This time, Jake Bauers had just enough distance.
After almost hitting the go-ahead home run in the fifth inning, only to see it caught at the center-field wall, Bauers hit his first homer as a member of the Mariners, just over the wall and out of the reach of Minnesota’s Nick Gordon in the eighth inning.
The solo blast proved to be the difference in Seattle’s 4-3 victory over the Twins.
The Mariners got solid relief work as JT Chargois, Paul Sewald and Drew Steckenrider combined to pitch the final four innings scoreless, allowing Seattle to come back from an early 3-1 deficit.
When Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred tries to highlight the improvement in pace of play from the 2021 season, he will not use the first inning of Monday's game as an example of it.
It took 35 minutes to complete the first inning. Mariners starter Marco Gonzales allowed three soft singles, including a run-scoring looper off the bat of Trevor Larnach. He needed 25 pitches and faced six batters to get out of the inning, striking out Miguel Sano to end the inning.
Twins starter Kenta Maeda, who was activated from the 10-day injured list before the game, had minimal feel of his pitches and even lesser interest in working with pace or rhythm, throwing 33 pitches in the bottom of the first. After striking out J.P. Crawford to start his outing, he walked the next three batters in order to load the bases. The Mariners failed to take advantage of his wildness, perhaps lulled to lethargy with his time in between pitches. Dylan Moore popped out and Bauers struck out to end the inning.
Both pitchers found a little better pace and quicker outs over the next few innings. Maeda didn’t work much faster, but he struck out the side in the second, allowed a run in the third on a RBI single from Jake Fraley and worked a scoreless fourth.
Working on a pitch limit, Maeda was done after four innings and 76 pitches. He allowed just the one run on three hits with three walks and seven strikeouts.
In his third since coming off the injured list, Gonzales pushed his pitch count into the 90s, which is a signal that he is back to full strength. But he didn’t pitch with his preferred efficiency or reach his desired innings total. Gonzales pitched five innings, allowing three runs on eight hits with two walks and five strikeouts.
Besides a 1-2-3 second inning, Gonzales had runners on base in each of his five innings. But he didn’t have runners on base at key times, specifically when Alex Kiriloff led off with a solo homer to center to start the fourth inning and rookie Gilberto Celestino hit a solo homer two batters later. The two solo blasts pushed Minnesota’s lead to 3-1.
Perhaps buoyed by the chance to face a different pitcher, who didn’t possess a devastating splitter and spent less time between throwing them, the Mariners immediately scored two runs against Maeda’s replacement, right-hander Luke Farrell. Fraley worked his second walk of the game and scored from first base on Ty France’s double down the third base line. With one out in the inning, Moore, who had failed in his previous two at-bats with runners in scoring position, sent a ball off the wall in deep center that Celestino couldn’t glove as he went face first into the wall. It was a standup triple for Moore that tied the game at 3-3.
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