Mariners’ Randy Arozarena extends his career-best on-base streak | Notebook…
It’s almost a certainty at this point that Randy Arozarena is going to get on base at some point in the ballgame. It’s just a question of how he’s going to do it.
With a leadoff single in the fourth inning of Sunday’s game that caromed off the glove of Blue Jays shortstop Bo Bichette, Arozarena extended his career-high on-base streak to 33 games.
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That is the second-longest active on-base streak in baseball, with Philadelphia Phillies slugger Kyle Schwarber extending his on-base streak to 46 games Sunday.
Arozarena is one game away from tying Robinson Cano for the team’s third-longest on-base streak since 2005, at 34 games.
Arozarena has reached base in every Mariners game since March 31, the fifth game of the season.
“A big part of our offense is making pitchers work, and he’s been really, really consistent with that for a while,” manager Dan Wilson said. “That’s been huge for us. As we’ve talked about, he’s had a lot of, whether it’s big at-bats, big walks, getting on-base at big times, and that’s been huge for our offense.”
The Mariners left fielder has hit .262 with 15 runs, nine doubles, four homers, and 19 RBI during his streak, with eight stolen bases.
Alvin Davis holds the franchise record at 47 consecutive games on base in 1984, while Ichiro Suzuki has the best mark in the past 20 years, with 43 consecutive games in 2009.
Arozarena has kept the streak going despite hamstring tightness that has slowed him over the past week. He seemed to injure it legging out a single in Seattle’s 8-1 loss to Texas on May 4, and then sat out the series opener against the Athletics on May 5.
He was taken out for a defensive substitution in the eighth inning on Sunday, but it seemed to be more precautionary than anything, as the Mariners were already trailing by eight runs.
“He’s close,” Wilson said. “But we do want to be careful with it a little bit, and we don’t want to see anything that gets worse. But he continues to play and wants to get in that lineup.”
Oh, Canada
While there were noticeably fewer Blue Jays fans in attendance this season than in prior years, there were still plenty of maple-leaf clad faithful in the stands on Sunday and throughout the weekend.
George Springer’s home run was met with loud cheers from the crowd, and the later innings sounded much like a Blue Jays home game once the road team took the game into blowout territory. Attendance at the series did drop compared to last year, with relations between Canada and the United States currently frosty, to say the least. But Sunday’s game seemed to be the exception.
With 36,823 fans in attendance, it was the second-highest attendance for a game between the Mariners and Blue Jays in the past two years, with game two of the 2024 series taking the high mark, with 38,264 fans in the stands.
The bigger drop took place between 2023 and 2024. In the 2023 season, the average attendance in the Blue Jays vs. Mariners series from July 21-July 23 was 43,024. In 2024, the average attendance in the series was 35,880.
The average attendance for the 2025 series was 33,189, with 31,564 fans on Friday, and 31,182 showing up on Saturday.
Off day for Polanco, Williamson
Jorge Polanco and third baseman Ben Williamson were out of the starting lineup Sunday which Wilson said was simply a rest day for both.
After starting the season off on an offensive tear, Polanco has cooled off since the calendar flipped to May. Through eight games so far this month, Polanco is hitting .179 with a .508 OPS, two doubles and three RBI. At the end of April, the Mariners DH/occasional second baseman was hitting .384, and his average now sits at .327.
Williamson, meanwhile, is hitting .250 over his past seven games with six hits, three RBI, and eight strikeouts in that span.
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