Michael Arroyo belts first homer, Seattle Mariners clobber Athletics

Adam Jude, The Seattle Times on Sep 13, 2026

Published in Baseball

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WEST SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Show up. Play hard.

With two weeks left in a disappointing season, that’s the simple mindset the Seattle Mariners are taking with them to the ballpark.

What else can they really do at this point?

“The thing I tell myself is: ‘Show up,’” Julio Rodríguez said before Saturday night’s game. “‘Show up. Show up. Show up.’ … Things are tough for us right now. But, like, that’s the card that we drew for ourselves, and we just have to show up and play hard.”

The bats, indeed, showed up in a big way Saturday night.

Michael Arroyo blasted his first big-league home run to punctuate a five-homer night for the Mariners in a rousing 19-1 rout of the Athletics before a crowd of 10,289 at Sutter Health Park.

Dom Canzone and Randy Arozarena clubbed early homers to give the Mariners a 5-0 second-inning lead, and Cole Young, Arroyo and J.P. Crawford piled on in an emphatic bounce-back victory.

Weston Wilson went 4 for 6, Rodríguez, Arroyo, Young, Josh Naylor each had three hits, and the Mariners finished with season highs in hits (23) and runs (19).

The M’s came one hit shy of the team record (24) for hits in a game.

Their 19 runs are the most in a game since May 20, 2012, at Texas.

Their 23 hits are the most in a game since Sept. 22, 2004, at Anaheim.

The A’s eventually turned to a position player, Carlos Cortes, to record the last four outs for them.

It’s a position the players know all two well, having been blown out twice in the past month — 22-0 at Milwaukee and 19-2 to the Chicago Cubs at home.

They were due for something like this.

Rodríguez was the first out of the visitors’ dugout to greet Arroyo with the celebratory trident. Arroyo, a 21-year-old making his second big-league start, belted a 418-foot blast onto the roof of the clubhouse beyond left field in the seventh that would have been a homer in all 30 MLB parks.

Arroyo, in the lineup as the designated hitter, doubled in the fourth inning for his first major-league hit and added a 106-mph single in the eighth inning.

The blowout victory came 24 hours after ex-Mariner Donovan Walton’s walkoff, 10th-inning homer spoiled Seattle’s late comeback bid Friday, which felt in a lot of ways like a death knell for the Mariners’ playoff chances.

They are, mathematically, still alive.

And it helped, certainly, that the Mariners (70-79) won on a night when the Houston Astros (75-74) lost to the Tampa Bay Rays, pulling the M’s within five games of the AL West lead.

“We keep going,” M’s manager Dan Wilson said pregame Saturday. “I think the goal here is to cut that lead down as much as we can before we get home and face Houston. I mean, that’s where we’re at. Tough one (Friday) night, no question. But we’ve got to bounce back today.”

Bay Area native Bryan Woo continued his mastery of the Athletics, allowing one unearned run over six sharp innings, allowing just three hits with two walks and five strikeouts.

He threw a career-best eight shutout innings against these A’s last weekend in Seattle, allowing only one hit, and in his three September starts has allowed only one earned run over 20 innings.

He lowered his season ERA to 3.88.

In 12 career starts against the A’s, Woo has a 1.78 ERA with 72 strikeouts, 17 walks and 14 earned runs over 70.2 innings.