DETROIT — Victor Robles saw an opening.
The Seattle Mariners’ outfielder, notorious for his ambitious exploits on the basepaths, watched as a wayward throw from left fielder Riley Greene caromed through the legs of Detroit Tigers catcher Dillon Dingler. Robles had initially been held up by third-base coach Kristopher Negron after J.P. Crawford dropped a single into left field, but as the ball skipped away from Dingler, plans changed.
With pitcher Jack Flaherty scrambling to recover the ball, Robles embarked on a mad dash toward home. Flaherty hurried the ball to Dingler, but Robles slid in safely just in the nick of time. 1-0 Mariners.
At that moment — in the top of the third inning of ALDS Game 3 — Robles’ run felt enormously consequential. Runs tend to come at a premium in October, as demonstrated by these clubs trading narrow 3-2 victories in the first two games of the series. And after two scoreless frames to open Game 3 on Tuesday, it seemed like Detroit and Seattle were destined for yet another tense and tight ballgame.
[Get more Seattle news: Mariners team feed]
As it turned out, Robles’ bold gambit to capitalize on Detroit’s unusual sequence of defensive miscues was merely the opening act in what turned out to be a fairly lopsided contest. Over the remainder of the game, nearly every member of the Mariners’ roster contributed, while very few Tigers could muster much of anything. The excitement of a Comerica Park sellout crowd of 41,525 who had waited to welcome their team home after two grueling weeks on the road — plus another three hours due to rain that delayed first pitch — slowly dissipated as the Mariners coasted to an 8-4 victory.
Flaherty looked comfortable in the early going, but Robles’ double to lead off the third and subsequent scoring sparked an uptick in both confidence and production from Seattle’s hitters. The chaos involved in Robles’ run enabled Crawford to get to second base on the play, which immediately proved costly when Randy Arozarena drove him in with a single in the next at-bat, making it 2-0 Mariners.
Returning to the mound for the fourth inning with hopes of calming things down against the bottom of the Mariners’ lineup, Flaherty was greeted by an authoritative swing from slugger Eugenio Suárez, who pummeled a poorly placed fastball deep to left field for a solo home run.
Flaherty’s outing concluded shortly thereafter, but reliever Tommy Kahnle was unable to escape the inning without further damage. He surrendered an RBI single to Cal Raleigh to make it 4-0 Mariners.
Opposite Flaherty’s abbreviated outing was a strong effort from Seattle starter Logan Gilbert, who completed six frames while allowing just one run on 85 pitches. Although Gilbert didn’t walk any batters, his command wasn’t pinpoint by any stretch, with several offerings sailing far from their intended target, especially in the early frames. No matter. His trio of primary pitches — a four-seam fastball sitting at 95 mph, a sharp slider that kept diving below barrels and a splendid splitter that was dancing all over the zone — had so much life that Tigers hitters conjured few competent swings against him.
“It was nice trying to work everything in there tonight, and Cal always does a great job seeing what’s working, what we need to go to, so I just try to follow his lead,” Gilbert said afterward. “I didn’t get a ton of first-pitch strikes, which I try to focus on. But after that, I felt like I did a pretty good job making pitches when I needed to.”
With the Tigers struggling to find any offensive momentum against Gilbert, the Mariners continued to add on. Crawford was especially busy, torching a solo homer off lefty reliever Brant Hurter in the sixth and lofting a sacrifice fly to score Luke Raley after Raley advanced to third when Tigers right fielder Kerry Carpenter dropped a fly ball from Robles — another Tigers defensive miscue capitalized upon.
And just when it seemed like Seattle’s night couldn’t be going any better, an exclamation point of extraordinary happenstance unfolded in the top of the ninth. The play itself — a two-run home run by Raleigh to make it 8-1 Mariners — was not especially unusual, given the hitter involved and the relatively low leverage. But Raleigh’s blast bounced into the Seattle bullpen beyond the left-field fence and landed in the hands of a Mariners fan named Jameson Turner, who was wearing a custom-made teal shirt with a silver “DUMP 61 HERE” emblazoned on the front, a nod to the Mariners’ backstop’s “Big Dumper” moniker and 60 long balls in the regular season.
After celebrating catching the ball, Turner immediately ripped off the garment to reveal “DUMP 62 HERE” on a different shirt, extending the bit with perfection.
“That’s crazy,” Raleigh said postgame. “What are the odds?”
Adding to the improbable nature of the sequence was where Turner was sitting. Raleigh hit 38 home runs left-handed in the regular season, but just five of them were to the opposite field. He picked a pretty good time to hit a sixth.
“I was like, no way,” marveled Mariners reliever Gabe Speier, who was in the bullpen when Raleigh’s home run found its unlikely destination. “The only guy in the whole stadium with that shirt!”
It didn’t take long for Turner to realize the kind of attention he had just seized. After the game, he was invited into the tunnel outside the Mariners’ clubhouse to meet Raleigh and take the perfect picture. As a wide-eyed Turner spoke to a group of reporters, Mariners general manager Justin Hollander walked by and insisted that he needed a picture with Turner as well.
Improbable circumstances aside, Raleigh’s home run represented an emphatic final blow in what was a comprehensive effort from the Mariners’ lineup. Even in a game in which 3-4-5 hitters Julio Rodriguez, Jorge Polanco and Josh Naylor combined to go 0-for-14, Seattle scored eight runs on eight hits.
The potential of the Mariners lineup is sometimes obscured at home, in the hitter-unfriendly confines of T-Mobile Park, but its potency has been on display away from Seattle all season. The Mariners ranked second in MLB in road OPS in the regular season, behind only the Yankees, and were tied with New York for most home runs away from home, with 134 in 81 games. That ability to mash as the visiting squad provided more than enough offense to secure a Game 3 victory and 2-1 lead in this series.
“We had two games where we pitched tremendously well, and we had a lot of parts of this game where we pitched tremendously well. But listen, this is the playoffs,” Detroit manager A.J. Hinch said afterward. “And I keep saying they got here for a reason, too. And they won some of the at-bats and certainly hit the ball out of the ballpark a couple times. …
“They do hit homers when you make mistakes, but we’re going to play the rest of this series out and see if we can answer the challenge of getting through this lineup and putting up more runs.”
Although the Tigers’ effort in Game 3 didn’t inspire much confidence in their ability to extend this series further, Seattle’s pitching plans for Game 4 on Wednesday might allow Detroit to make things interesting. On the mound for the Mariners will be right-hander Bryce Miller, the 27-year-old who shined as a second-year starter in 2024 but has been extremely ineffective across an injury-marred 2025, with a 5.68 ERA and troubling underlying data that confirms opponents have been squaring him up with regularity.
Miller is being relied on in this spot because the Mariners are without their top starter in the regular season, Bryan Woo, who isn’t on the ALDS roster due to a pec injury suffered in September. The Mariners have done well to secure a lead in the series before asking Miller to tackle this high-stakes assignment, but Woo’s absence undeniably opens the door for a scuffling Tigers offense to perhaps get something going against a pitcher who has struggled to limit hard contact and prevent runs.
On the other side, facing elimination at home, Casey Mize will take the ball for Detroit for his second start of the postseason after an unremarkable three innings vs. the Guardians in Game 2 of the wild-card round. The former No. 1 pick will be tasked with slowing down a Seattle lineup starting to find its groove, but his efforts might be moot if the Tigers’ bats can’t wake up themselves. Before first pitch Wednesday afternoon, this Detroit team will need to flush Tuesday’s collective letdown and find a way to rediscover some positive baseballing energy, the kind that helped propel them to a terrific first half of the season.
“We’ve earned our way here, and we’ve had to play more and more back-against-the-wall-type games. I know our guys are going to be ready,” Hinch said. “We knew it wasn’t going to be easy. We knew it wasn’t going to be hand-gifted to us. We’re going to have to earn it and play better in all aspects against a really good team.
“And we can because we have a really good team, too.”
Read the full article here