The Seattle Mariners might be selling. They’re hanging around .500 aimlessly, are 5.5 games back from the Wild Card with four teams in front of them and even farther out of the AL West, and they just swung a trade to send reliever Mike Montgomery to the Cubs for Dan Vogelbach, with others involved.
And yet they still were able to tune up the Sox bullpen to snatch two games out of three, winning 6-5 in 11 innings Wednesday.
1. Leonys Martin‘s second home run of the game, and the third home run allowed on the day by the Sox bullpen, sealed a Mariners comeback from what was a 4-0 deficit in the second inning, and what was a 5-2 lead in the seventh.
Martin got a hanging slider from Dan Jennings–a poor reliever in his second inning of work–on an 0-2 count and drilled it out to left, giving the Mariners their second walk-off win of the week, after Adam Lind–who also homered Wednesday–walked it off on Monday. Thanks to a 1-5 west coast swing to start the second half, the Sox are now 10 games out of the AL Central, and have six teams in front of them for the final Wild Card. Six!
2. Jennings joined Nate Jones, who had Lind spray an outside fastball just over the left field bullpen to tie the game at 5-5 in the eighth, and Zach Duke, who came on in the seventh and allowed a massive two-run shot to the recently recalled Mike Zunino, among Sox relievers allowing home runs.
David Robertson, amusingly, pitched a perfect ninth inning and was the only reliever who wasn’t scored upon.
3. Besides ‘most handsome White Sox rotation member,’ Miguel Gonzalez will not earn any awards for his Wednesday performance, but was certainly functional over six innings and left with a 5-2 lead, which was also his strikeout-to-walk ratio. He was overly reliant on the lineout as a means to an end early on, and certainly earned every bit of the towering two-run bomb Martin launched off of him in the bottom of the second given the fat fastball he threw him.
Gonzalez still kept the Mariners scoreless through the sixth, and got taken out after a leadoff walk, only for the bullpen to nigh immediately add that as a run to his tab.
4. The White Sox offense was spunky enough–or so it was thought!–against a freshly activated from injury Felix Hernandez. When Hernandez didn’t get a call he wanted on a 3-2 delivery to walk Justin Morneau in the first, the Sox took advantage with Todd Frazier belting a three-run home run on the first pitch he’s ever seen from Hernandez. The next inning, Tyler Saladino, Adam Eaton and Melky Cabrera strung together three-straight two-out singles to plate another run, and Morneau made his first big contribution in the fifth when he drilled a high fastball for an RBI single to score Cabrera after a leadoff triple.
This all came with a getaway day lineup that rested Tim Anderson, still doesn’t have Alex Avila, and treats J.B. Shuck as a regular. They did ok, even well.
5. Jose Abreu went 0-for-4 and only reached base when Steve Cishek threw a slider at his butt. To his credit, he has one of the better statistical lines among players I consider it a nightmare to watch.
Team Record: 46-48
Next game is Thursday at 7:10pm CT vs. Detroit on CSN
Lead Image Credit: Joe Nicholson // USA Today Sports Images