MLB playoff bedlam as Mariners homers, Blue Jays meltdown flip ALCS on its head

Baseball’s majesty and misery are almost always intertwined. And in a stunning eighth inning in an unforgettable Game 5 of the American League Championship Series, they were inseparable.

For several pulsating minutes at T-Mobile Park, the fates of the Toronto Blue Jays and Seattle Mariners hung first on a crucial decision by a manager, and then in the air for several tantalizing seconds as Cal Raleigh’s pop fly ball drifted into the left-field stands, and then finally when Eugenio Suárez’s grand slam settled into the right field stands.

A short burst of bedlam flipped the game from the Blue Jays’ win column to the Mariners’, a 6-2 victory that pushed them to a brink of their first World Series appearance.

Game 6 is scheduled for Sunday.

Friday’s drama shoved a motley cast of characters front and center:

Eugenio Suárez

He has played for four franchises, beloved so much in Seattle that the Mariners had to bring him back in a special season that certainly merited some trade-deadline punch.

And so when Suárez started the scoring with a second-inning homer and ended it depositing Seranthony Dominguez’s 98-mph heater into the right field seats, the joy could be shared from Seattle to Arizona, Cincinnati to Detroit.

“As good a player as Geno is, he’s an even better person. I think that’s what shines through with Geno,” Mariners manager Dan Wilson told reporters after Game 5. “You can’t tell if he’s in a slump, you can’t tell what he’s going through, because he’s always picking everybody else up.”

Suarez has gone to the postseason with three franchises but never a World Series.

Cal Raleigh

The MVP votes are already tallied, and it will be revealed next month if Raleigh outpointed Aaron Judge at the ballot box. Postseason performances aren’t factored in. Instead, legacies are burnished or diminished.

And Raleigh is well on his way to an October platform blowing up his spot even more.

Seattle has won three games in this ALCS, and Raleigh has homered in two of them, the first a tying shot off Blue Jays ace Kevin Gausman in Game 1.

The second?

“It felt like Cal’s ball was in the air for, like, an hour,” Wilson said of Raleigh’s sky ball in the bottom of the eighth inning, Mariners trailing 2-1, just six outs from a sweep in Seattle that would have made their pennant-winning task perhaps insurmountable.

When it came down, the score was tied 2-2, a chaotic eighth inning was only beginning, and Raleigh further verified his greatness on a bigger stage.

John Schneider

The manager of the Toronto Blue Jays got to his post and kept it thanks to a resolute mentality and steady demeanor, through parts of four seasons that have featured playoff highs and dispiriting underperformance.

But it always comes down to pushing buttons, and the Jays’ Game 1 and 5 losses came about when Brendon Little had the ball in his hands.

Schneider called on Little to preserve a 2-1 eighth-inning lead, Raleigh at the plate, the thinking that maybe forcing “Big Dumper” to bat right-handed the first time in the series might serve as Kryptonite.

One swing and 348 feet later, tie score.

But Little had to face two more batters. Befitting his season-long track record, he walked both of them.

Little threw 15 pitches. Ten were balls, and another landed in the front row of the left-field seats.

That left Seranthony Dominguez to come on and try to clean up a two-on, no-out mess, Seattle ready to burst. He grazed Randy Arozarena with a pitch to load the bases and then there he was: Suárez, with nowhere to put him.