Randy Arozarena hit a home run on the first pitch he saw Saturday night, then hit one on the last pitch he saw, and by Sunday morning the sport was still treating him like a discovery.
Start with the mechanics, because a night this absurd needs the sequence said out loud before anyone gets to the argument. In the bottom of the first, on a 93 mph sinker, Arozarena drove a ball into the seats at 105.3 mph off the bat, 415 feet to center — a leadoff home run on the very first pitch he saw, his 18th of the season. Two innings later, he ran one down in the gap and took a home run away from Cubs catcher Miguel Amaya.
Most nights, that catch is the headline.
Seattle still trailed 4-2 into the ninth, chasing a game that was on track to hand Kade Anderson a winning major league debut. Leo Rivas cut it to one run with a two-out single. Then Arozarena stepped in against Cubs closer Jacob Webb and ended it — a two-run shot that traveled 404 feet to center, dropped Webb to 6-3, and turned a rookie’s near-gem into a footnote.
Arozarena’s walk-off made him the seventh player in MLB history to hit a leadoff homer and a walk-off homer in the same game, and the first to do it as a Mariner. Pete Crow-Armstrong pulled off a version of the same trick against the White Sox days earlier, which makes this the second time this month a game got bookended like that and still didn’t crack the front page.
That detail sat several paragraphs deep in most of the coverage that ran overnight.
https://twitter.com/MLBNetwork/status/2091347504659050855
A guy just joined a club that small, sandwiched a run-saving robbery in between, and won the game on the last swing he took. The framing forming around him this morning, “best player in baseball nobody’s talking about,” isn’t actually a compliment once you sit with it. It’s a comment on what national coverage decides is worth a camera angle, not on what Arozarena is doing with a bat in his hands.
I spent two years freelancing for $50 to $150 a piece writing about players exactly like this before I got a full-time byline, so forgive me for being unmoved by the sudden discovery. Guys who do this consistently don’t need a walk-off to be good. They need someone to point a camera at them on a random Tuesday, or in this case, a Saturday against the Cubs that most of the country wasn’t watching until the ninth inning.
None of this should read as a surprise by now. Arozarena has 18 home runs, a highlight reel from a single game, and membership in a seven-man club that most of the league only just found out exists.
Arozarena’s been playing like this the whole time.
