ARLINGTON, Texas — What a swing.
Dom Canzone dropped his bat instantly. He knew what he’d just done, and so did everyone else inside Globe Life Field.
Canzone’s three-run home run in the seventh inning flipped the score and flipped his club’s fortunes in this series — and, perhaps, beyond — giving the Mariners their first lead in this series and sending them to a 6-4 victory over the Texas Rangers on Sunday afternoon.
It’s not a stretch to suggest Canzone’s blast — a dead-pull 400-foot shot to right field, 111.0 mph off the bat against Texas reliever Cole Winn — was the most important swing of the season for the Mariners, who were, to be frank, an out-of-sorts mess coming into Sunday.
Canzone’s swing might have sparked the Mariners’ most important win of the season, too.
Over the previous five days, the M’s had fallen from first to third place in the AL West. They’d lost four straight, saw one of their beloved hitting coaches dismissed and looked largely uncompetitive in the first two games of this series against a division rival.
The emotional swing Canzone’s homer provided to the Mariners probably can’t be fully realized now. We’ll need to see how the this team respond in the coming days and weeks.
If nothing else, though, Canzone offered a chance to exhale — a moment to celebrate, to relax, after a challenging few days, and a challenging week ahead.
It was Canzone’s team-leading 16th homer of the season, and it could not have come at a better time.
The Mariners, the worst offense in baseball the past six weeks, had hit just 28 homers in their previous 34 games.
For a team that has, over the past handful of years, relied on homers as much as any team for run production, it has been a rather shocking downturn in slugging.
The Mariners’ offense looked largely lost again Saturday in a 7-1 loss to the Rangers, and the first six innings Sunday produced only one more run against the Rangers’ Jacob deGrom.
Trailing 3-1, the Mariners finally broke through in the seventh.
Colt Emerson and Cole Young had back-to-back, one-out singles off lefty Tyler Alexander.
Julio Rodríguez then flew out on the first pitch from Winn, bringing up Canzone.
Winn missed badly with his first two pitches, a splitter and cutter. On a 2-0 pitch, Canzone then golfed a low splitter and obliterated it. He flipped his bat and admired the bat sailing into the right-field seats.
Randy Arozarena followed with a 400-foot homer of his own into the home bullpen beyond the wall in right-center field. It was his 12th of the season, and that made it 5-3.
After the Rangers got within 5-4 in the eighth on an Ezequiel Duran solo homer, Canzone delivered again in the top of the ninth with a double down the right-field corner, scoring Rodriguez from first base.