HOUSTON — Three first pitches. Three first-pitch swings. Three home runs.
Who says you need to have long, drawn out at-bats and work the count at the plate.
The Mariners again relied on the long ball on Friday night, this time hitting three homers on their way to a 5-3 win over the Astros in the second game of their four-game series before 34,664 at Daikin Park.
What made these three homers unique was the Mariners didn’t wait around. Leody Taveras homered on the first pitch of the third inning. Miles Mastrobuoni homered on the first pitch of the fifth inning, an opposite field fly ball that only would have been a home run in Houston thanks to the Crawford Boxes in left field.
But the biggest blow, and most majestic came off the bat of Raleigh.
With two outs in the seventh inning, Julio Rodríguez lined a game-tying double into the right field corner and J.P. Crawford was able to skirt around from first base to score and pull the Mariners even at 3-3. It was a risky send by third base coach Kristopher Negrón, but proved to be the right one. It also made up for an inning earlier when Negrón sent Raleigh after Taveras singled and watched the catcher get thrown out by 15 feet by left fielder Jose Altuve — which will forever be a strange sight after all his years at second base.
There was barely any time to react before Bryan Abreu’s next pitch, which was a slider that Raleigh attacked. And he attacked it almost too much as it curved down the right-field line and flirted with going foul before catching the foul pole.
For a moment, it appeared Raleigh’s moonshot had hit the cow — yes a cow — that’s atop the right-field foul pole as part of an advertisement for Chick-fil-A. Unfortunately, it didn’t hit the cow, but clanged off the yellow body of the foul pole.
His 17th homer vaulted Raleigh back into the American League lead and vaulted the Mariners to their sixth win in the first eight games of this road trip. It was also his 11th go-ahead home run in the seventh inning or later since the start of the 2022 season — the most in baseball.
It also made a winner out of M’s starter Emerson Hancock on a night he pitched well enough to deserve the victory. Building on his previous start last weekend in San Diego, Hancock (2-2) tossed six innings and while he allowed nine hits limited the damage to three runs.
Two of those runs came on Isaac Paredes’ homer into the Crawford Boxes, a fly ball that would have only been a homer in Houston and at Fenway Park. The Astros added another on Christian Walker’s sacrifice fly, although Hancock may have escaped that jam had a borderline pitch to the previous batter Yainer Diaz been called a strike by home plate umpire Brian O’Nora.
But Hancock’s effort was strong enough the Mariners could turn to their leverage arms of Matt Brash in the seventh and Carlos Vargas in the eighth. Houston pieced together a pair of two-out singles off Vargas, but Jeremy Peña hit into a force out to end the inning.
Then it was time for Andrés Muñoz, who retired Paredes, Altuve and Diaz for his 17th save and has still not allowed an earned run in 23 appearances.
Tavares homer was his second in three games and part of a three-hit game as the M’s continued to get contributions from the bottom of the batting order. Mastrobuoni’s homer was just the second of his career, with his only other one coming in July 2023 at Wrigley Field while playing for the Cubs.
But when it mattered, the stars that needed to deliver for the M’s came through. First Rodríguez and then Raleigh.