SEATTLE – For a guy who has one of the most valuable fastballs in all of baseball, it felt a little incongruous that Bryan Woo threw a sweeper for his breakthrough pitch Saturday night.
It certainly caught the Angels’ Sebastián Rivero by surprise.
On a 1-2 count, Rivero took the sweeper right down the middle for strike three in the fifth inning, Woo’s 10th punchout of the game, establishing a new career high.
For good measure, Woo struck out the side in the sixth inning, getting Jo Adell to swing through a sweeper (there it is again) off the plate, the 100th and final pitch of the night for the Mariners’ emerging ace.
The Mariners kept pace with the Houston Astros atop the AL West with their eighth straight victory, a 5-3 final over the Angels, thanks to another dominant night from Woo before one of the best and rowdiest crowds of the season, 38,962 strong at T-Mobile Park.
J.P. Crawford hit the go-ahead home run off Angels rookie left-hander Mitch Farris in the fourth inning, and Josh Naylor won an 11-pitch battle with a groundball single to right field with the bases loaded in the fifth inning to drive in two more runs.
The Mariners (81-68) improved to 21-6 at home since the All-Star break.
Woo allowed two runs on three hits over six innings, retiring the final 13 batters he faced.
His 13 strikeouts and 22 swings-and-misses were both career highs.
A first-time All-Star, Woo has been a steadying force for a Mariners rotation hampered by injuries much of the season.
As the likes of Logan Gilbert, George Kirby and Bryce Miller round back into form here late in the season, Woo has remained the backbone of the pitching staff. And even as he cleared 180 innings Saturday – a career-high workload – he looks primed to lead this team back to the playoffs for the first time in his career.
Six times this season, Woo had struck out nine batters in a game. Getting over that double-digit hump, clearly, meant something to him, as he twirled around on the mound, exhaled and pointed to the sky.
Mariners catcher Cal Raleigh, after catching the fifth-inning sweeper on the Rivero strikeout, immediately tossed the baseball to the home dugout for Woo to have as a keepsake.
Woo allowed a solo homer to Adell in the second inning on a hanging slider, maybe the one mistake Woo made all night.
A soft single from Angels rookie Bryce Teodosio drove in another run to tie the score at 2-2.
Woo struck out Mike Trout to end the second and escape further damage, and he was dominant the rest of the way.
Jorge Polanco drove in Raleigh and Julio Rodriguez in the first inning with an opposite-field double to right field. It was the sixth straight game in which Polanco has had a double, and his eighth straight with an extra-base hit.
Crawford’s 391-foot blast in the fourth was his first homer since Aug. 3, and fourth against a lefty this season.
Taylor Ward hit a solo homer off Matt Brash in the ninth inning, but Brash rebounded to get a groundball double play and a strikeout to earn the save.