SEATTLE -- Shortly before the Mariners’ dugout and the entirety of T-Mobile Park and perhaps all of the baseball fans in the Pacific Northwest were holding their breath waiting for Cal Raleigh’s game-tying home run ball to land on Friday night, everyone was holding their breath waiting to see where Ernie Clement’s high fly ball would land.
It went farther than Raleigh’s Statcast-projected 348-foot home run, with Clement’s ball tracking at 363 feet -- not quite the deepest part of T-Mobile Park, but deep enough to make it too close for comfort. Left fielder Randy Arozarena sprinted back toward the wall. Reliever Gabe Speier turned quickly, waiting and watching. Blue Jays relievers expectantly waited for it to drop into the 'pen.
But then it landed in the glove of a jumping Arozarena at the wall. Momentum, so fragile and so important at this time of year, swung to Seattle’s dugout, keeping the Mariners within a run in Game 5 of the American League Championship Series.
“You don’t know what’s going to happen,” Arozarena said via interpreter Freddy Llanos. “Could have hit the wall, could have gone the other way or over and come back. No one knows. So I just got ready to make the catch. … It’s a little different being down 2-1 [versus] 3-1. It gave us a little momentum.”
A frame later, the Blue Jays bullpen was collapsing. And the Mariners’ offense was staging a comeback 6-2 win that brought them to the precipice of their first World Series as a franchise, needing just one win to advance as the ALCS heads back to Toronto for Game 6 on Sunday night.
“It always does,” Clement said about the momentum swing. “Defense moves to offense in many ways, so it definitely gained them momentum and they made a nice play, some nice adjustments at the plate.”
Whether Clement’s ball would have gone over the fence if not for Arozarena’s glove is irrelevant. What matters is that he made the catch, kept the score where it was and got the crowd ready to shake the foundation of this ballpark in the next half-inning.
“It would have been a double or homer,” Speier said. “... Crowd goes crazy. I threw my arms up. Without that play, it could have gone a lot different. Very thankful for him.”
If the Mariners finish this thing off, Game 5 will be remembered for Raleigh’s game-tying home run and Eugenio Suárez’s go-ahead grand slam. But the defense it took for the Mariners to get to that point didn’t go unnoticed by Seattle’s dugout.
Arozarena’s catch set up the comeback inning. But the defensive day really started, like so many moments this year, with their catcher. Raleigh won’t repeat as the AL’s Platinum Glove Award winner in 2025, but he still showed Platinum-level awareness in a defining early moment Friday, igniting a frame-ending double play with the bases loaded.
Starter Bryce Miller loaded the bases in the fourth inning but recorded a crucial strikeout of Daulton Varsho. At that point, the Mariners needed a double play to get out of the jam.
Everything went right for them to get it.
Clement swung at a first-pitch splitter from Miller, which went straight down just in front of the plate. Raleigh threw off his mask, seized the baseball and jumped up to throw to first base. As he did so, he tapped his right foot on the plate to get the forceout before unleashing an 80.7 mph heave to first baseman Josh Naylor, who had just completed a big double play an inning earlier to erase a leadoff double for Miller.
“[Clement] hit a ground ball about one inch, and Cal tackled it,” Miller said. “I don’t know how it worked out, but it did -- perfectly. I’ll take it.”
The throw itself was more into fair territory to give Naylor a lane to snag it, as Clement -- Toronto’s fastest everyday player by Statcast’s sprint speed -- was just three steps from the bag.
“He’s all over it, and that's what he's done all season long, both sides of the ball,” Seattle manager Dan Wilson said. “We saw him make that play today, a lot of nice blocks today, and then to be able to deliver offensively like he did.
“It's, in my mind, an easy MVP choice. Today was another perfect example of that.”
According to Elias, the last 2-3 DP in the postseason before this, and the only previous 2-3 DP to be a GIDP, was fielded by none other than the Mariners in Game 2 of the ALCS on Oct. 11, 2000.
The catcher that day? Wilson.
Now this M’s team he’s managing is closer than ever to the World Series.
To do so, they’ll need all parts of their identity -- offensively and defensively -- to show up again.
“We dodged a lot of bullets today,” Raleigh said. “... It's what you got to do, though. You got to find a way to get through those tough innings. We were able to make some plays there, which was huge.”