ANAHEIM — The Seattle Mariners kicked off baseball’s trading season on Thursday with the first significant deal ahead of next week’s deadline, bolstering their offense by acquiring Arizona first baseman Josh Naylor for a pair of pitching prospects.
The Angels came out of the All-Star break with visions of joining the Mariners in the buyers’ aisle, hopes that were buoyed by their two wins in a three-game series in Philadelphia last weekend.
But they are looking more and more like trade-deadline sellers after they lost their fourth straight game on Thursday night, a 4-2 defeat at the hands of the Mariners that dropped the Angels (49-54) 5½ games behind the Boston Red Sox for the American League’s third and final wild-card spot.
What’s more, the Angels would have to leap-frog five teams – Tampa Bay, Texas, Cleveland, Kansas City and Minnesota – to move into a playoff position.
The Angels showed their usual fight, loading the bases with two outs in the ninth inning against Mariners closer Andrés Muñoz, but the hard-throwing right-hander got Nolan Schanuel to line out to left field to end the game and notch his 23rd save.
Thursday night’s pitching matchup seemed to favor the Angels, who had their ace and lone AL All-Star representative, Yusei Kikuchi, on the mound to face Seattle’s No. 5 starter, Logan Evans.
But Kikuchi unraveled during a three-run fifth inning in which he gave up four straight hits – two of them homers – and Evans held the Angels hitless for four innings after giving up one run and three hits in the first.
Kikuchi escaped a second-and-third, one-out jam in the first by striking out Randy Arozarena with a 97-mph fastball and getting Mitch Garver to fly to right, and the Angels handed him a 1-0 lead in the bottom of the first when Mike Trout doubled to left and scored on Schanuel’s RBI single to right.
The double and run gave Trout 437 career total bases and 146 runs against Seattle, breaking Rafael Palmeiro’s record of 435 total bases and Hall-of-Famer Rickey Henderson’s record of 145 runs against the Mariners. Trout is also baseball’s all-time leader with 54 homers, 103 extra-base hits and 31 intentional walks against Seattle.
Kikuchi blanked the Mariners on two hits in the second, third and fourth innings and retired the first two batters of the fifth before Julio Rodriguez lined an up-and-away 95-mph fastball over the short wall in right for an opposite-field home run and a 1-1 tie.
Cal Raleigh, who leads baseball with 39 homers, reached on an infield single. Kikuchi fell behind Arozarena with a 3-and-1 count and, figuring the cleanup batter was looking fastball, tried to throw off his timing with an 87-mph slider.
But Arozarena seemed to be looking for the offspeed pitch, timing it perfectly with a vicious swing that produced a 110-mph laser that cleared the left-field wall for a two-run homer – his 19th of the season – and a 3-1 Seattle lead.
Mitch Garver followed with a double to right-center, and Kikuchi was pulled in favor of right-hander Connor Brogdon, who got the final out of the fifth.
The Angels went hitless against Evans and reliever Eduard Bazardo from the second through sixth innings before staging a two-out rally off right-hander Carlos Vargas in the seventh.
Luis Rengifo singled to right, took second on a balk and scored on Zach Neto’s RBI single to left to pull the Angels to within 3-2. Mariners manager Dan Wilson summoned left-hander Gabe Speier to face Trout, but not to intentionally walk the three-time AL most valuable player and pitch to the left-handed-hitting Schanuel.
Speier got Trout to fly to right, ending the inning, and Seattle got that run back in the eighth on Jorge Polanco’s solo homer off Jose Fermin to take a 4-2 lead.