Refsnyder robs Smith, Mariners’ skid hits five
ARLINGTON — It was the kind of moment right field was built for.
Rob Refsnyder didn’t just make a catch. He stole one. And in the Mariners’ 3-0 loss to the Rangers on Wednesday, it took center stage—right down to Bryan Woo’s incredulous reaction on the mound.
The sequence started in a game that was still scoreless. Josh Smith led off the third inning with a deep fly ball down the right-field line. Refsnyder tracked it down and grabbed it with a leaping catch at the wall. Then, the details became impossible to ignore: he slowed from a full sprint, timed his jump, and robbed Smith of what would have been a third-inning homer.
Woo, watching it unfold, blurted out two words on the mound. The first appeared to be “holy.” After that, he tipped his cap to Refsnyder.
Smith joked after the game that he “wanted to cry” when he was denied what would have been his first homer this season.
What made the play even stranger—at least from where Refsnyder began—was positioning. He wasn’t positioned near that corner, either. To get there, he had to cover 115 feet of ground to run down the ball.
“Unbelievable — definitely one of the best catches I’ve ever seen, the distance he covered, and being able to track that down all the way over, and then also, it’s such a high fence and a weird corner,” Woo said.
Still, the highlight couldn’t stop the game from turning. A scoreless tie didn’t last. The Rangers’ three-run frame came two innings later, and it loomed larger than any single defensive moment as the Mariners’ offensive struggles continued.
By the time the final score settled at 3-0, Seattle’s losing streak had reached five games, coming on the heels of a three-game sweep at Globe Life Field.
“This is a tough one — offensively, again, just not much going on offensively,” Mariners manager Dan Wilson said. “We were able to get a little bit of traffic, but we were not able to move it along. Not enough consistency on the offensive side.”
The numbers behind that frustration are stark. The Mariners departed Texas ranked last in the AL in team batting average (.184), on-base percentage (.280) and slugging percentage (.301). When Wednesday’s loss ended, they were the only MLB team hitting below .200 and the only MLB team with an OPS below .600.
In the visitors’ clubhouse, it wasn’t a mood for laughing. The Mariners eked out only two hits and struck out 13 times. Woo, who was among the somber faces, pitched five decent innings and allowed only one earned run—but the offense never found the kind of spark that changes games.
“We’ve got to find a way out of it,” Woo said of the Mariners’ skid. “Luckily it’s April and not September, but we still need to have some urgency about it. … If there’s anything we’ve learned over the last couple years, it’s just, you’ve just got to get hot at the right time and find a way into the playoffs. But you can’t get there unless you win the games that you need to win. And so, it’s not the end of the world, but we still need to find a way to pick it up.”
Woo struck out two, walked two and gave up three runs (two unearned).
The Rangers, for their part, kept the Mariners from doing damage against MacKenzie Gore and a bullpen group that closed things down. Chris Martin, Luis Curvelo and Cole Winn combined for the two-hit shutout.
One player trying to look past the slump was Brendan Donovan, one of the few Mariners regulars producing at the plate right now with a 1.027 OPS.
“You’re going to go through lulls like this,” Donovan said. “Unfortunately, we’re just getting hit with some adversity at the beginning. … Personally, I’d rather us go through it now, see what we’re made of, establish our identity, and then go from there.
“We’ve just got to string some hits, some days, some games together, and then we’ll look back at this and laugh.”
But after Wednesday, the laughter wasn’t there yet.
Wilson summed up the task ahead bluntly. “We’ve got some work to do, there’s no doubt about it,” he said.
Short version: a catch for the highlight reel couldn’t solve an offense stuck in neutral.