Mariners celebrate another walk-off win, this time thanks to Mitch Haniger
Mitch Haniger fouled off pitch after pitch, just getting hints of the baseball as he tried to find something from White Sox reliever Steven Wilson that he could handle.
He wasn’t going to strike out in this situation and allow the possibility of losing this game become a reality.
So on the sixth pitch he saw from Wilson, Haniger got just enough of the ball to make it matter. He was able to hit a slider off the end of the bat, looping a single into right field to score Luke Raley from second base and give the Mariners a 2-1 walk-off victory over the White Sox in 10 innings, Wednesday night at T-Mobile Park.
The Mariners have taken the first three games of the four-game series and will go for a sweep on Thursday. They improved to 40-30 on the season.
Bryce Miller delivered perhaps his best outing of the season. He carved up a White Sox lineup without Luis Robert, pitching seven scoreless innings and allowing two hits with two walks and eight strikeouts. The strategy wasn’t complicated. It essentially amounted to – “Here’s my fastball, prove to me you can hit it.”
The White Sox didn’t over the seven innings. Of his 92 pitches on the night, 49 were fastballs. He generated 11 swings and misses on the pitch, 17 foul balls and seven called strikes. That’s 35 fastballs for strikes that never got put into play. Chicago put five balls into play on fastballs on the four-seam fastball – none of them for hits.
After whipping a 95-mph fastball past Zach DeLoach, his former Texas A&M teammate, for a swinging strike three to end the seventh, the crowd of 23,312 gave him standing ovation.
His teammates even put him in line for a deserved victory.
After being stymied by White Sox starter Jonathan Cannon and held scoreless six innings, the Mariners were happy to welcome his replacement, Jordan Leasure, into the game.
With one out, Luke Raley smashed a solo homer into the right field seats to give Seattle a 1-0 lead.
It appeared that would be enough run support when Austin Voth, who replaced Miller, struck out all three batters he faced in the top of the eighth.
When Mike Baumann stepped on the mound to start the ninth, he had a chance to not only close out a 1-0 victory but end the game in under two hours. That possibility ended with Baumann’s first pitch of his outing. He left a 96-mph fastball on the inner half of the plate, belt-high to the wrong hitter.
Given a scheduled day off as he works his way back from an injury, Robert pinch hit for light-hitting Nicky Lopez in the top of the ninth. He mashed the mistake pitch, sending a line drive over the wall in left field for his second homer of the series and tying the game at 1.
Woo on track to return after ‘clean’ MRI on elbow, Mariners say
A day after Bryan Woo was scratched from his scheduled start and underwent an MRI on his right forearm, the Mariners were able to announce some positive news while feeling some level of relief about their talented young pitcher.
“His MRI was perfectly clean,” general manager Justin Hollander said.
When Woo was unable to throw his normal bullpen session after his start last Wednesday in Kansas City, the Mariners decided to exercise some caution and have him undergo another MRI. Woo had missed the first month of the season due to elbow and forearm inflammation.