The first night at Coors Field had it all. Specifically, all the possible infield permutations this Mariners roster could muster, shuffling J.P. Crawford and Cole Young around to give them a variety of vantage points for the 15 hits Seattle yielded to the Colorado Rockies as they somehow escaped with a 5-4 victory.
The M’s jumped out to a lead that evoked their recent series in Sacramento, and in keeping, they coughed up the 3-0 lead that the top of their order generously constructed for them right out of the gate. Crawford made sure this mission to mile-high altitudes would not come up homerless, cracking a solo shot in the first at-bat of the game off oft-injured Rockies RHP Gabriel Hughes. Randy Arozarena authored the first of his three hits, cracking a double that Dominic Canzone took as license to copy but Arozarena read sub-optimally off the bat, and Seattle seemed off to the races.
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It seemed like that misread would haunt the M’s with Cal Raleigh and Julio Rodriguez punching out, and while hitting the Josh Naylor 7-7-7 slots meant a rolled over grounder snuck through for a 2-RBI single with two outs, the pair of punchouts from Seattle’s stars were emblematic ones. For Raleigh, who’s looked far closer to his better self writ large in the past month and a half, it was nonetheless an eight-pitch punchout that came due to missing two center-cut fastballs by a hair, fouling them back before waving over a middle-middle slider in a 3-2 count. For Julio, the culprit was also three missed pitches in the zone, but two foul balls on bottom third sliders before a familiar frustration mostly new to 2026: staring at a fastball for strike three at the bottom rail.
Seattle would not be the major culprit of spoiled opportunities tonight, however. The Rox are a plucky club this year, with far more verve than their catastrophic 2025 season of a 43-119 season. But Colorado is likely to lose 100 games again this season, making it four straight campaigns with 100+ defeats, and tonight was a showcase in how. Despite a night where eight of their nine starters secured at least one hit, Colorado left 12 on base and went 4-for-20 with runners in scoring position, letting Bryan Woo wriggle out of danger time and time again to achieve a defensible 5.1 frames and just three earned runs. It could have easily been worse a dozen times over, and Seattle’s league-worst range on the infield created many of the conundrums Woo had to solve.
No pitcher looks stellar at Coors Field consistently, of course, and Seattle’s beleaguered bullpen deserves their kudos for tonight’s win. After Woo’s exit, Gabe Speier regrettably yielded the lead to breakout Rockies outfielder Jake McCarthy on a clobbered gap-shot triple and a RBI single in sequence, but from there it was nails. 3.1 frames followed Speier and despite runners reaching in each inning, not a single run crossed the plate again for Colorado.
It wasn’t much room, nor were Seattle’s precocious youngsters afforded much room to spark Seattle, but starting RF Lazaro Montes and pinch-hitter Michael Arroyo took their tag-team operation above the alpine. First, in the seventh, seeking a spark against southpaw from the past Brennan Bernardino, Arroyo aggressively took his chance in relief of Brock Rodden. He cracked a double down the third base line that looks familiar to anyone who’s watched Arroyo work through the minors, before dashing around the bases on a bunt and a sac fly. That set the stage for Laz, whose tour through the hitter-friendly parks of MLB has reached its zenith, visualizing and then manifesting a stratosphere-scraping second-decker to put the M’s up one in the ninth. Not even the speed of Cole Carrigg on base could stifle Seattle Friday night, as Andrés Muñoz managed a rare pickoff to clear the bases and quell the threat in the ninth. Not quite easy, but 5-4 with the players the M’s hope will help turn things around in 2027 is a pleasant way to start a series.
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