SEATTLE — Logan Morrison’s forgettable April has been replaced by a May to remember.
The Seattle Mariners’ first baseman continued his hot streak at the plate with two more hits Friday night, including a walk-off home run on the first pitch of the bottom of the 11th inning.
“He’s starting to come on,” Mariners manager Lloyd McClendon said after Morrison’s homer beat the Oakland A’s 4-3 in 11 innings. “He’s full of confidence, and there’s nothing like a confident player.”
The opposite could have been said just two weeks ago, when Morrison saw his average drop to .149 before a 4-for-5 performance at Texas on April 29 got him going. Over the past nine games, Morrison is hitting .429 with four home runs and seven RBIs.
Morrison had plenty of hard contact early in the season but wasn’t getting rewarded for it. He was hitting a lot of balls at people and had a couple of home runs stolen away from him over the wall.
He made sure that his mammoth shot to open the bottom of Friday’s 11th inning wouldn’t get caught.
“It that didn’t go,” he said with a sigh of relief after the extra-inning win, “I was probably going to just quit.”
It’s too early to anoint a single play as a season-changer, but Morrison’s home run and the comeback win seemed to breathe some life into a Seattle team that had lost six of its previous seven games.
“That was a big win,” he said. “All of them are big, obviously, but after the way we lost our last two, that was a big one.”