Hernández Blast Resurrects Miami After Seattle's Wild Eighth
Seattle turned a 4-0 deficit into a 5-4 lead with a chaotic eighth inning full of errors, interference, and wild pitches — then watched Heriberto Hernández erase all of it with one swing. Hernández's 422-foot homer to left swung Miami's win probability from 30% to 63%, and Jakob Marsee's walk-off single in the tenth finished the Marlins' 6-5 comeback win.
Miami looked in control from the jump. Owen Caissie launched a 418-foot shot to right center in the second inning to open the scoring, and Bryan Woo compounded his own troubles by throwing a wild pitch that let another run score, pushing the lead to 2-0. Marsee's single to right in the third plated another run, and a sacrifice fly in the fourth made it 4-0. Woo finished with 9 hits and 3 earned runs allowed over 5.0 innings — the kind of outing that puts a team in a deep hole and leaves the bullpen exposed.
Seattle clawed back in the fifth. A sacrifice fly scored Raleigh, then Cole Young went the other way with a 354-foot homer to right to cut it to 4-2. The Mariners went quiet until the eighth, when everything broke loose at once. Raleigh doubled to right to score Crawford, then Naylor singled to right and Arozarena scored on an error — compounded by interference from second baseman Edwards — to tie it at 4. A Faucher wild pitch then scored Naylor, and Seattle had a 5-4 lead it had absolutely no business owning. The story of that inning, frankly, was Miami handing runs back as fast as they'd earned them.
Then Hernández stepped in. His 422-foot homer to left — the biggest swing of the night by any measure — knotted the game at 5 and flipped Miami's win probability from 30% to 63% in a single at-bat. From there it went to extras, where Marsee, who finished 2-for-4 with 2 RBI on the night, singled to right in the tenth to score Edwards and end it. Pete Fairbanks was sharp in relief for Miami, throwing a clean inning with 2 strikeouts and no runs allowed. Liam Hicks went 3-for-5 and scored a run, quietly one of the steadier offensive presences in a game that looked anything but steady. Seattle's Jose Ferrer matched Fairbanks with a scoreless inning of his own, but it wasn't enough. Final: MIA 6, SEA 5.