Woo's gem (9 K's, 7 scoreless) helps Mariners run win steak to 5 games

SEATTLE -- Coming off of his roughest outing of the month, a matchup with the Diamondbacks wasn’t necessarily the easiest recipe for a bounceback for Bryan Woo.

Woo didn’t care.

Flashing the stuff that earned him down-ballot AL Cy Young Award votes last year, Woo dominated the D-backs with nine strikeouts in seven scoreless innings in a 5-1 win, which stretched the Mariners’ winning streak to a season-best five games and put Seattle over .500 for the first time since the fifth game of the season.

And he did it by going strength-on-strength.

Arizona came into the day hitting a league-best .288 vs. fastballs. The D-backs’ .846 OPS vs. heaters ranked third, behind only the Dodgers and Yankees. Their 17.7% whiff rate vs. fastballs was tied for fourth lowest, and their 166 strikeouts on them were the fewest in baseball.

But Woo came out Saturday with his signature combination of the four-seamer that was tied for the fourth-most valuable pitch in baseball in run value last year and a sinker that had an even higher putaway percentage, and shoved.

It started with a heater-heavy first inning -- nine straight four-seamers to get a first-pitch lineout vs. Ketel Marte, strike out Corbin Carroll and put Geraldo Perdomo in a 1-2 hole, setting him up to stare at a perfect slider on the outside corner.

That put Woo in a groove, and he didn’t take his foot off the gas, retiring the first 13 D-backs of the night before Adrian Castillo broke up his perfect-game bid an out into the fifth.

Woo finished his night on 86 pitches, 59 of which were fastballs -- just about exactly the 86.4% usage rate he’s had all season. He finished with 14 whiffs on the night, seven of which came against fastballs.

Meanwhile, the Mariners gave Woo plenty of insurance early, driving four solo home runs in the span of seven batters between the second and third innings off D-backs starter Ryne Nelson.

Randy Arozarena started the big-fly barrage, ironically enough, with an out, driving a fly ball to dead center field that would have been a homer had the wind not blown it 16 feet back to the warning track, according to Statcast. Luke Raley would have no such ill luck six pitches later, launching a 3-2 fastball 390 feet out to right-center. A batter later, Dominic Canzone hit his second homer in three games.

Colt Emerson picked things back up in the bottom of the third with his second career home run, and Julio Rodríguez made it 4-0 with his 10th homer of May, extending his career high for a month.