One swing decided it
Josh Lowe turned on a pitch in the sixth inning on Tuesday night in Anaheim and the Seattle Mariners lost the last piece of their season. His 12th home run, a 388-foot drive to right-center, gave the Los Angeles Angels a 2-1 win. It also guaranteed Seattle a losing record for the first time in six years.
The math is blunt. Seattle sit at 70-82. A year ago this team played in the American League Championship Series.
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Ryan Johnson was the problem
The Angels right-hander opened the game with 16 consecutive strikes. Sixteen. He finished six innings with seven strikeouts, no walks and one run on six hits, leaving after 90 pitches, 67 of them strikes. That is his fifth win against eight losses. Ryan Watson handled the ninth for his third save.
Logan Gilbert deserved better. Seattle’s starter gave up two runs on six hits across six innings, walked two and struck out seven. The last of those was the 1,078th strikeout of his career, tying him with Mark Langston for fourth on the Mariners’ all-time list. A milestone, on a night nobody in Seattle will want to keep.
What it means for both sides
Wade Meckler had two hits and scored. Vaughn Grissom doubled him home in the fifth for the opening run. Moises Ballesteros added two hits. At 58-93 the Angels are going nowhere, but they have now won a home series for the first time since mid-August, when they took three from Texas.
Seattle have lost four of their last five. Dominic Canzone tripled off the top of the center field fence in the sixth and Julio Rodriguez brought him home with a double into the left-center gap. That was the entire Mariners offense. The Angels go for the sweep on Wednesday.
The last full losing season in Seattle came in 2019, when the Mariners finished 68-94. The shortened 2020 campaign brought a 27-33 record. Then came the rebuild, the ALCS run, and now this.
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