Mariners cap successful road trip with first series win in Boston since 2014

Tim Booth, The Seattle Times on Apr 24, 2025

Published in Baseball

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BOSTON — After running over to protectively cover first base as the final out of the sixth inning was recorded, Bryan Woo turned and started toward the dugout. Slowly. Methodically.

If this was at home, a standing ovation would probably be in order. As it was at Fenway Park, the deserved applause for Woo came from the visiting dugout and the handful of Mariners fans dotting the stands.

Woo continued his run of one quality start after another, throwing six innings and for the most part shutting down the Red Sox lineup in helping give the Mariners a 4-3 win on Thursday afternoon.

The M’s won their first series in Boston since 2014 when they swept three games from the Red Sox in late August of that season. They picked up a fifth straight series victory and closed out a 6-3 road trip in which the Mariners won in a variety of ways.

There were games when pitching was the story and games where the offense more than did its part. And a couple of wild afternoons at the ballpark where comebacks and chaos were the story.

Perhaps most impressive, the M’s dropped the first game of all three stops and still came back to win the series.

And they concluded their first long road test of the season watching Woo be the best starter on the field, even facing Boston ace Garrett Crochet.

The only trouble Woo (3-1) faced came off the bat of Alex Bregman, who provided a reminder of how troublesome he was in the past with Houston. Bregman homered in the first inning, clanged an RBI single off the Green Monster in the third and walked in the sixth.

But only two other Boston batters reached base against Woo — Triston Casas was hit by a pitch and Jarren Duran doubled. Woo struck out eight and showed an evolution to his pitch mix. While it was still the fastball creating the foundation, Woo spun a season-high 13 sweepers after throwing 17 total sweepers through his first four starts.

It was a trend-breaker and a little bit of a different look than maybe what the Red Sox were expecting.

Boston made it a nervous finish for the M’s after Carlos Narváez hit an opposite-field homer off Gabe Speier that clanged off the Pesky Pole just 302 feet down the right-field line leading off the eighth inning. Speier got the next two batters, and Trent Thornton was the first pitcher to record an out on Bregman, but only thanks to Leo Rivas making a difficult basket catch in shallow center field that even seemed to surprise Julio Rodríguez.

Andrés Muñoz walked Casas with two outs in the ninth, but struck out Kristian Campbell with his bat flying into the infield to end it.

While a 6-3 road trip is an overwhelming success, there was a bit of good fortune. The M’s didn’t face Hunter Greene in Cincinnati. They didn’t face Chris Bassitt in Toronto. And they ended up facing a version of Crochet that struggled to stay in the strike zone and couldn’t entice the Mariners to chase.

Crochet needed 110 pitches to finish off five innings, tied for the most by any pitcher in baseball this season with San Diego’s Michael King. Unlike Crochet, King’s 110-pitch game came in a complete-game, two-hit shutout of Colorado.

Crochet walked a career-high five and despite striking out nine times, the Mariners’ plate discipline was exceptional. The Mariners entered the day third in the league in walk percentage at 11.8, trailing only Philadelphia and Arizona.

And the most important at-bat came four batters into the game.

Randy Arozarena fell behind in the count 1-2 before fouling off three straight pitches, getting a piece of a change-up, sweeper and cutter all in succession. At that point, it was a successful plate appearance just for making Crochet work a little extra.

What made the at-bat great was Arozarena laying off three straight balls — none particularly close — to extend his on-base streak to a career-high 21 games and keep the inning alive. The effort of Arozarena’s at-bat cashed in when Mitch Garver delivered his first extra-base hit of the season, ringing the Green Monster with a double to score Dylan Moore and Arozarena and provide Woo an early 2-0 advantage.

The M’s made it 4-1 in the second when the bottom of the lineup — Ben Williamson, Rivas and J.P. Crawford — used two singles around a walk to load the bases. Moore’s sacrifice fly and Rodríguez’s groundout scored a pair and the M’s pitching was able to make that early advantage stand up for the final seven innings.