Cal Raleigh crushes No. 41, but Mariners drop series finale to Angels

ANAHEIM, Calif. – One pitch and one call doesn’t make a difference until it does.

Logan Gibert cruised through four innings against the Los Angeles Angels on Sunday afternoon. He allowed just one base runner. He struck out six. It looked like it was going to be another strong performance building on the 6 1/3 shutout innings Gilbert tossed in his last start against Milwaukee.

And then it all crumbled with a forgettable fifth inning that started with a blown strike three call and Gilbert never recovered from. The Angels scored four times in the frame – highlighted by another Mike Trout home run to be added to his career highlight reel against Seattle – and went on to a 4-1 win over the M’s and a split of the four-game series at Angel Stadium.

“Logan seemed like he was cruising, just a couple of free bases there in the fifth and not able to bounce back from that,” M’s manager Dan Wilson said. “Just a tough way to end a good series.”

Wilson tried to put a positive tone on the split, but the weekend was a missed opportunity for the M’s. While Houston was in the process of getting swept at home by the Athletics, the M’s lost frustratingly in extra innings Friday night and experienced an offensive power outage Sunday against soft-throwing Kyle Hendricks and his array of off-speed stuff that made his 86 mph fastball work effectively.

The M’s conclude this road trip with three games in West Sacramento against those red-hot A’s starting Monday. And remember those forgotten about Rangers? They’ve won six straight, nine of their last 10 coming out of the All-Star break and are now even with the Mariners in the standings with a four-game series next weekend at T-Mobile Park looming as much more significant than the last time the teams saw each other in late June in Texas.

The entirety of the M’s offense was limited to Cal Raleigh’s continued rewriting of records by catchers. Raleigh hit his 41st homer of the season leading off the seventh inning against Hendricks, a 421-foot shot to center field. He tied Todd Hundley for the most home runs by a switch-hitting catcher in a single season, set in 1996.

Hundley’s mark came in a full season. Raleigh reached the number on July 27.

But that was the lone highlight for the M’s on a weekend where they were entirely too reliant on the long ball. Of the 14 runs scored in the series, 11 came via the home run. They almost scored another that way, but J.P. Crawford was robbed of a homer by Jo Adell’s leaping grab at the wall in center an inning before Raleigh’s home run.

The only other hit for Seattle was Josh Naylor’s line drive single leading off the fifth inning.

“The way to really get the offense going is to be able to score consistently without the home run and we were able to do that last night,” Wilson said. “That’s what we’re looking to do. That’s what we’re going to get back to, get on base, create the traffic, create the pressure.”

Raleigh’s 41st might have been more influential in the final outcome if not for the trouble Gilbert created for himself in the fifth inning that started when home plate umpire Charlie Ramos missed what appeared to be a pair of potential strike three calls to Travis d’Arnaud. They were botched calls that led to a leadoff walk and calls that an automated balls and strikes system expected in the future would have corrected.

In the moment Gilbert said he was uncertain if either pitch was a strike, even if his immediate reaction on the mound seemed to indicate he did.

But the responsibility is on Gilbert to overcome those human errors and in that regard he failed badly with how the rest of the inning played out. He seemed irritated, lost command and walked Luis Rengifo and hit Gustavo Campero when he squared to sacrifice bunt to load the bases.

“I thought I got him, but I wasn’t confident enough to think that he blew the call,” Gilbert said. “I didn’t know when I was out there if it was actually a strike or not, but regardless, after that if a guy was trying to put down a bunt, just throw the ball in the zone. Little simple things that I just didn’t do a good job of especially in that inning.”

Kevin Newman’s soft ground ball scored d’Arnaud and the Mariners were unable to turn the double play. But Gilbert’s control issues continued. He spiked a slider in front of the plate that Raleigh couldn’t block and Rengifo scored on the wild pitch. Another poorly located slider to Zach Neto nearly became a double but Randy Arozarena made a strong running catch for the second out.

Then there was the fastball to Trout. The Mariners kept their longtime nemesis quiet for most of the series, beating him with fastballs in or at the top of the strike zone. Gilbert struck out Trout in the first two at-bats working up with the fastball and then getting him with a splitter.

But the 1-0 fastball he threw to Trout the third time up could not have been in a worse spot, even if Gilbert felt the pitch location wasn’t the problem. Belt high. Over the plate. And Trout did what he’s done 54 previous times vs. the M’s – he hit it a very long way.

“I don’t think I missed there. It was more just getting 1-0 and then basically sequencing him the same way we did the first two at-bats. We got him and had a good plan, but a hitter like that we probably needed to give him a different look there,” Gilbert said.

The 443-foot homer was his third longest of the season. It also vaulted Trout over the 1,000 RBI mark in his career and while it felt like most of those have come against the M’s, it was only his 136th and 137th.

Gilbert’s final line was only three hits allowed and seven strikeouts. But four runs, three walks and only five innings is not what the M’s were expecting to see after his last start.

“Just slightly out of whack there and didn’t really make an adjustment to get it back,” Gilbert said.