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Mariners use chaos ball in 8th, rally for 2nd straight win over Astros

Ryan Divish, The Seattle Times on

Published in Baseball

Ryne Stanek didn’t need to look at the third-base dugout to see his former teammates as the final out was caught by Luke Raley in left field.

Nope, instead, he celebrated his scoreless ninth inning and closing out a 4-2 victory over the Astros at T-Mobile Park by locking arms with his teammate and participating in the Mariners postgame victory dance in front of them.

Seattle has now won the first two games of the four-game series and its last three games.

The Mariners found a little of the old chaos ball to take the lead against Astros in the eighth inning. Mitch Haniger led off with a double against Astros former closer Ryan Pressly and was replaced with pinch-runner Jonatan Clase. After failing to get a sac bunt down, rookie Ryan Bliss, playing in his second game, worked a walk off Pressly. With Clase having advanced to third on a wild pitch, the Mariners had runners on the corners with no outs.

With one out, Josh Rojas ripped a ground ball that went off the glove of Jose Abreu for a double to tie the game.

When Julio Rodriguez followed with a soft ground ball to third, Bliss was running on contact. Astros third baseman Alex Bregman looked to home but saw he had no play. With Rodriguez sprinting to first, Bregman rushed his throw and it got by Abreu, allowing Rojas to score an insurance run.

 

Seattle got a solid start from Luis Castillo, who pitched six innings, allowing two runs on five hits with two walks and six strikeouts. The two runs came in the fourth inning. After the Mariners couldn’t quite turn a double play to erase a leadoff runner on a Jeremy Pena ground ball, Alex Bregman hit a fly ball that just cleared the fence in left field for a two-run homer. Left fielder Luke Raley, who had robbed a homer earlier, didn’t quite have a play on it.

They would be the only runs he allowed the rest of the way. It was the ninth consecutive start where Castillo pitched five-plus innings and allowed two runs or fewer. Only Randy Johnson (10 games) and Felix Hernandez (17 games) had longer stretches of those starts in team history.

But it looked like the two runs allowed might have been two too many when the Mariners could only muster one run against Astros starter Hunter Brown.

The right-hander worked six innings, allowing one run on four hits with a walk and nine strikeouts. Seattle’s lone run off Brown came in the first inning on Rodriguez’s RBI single.


©2024 The Seattle Times. Visit seattletimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

 

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