanta, and the next four plate appearances were a mix of two walks and two hard hit balls in the air. Thankfully for Gilbert, both of those fly balls went into Randy Arozarena’s glove and the first came before the second walk had put a man on third. Despite giving up eight hard hit balls out of nine balls in play, Gilbert’s only run in the first three innings had arrived on a solo shot. Surprisingly, the nailbiting third was followed by a restful fourth and fifth for the Mariners hurler, who had a good beat on mixing eye levels and pitch types, showing good feel for just about everything in his arsenal. His shakiest moment of those two frames was when he reflexively threw two non-competitive splitters upon getting Mateo to two strikes, but he went right back in the zone and got the out anyway. But just like in 2025, when he had a 9.58 ERA in the frame, the sixth inning had been tough for Gilbert in 2026 - and that continued on Monday. He threw Albies a 1-1 heater right down the middle; just like Baldwin in the first, he launched it over the center field fence. Olson saw a 2-1 slider that looked an awful lot like the one Gilbert threw to Baldwin, and the first baseman got the 300th home run of his career, the third of the game for Atlanta as the Braves went up 3-0. The visitors weren’t done hitting bombs. Gilbert fell behind Austin Riley two batters later, sent him a middle-middle-heater, and it was home run number four. But they were all solo shots, and the Braves’ lead was a manageable - though quite dire - four. “They say solo homers won’t be too horrible,” Gilbert said after the game, “It’s not ideal, but like I said, it held true tonight.” That hits at a nugget of baseball wisdom few should forget: a pitcher can give up any one of homers, hits, or walks at a time. But if he gives up any two of those at once, he’s in big trouble. Two of the homers had been on essentially the same pitch, the slider on the lower edge of the plate but over the middle in the east-west side of things. “Yeah, they hit a couple homers on good ones down, so honestly, don’t really want to overthink it,” Gilbert said of the bombs hit by Baldwin and Olson. “Sliders are supposed to go down, so I’m going to keep throwing it there.” Well, depending on the definition of “there” \[1\], Gilbert might find that he gets touched up more than he would like. When it comes to the area around the bottom edge of the strike zone - termed “attack zone 18” on StatCast - sliders have either been really fruitful or really not in 2026, with a 42.1% whiff rate, 20% strikeout rate, but also a 75% hard hit rate. When such pitches were in the strike zone half of that attack zone, they had a 1.250 OPS against; while when low-but-close, they had a .500 OPS against. But Gilbert still has to hit the strike zone at least some of the time with those pitches, or else they won’t get swings. While the samples for 2026 aren’t large enough at this granular of detail, when he hits the spots in that lower attack zones (17, 18, and 19, to include the corners) that *also* are on the edges of the plate, he has garnered a .666 opposing OPS with the slider since 2025 - something the BABIP data (.455) indicates would be an overperformance on the hitters’ part. It should be noted that few pitchers in the game can be that pinpoint. Generally down-but-close is still Gilbert’s best zone for sliders, so he can live with some hard contact if it makes everything else better. Still, if he can hit the corners more consistently, he should. The real issues were the middle-middle meatballs that produced the other home runs; those are far more preventable. ### Seattle couldn’t produce in open play as too many hitters tried for glory. Up and down the lineup, the M’s were trying to kill everything they saw over the plate. J.P. Crawford had two big hacks in hitter’s counts to start off, but the thing about his approach is that, when he is on his A-game, he will be very situational: dialing back that kind of swing with two strikes and taking his walks when he gets them, as he did in that inning with his first of two free passes. But it seemed the urge to try and force homers - rather than let their own abilities do the work - was overpowering across the board. Even with runners on first and second in the bottom of the second, noted contact hitter Cole Young tried to hit a middle-middle fastball 500 feet rather than putting the kinds of solid swings on the ball that had led to his now-fizzled hot streak. Neither Young nor catcher Mitch Garver nor third baseman Leo Rivas had a great day at the plate, with the bottom three hitters in the order going 0-10 with one walk, one hit by pitch, and five strikeouts. Braves starter JR Ritchie, a born-and-bred Bainbridge Islander, had a solid homecoming, moving quickly through the Mariners lineup even two outs into the fifth. But as a two-strike curveball got away from him and hit Leo Rivas, Seattle began to put something together. Crawford worked a seven-pitch base on balls and Rodríguez took four straight balls for a walk of his own. Josh Naylor had a table set for him, men on every base. Naylor was overeager. He tried to kill a fastball above the zone and found himself jammed on an up-and-in heater, rolling one over to Olson at first and the Mariners were still runless. Even after the two bombs cemented a Mariners lead, the team failed to put insurance on the board in the seventh. Naylor rocked a leadoff double against lefty reliever Aaron Bummer, and although Arozarena made a harmless out, pinch-hitters Rob Refsnyder and Connor Joe loaded the bases with a single and a walk, respectively. Young found himself stymied, the road trip hero all out of juice as he struck out on four pitches. While Garver’s walk in the previous inning had been the tying run, he didn’t reach base either and the inning ended. Because of the sixth, however, neither the fifth or seventh mattered. ### Sixth inning home runs from Luke Raley and J.P. Crawford flipped the game on its head and gave the Mariners the winning runs. Braves manager Walt Weiss had squeezed the last bit of juice from his starter to get out of the fifth. Luckily for the M’s, he didn’t realize it until it was too late. Ritchie threw four uncompetitive balls to Arozarena leading off. While he was a bit closer against Canzone, the designated hitter walked on five pitches. Luke Raley got ahead as Ritchie tossed a curveball away and turned hard on a cutter up and in, but pulled it foul. The starter’s final pitch of the game was a curve that dropped right over the heart of the plate. “I was out in front of something hard, so I was looking for something soft, and got a good one to hit,” Raley told Mariners TV’s Angie Mentink after the game. “You just gotta stay calm, let it get there, and not try to do too much.” Raley sent it several rows deep into the right field stands. The M’s were within a run of the Braves with one swing. Like the Braves’ homers, it was thrown; like those earlier bombs, the potential homer had been turned into a real homer with a good, solid swing that could have done many different things had the locations been different. Raley, who had knocked just two hits in his previous 31 at-bats, needed the change of fortunes. After he raised the trident in the dugout, he went over to director of hitting strategy Edgar Martinez and gave him a big hug. “I’ve been scuffling a little bit as of late, and I’ve just been talking to Edgar a lot,” Raley said. “We made some adjustments yesterday.” Seattle wasn’t done with the fireworks. Tyler Kinley came in for Ritchie and got two of the next three men out, but a walk to Garver set Crawford up with a man on and two outs. Despite a .658 OPS going into Monday’s game, Crawford had been putting in some great at-bats, with a low chase rate (17.9%) and low whiff rate (16.4%) leading to 20 walks and 18 strikeouts in 115 plate appearances. Once again, he was a pest to the opposing pitcher, fouling off a tough two-strike pitch and taking a couple more out of the zone to get himself to 3-2. All game long, Crawford had been making big swings when the situation allowed it. Sometimes, he can get too overeager with such hacks, but in his dialed-in state on Monday night, he didn’t miss Kinley’s backed-up, low-and-in slider. “Some guys throw more off-speed, so kind of take a shot to sit on that,” Crawford said of his approach against Kinley, who threw him nothing but curveballs and sliders in that at-bat. “I’d seen all off-speed, so if he’s going to do it all that time, 3-2, he’s probably gonna throw it again.” Crawford knocked it about a mile in the air, a 39-degree moonshot that wouldn’t have had the distance if it had gone anywhere but right down the right field line - which is, of course, exactly where the ball went. The Mariners led 5-4. ### A stretched-thin Mariners bullpen got the job done with the only three top guys available. Seattle got injury news earlier on Monday that did nothing but compound already steep bullpen woes. Just days after Matt Brash went to the IL, so did Gabe Speier, and Seattle’s core of five high-end relievers was down to three: Jose A. Ferrer, Eduard Bazardo, and Andrés Muñoz. Each of them were dialed in on Monday. Ferrer went four outs, coming back to get Olson in the eighth, and Bazardo got two more in the penultimate frame without issue. But it was then off to the closer. Muñoz hadn’t opened 2026 the way anyone would have liked, with a 6.23 ERA in his first 14 outings of the season. But a big chunk of that was from the mother of all unlucky outings in San Diego, and some of the rest had to do with bad defense behind him. Still, with a blown save just two days prior that robbed Emerson Hancock of a much-deserved win, there weren’t any guarantees. Atlanta pinch-hit Dominic Smith with two outs and got a single, which Weiss turned into a double with a timely pinch-runner José Azocar. But as Baldwin softly grounded out to second, the M’s had taken the first game of the series. ### On Deck The Atlanta Braves have yet to lose a series in the 2026 season. Seattle’s win on Monday night pushed the MLB leaders to “just” 25-11, a figure which still marks a .694 winning percentage. George Kirby (3.00 ERA, 3.66 FIP, 3.83 xFIP in seven starts and 45 innings) will have the task of breaking that opening streak for the Braves. Up against him on Atlanta’s side of the bump will be Bryce Elder (1.88 ERA, 3.12 FIP, 3.97 xFIP in seven starts and 43 innings). \[1\] That, of course, depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is.