Junior Caminero hit his 28th homer Friday night in St. Petersburg, Fla., and the Tampa Bay Rays beat the Seattle Mariners 7-2 in a game that turned on who could punish mistakes harder and faster. Tampa Bay hit four longballs. Seattle got buried under them.
Nick Martinez pitched effectively into the sixth inning, improved to 8-2 and allowed two runs and four hits in 5 1/3 innings. The 35-year-old right-hander also got his first All-Star nod earlier Friday, replacing injured Boston left-hander Ranger Suárez. The honors keep flowing upward for the arm that held the line, while the Mariners kept taking the damage.
Who Had the Bat, Who Took the Hit
Caminero doubled and scored on a two-out single by Chandler Simpson to make it 1-0 in the third. In the seventh, he hit an opposite-field, two-run shot to right against Jose Ferrer that put Tampa Bay ahead 6-2. That was the kind of clean, brutal separation the Rays built all night. One swing, then another. The scoreboard did the rest.
Richie Palacios, Cedric Mullins and Victor Mesa Jr. also hit solo shots for Tampa Bay. Palacios led off the fourth with a 396-foot shot off Mariners starter Luis Castillo, who fell to 3-8. Mullins fouled off consecutive two-strike pitches before he hit a slider over the wall in right field, and Mesa added a 398-foot shot, also off a two-strike slider, that made it 4-1 in the fifth. Four home runs. Four reminders that the game belonged to the side that kept finding the gaps in the other side’s control.
The Cost at the Bottom
Seattle’s Cole Young hit his 11th home run of the season in the fifth, and Dominic Canzone had an RBI grounder in the sixth. That was the Mariners’ answer. It wasn’t enough. Castillo gave up four runs and nine hits in five innings, and the Mariners’ bullpen and lineup couldn’t stop the slide once Tampa Bay started stacking damage.
The Mariners, who were swept by the Marlins in Miami, have lost four straight and fell behind Texas into second in the AL West. That’s the hierarchy of the standings, cold and mechanical. One team climbs. Another gets shoved down. The people on the field absorb the consequences while the numbers above them keep sorting winners from losers.
What the Box Score Says About Power
Martinez allowed two runs and four hits in 5 1/3 innings, and Tampa Bay kept extending the lead with each blast. Jose Ferrer took the seventh-inning shot from Caminero. Luis Castillo took the early damage from Palacios and the later pressure from a lineup that kept forcing him into trouble. The Rays didn’t need drama. They just kept hitting.
Mariners right-hander Logan Gilbert, 7-5 with a 3.19 ERA, is scheduled to start Saturday opposite Rays right-hander Griffin Jax, 4-6 with a 3.60 ERA. The machinery rolls on. Another game, another set of arms asked to absorb the next round of punishment, while the league keeps the whole arrangement moving under the bright lights in St. Petersburg.