WEST SACRAMENTO -- Lawrence Butler crossed home plate like a switch-hitter, staring hard into the Athletics’ rowdy third-base dugout, before turning his attention back to the baseball.
Butler tossed his bat aside, then jogged backwards toward first base -- still facing his teammates -- to start an epic home run trot. His helmet was next to go, pitched underhand as Butler rounded third. It tumbled all the way across the first-base line while Butler skipped his way into home plate.
The Athletics’ most electric player had done it again.
Butler has had more than his share of big moments with the A’s, including a pair of three-homer games during a breakout 2024 and an inside-the-park home run last season. But he’d never had anything like Sunday’s two-run, walk-off homer to deliver an 8-7 win over the Mariners -- Butler’s first walk-off homer, he said, at any level.
“It’s amazing,” Butler said. “That’s probably the coolest thing I’ve done on the baseball field.”
Against Seattle closer Andrés Muñoz in the ninth, with Zack Gelof aboard at first after a leadoff single in a 7-6 game, Butler readied himself in the batter’s box. Muñoz missed with his first three pitches, and Butler, taking all the way, watched a 3-0 fastball over the plate for strike one.
He had no plans to look any further.
“If it’s in the zone,” Butler told himself, “I’m swinging.”
Muñoz’s next pitch was another fastball, right over the heart of the plate, and Butler tattooed it a Statcast-projected 402 feet to right-center for his second home run of the day. At 101.1 mph, it was the fastest pitch hit for a home run by an Athletics player under pitch tracking (since 2008, regular season and postseason).
The dinger completed an impressive comeback effort by the A’s, who trailed 6-2 before rallying for four runs in the seventh inning. Gelof and Butler -- who hit back-to-back home runs in the first inning -- were in the middle of things yet again, both working long at-bats before Shea Langeliers tied it with a two-run pinch-hit single.
“I thought this team fought as hard as they’ve fought all year,” A’s manager Mark Kotsay said.
A team that was eliminated from postseason contention earlier in the week again made it a point to drag down a division rival for good measure. At 70-79 coming into Sunday’s game, the Mariners’ postseason hopes were slim already, but they’re slimmer now.
It was the second win on a walk-off homer in three nights for the A’s, following Donovan Walton’s game-winning blast in the 10th inning on Friday, and it clinched a series victory -- not long after the A’s took three of four from the Mariners last weekend in Seattle.
“To have that fight and show that we still care about these games even though we’re out of it, it just says a lot about this ballclub,” said starting pitcher Jacob Lopez, who allowed five runs in 3 2/3 innings before his offense erased the deficit.
With Butler, at least, that fight is obvious. His OPS dipped below .500 in early June amid a dismal start to the season, but he stayed the course and was rewarded for it. In 54 games in the second half, Butler is batting .274 with 11 home runs, 36 RBIs and an .859 OPS.
“For Lawrence, what a day,” Kotsay said. “We talked a lot about Lawrence in terms of what he’s done over the last two and a half months. I think that today was just, like, the icing on the cake for him.”
Although it’s far too late to join the playoff race, Butler and the A’s have found their groove as the 2026 season winds down. They’ve won six of their past nine series, including three in a row, to inspire some confidence at the tail end of an injury-marred campaign.
“This group has really come together,” Kotsay said. “Obviously, it took a little while for us to come together. With all the injuries that we’ve dealt with, you might have seen this group a little earlier play the way that they’ve played the last nine series.”
Sunday’s dramatic win was the perfect example of what the resilient A’s can still accomplish.
“We just never quit,” Butler said. “No matter the score, no matter what inning it is, no matter how much time we have left in the game, we’re going to go at ’em and we’re going to go at ’em hard. We’re going to fight ’til the end. ’Til it’s over.”