Mariners can’t complete comeback, drop finale against Padres in 11 innings
The Mariners couldn’t pull off a comeback in extra innings Sunday afternoon at Petco Park, on their final day in San Diego, and return home to begin the final week of the regular season having lost five of their past six.
After Seattle rallied to tie the game in the eighth, and again in the 10th, everything unraveled in the 11th, as the Mariners dropped a 7-4 loss to the Padres.
“That was a little bit of everything,” Mariners manager Scott Servais said on a postgame video call. “Really good pitching, some big home runs, some extra-innings drama ... but heck of an effort by our team today. Really happy about how we went about it, and really grinded through the ballgame.”
The Padres scored the decisive run as part of a three-run 11th, when Mitch Moreland dropped a double off Casey Sadler just fair in front of Tim Lopes in left to score designated runner Manny Machado from second. A Jurickson Profar single back up the middle then scored Moreland. And, a fielding error by Dylan Moore allowed former Mariner Austin Nola to slide across for the final run.
The Padres clinched a trip to the postseason with the win, and in turn further dampened Seattle’s playoff hopes.
The Mariners loss, paired with an Astros win at home Sunday against the Diamondbacks, leaves Seattle (23-30) four games back of its American League West rival in the battle for the division’s second playoff spot with seven games to go. The Astros arrive in Seattle on Monday for a three-game series at T-Mobile Park.
“We’re ready to go back,” Servais said. “There’s no question about that. The entire time, I give our guys a ton of credit. Didn’t hear any complaining, anything else about the situation we’re at. It’s just … the hand we were dealt, we’ve got to play the cards that are in our hand, and I can’t fault our effort at all on this entire trip.
“The guys, they come in, they’re preparing like they should, they’re learning, they’re making adjustments along the way, and these are meaningful games for us. We’re learning a lot from it, and we’ve got some more meaningful ones, a big series coming up against the Astros. We’re excited to get back home, get into familiar surroundings again, and hopefully get those bats going.”
The Mariners, playing in their third extra-innings game this season, traded runs with the Padres in the 10th. San Diego pushed designated runner Jorge Mateo across on a bloop single from Fernando Tatis Jr. off Yoshihisa Hirano to make it 4-3, but Seattle fired back with two fly balls in the bottom half of the inning to move their designated runner up, with J.P. Crawford’s sac fly to left scoring Lopes. Moore doubled with two outs, but Trevor Rosenthal struck out Kyle Lewis to end the threat with the game still tied.
It seemed the Mariners would stumble to their fourth loss in this five-game “homestand” in California without much argument until Luis Torrens opened the eighth with a pinch-hit single, and then Moore ripped a two-run homer to left to tie the game at 3-3.
“Huge opportunity for our guys to to learn and be able to execute late in the game like that,” Servais said.
Moore’s eight homer of the season got Mariners rookie Justin Dunn off the hook for what would have been a frustrating loss, given how well Dunn fared until facing his final batter.
Dunn was one pitch away from posting his fourth quality start in five appearances. He was one pitch away from his third one-hit, scoreless outing of this shortened baseball season.
But, Dunn’s ninth start didn’t quite unfold that way. Instead of returning to the dugout having completed six scoreless innings while protecting a slim one-run lead, Dunn returned having recorded only two outs in the fifth before reaching his pitch limit, and suddenly trailing.
Dunn’s final pitch against the Padres — he threw a career-high 106 in 5 2/3 innings — was his only meaningful mistake in another otherwise solid outing. The Padres sent 22 batters to the plate before Dunn finally relinquished a two-out, ground-rule double to Moreland in the sixth that gave San Diego a pair of runners in scoring position with two outs.
With Dunn already at 101 pitches, pitching coach Pete Woodworth made a mound visit, undoubtedly letting Dunn know Wil Myers would be his final batter. Dunn and Myers were locked in a 2-2 count, with Dunn one pitch from escaping the inning, before Myers jumped a slider and planted it beyond the fence in straightaway center to give the Padres a 3-1 lead.
“It stings right now, but this situation will come up again, for sure, in my career,” Dunn said. “And hopefully next time I’m able to make the pitch, and I definitely think that having this experience will help.”
Dunn was pulled then, allowing the three runs on two hits, walking four and matching his career-high with six strikeouts. Anthony Misiewicz took over, and got the final out of the inning, but the score held until Moore’s game-tying, two-run homer in the eighth.
Dunn matched the intensity of Padres ace Dinelson Lamet — who allowed one run on two hits with two walks and 10 strikeouts in six innings — from the first frame. Neither pitcher allowed a hit through the first four innings.
“I wanted to do everything I could to give my team a chance to win, and going up against an arm like Lamet, who is up for the Cy Young, I knew I had to be on my game from pitch one until the last one,” Dunn said. “So, a lot of mental focus today.”
Lamet allowed the game’s first hit on an Evan White single in the fifth. Lopes followed up with a double down the line, and White, even after losing his helmet in the base path and slipping on the bag as he rounded third, beat the throw home for Seattle’s first run.
Dunn held the lead there until Myers’ homer in the sixth. He worked around walks in a pair of innings early, and after the Padres put two on with one out in the third — on a hit by pitch and a walk — Dunn worked a fly out from Tatis and struck out Eric Hosmer to end the threat.
It seemed he would find his way out of trouble again in the sixth after issuing his fourth walk of the game to Hosmer with one out. Dunn struck out Machado — his only strikeout this season facing a Mariners pitcher in 27 plate appearances — for the second out before Moreland’s double and Myers’ go-ahead homer.
“I think where we’re at, we’re trying to give those young starters an opportunity to work through it, and he was throwing the ball so well,” Servais said. “Obviously Moreland hit the double there ... and (Dunn) had handled Myers earlier in the ballgame pretty well. And that was probably going to be his last hitter, whether he got him or not.
“He got down in the count, he made a mistake, and I know he’s upset. I don’t want that whole outing to be clouded by one bad pitch, because he certainly took a huge step forward today in what he’s trying to get accomplished and learn from and grow from. Again, one bad pitch, it cost him there at the end, but he’ll learn from it, and the only way you learn is you’ve got to be out in those spots. And he’ll take a lot of good from that.”
Erik Swanson, Yohan Ramirez and Kendall Graveman each pitched scoreless innings in the seventh, eighth and ninth.
This story was originally published September 20, 2020 at 5:17 PM.
