Josh Naylor's 2-homer game breaks offensive slump as Mariners sweep Astros

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After a stunningly slow start, the Seattle Mariners look back to form. The Mariners swept the injury-ridden Houston Astros with a 6-2 win Monday behind two early home runs from first baseman Josh Naylor.

Naylor, like Seattle’s other stars, has struggled early this season, and hadn’t even scored a run until this weekend. But on Monday, he hit back-to-back homers in his first two at-bats, helping breathe some life back into the Mariners offense.

Naylor’s first home run of the year came off the second pitch of his first at-bat, sending it just past the wall in right field for a three-run bomb.

His second dinger came in the third, with Naylor knocking the ball into deep center field to bring him and Cal Raleigh home.

No one, by the way, was happier for Naylor than Julio Rodríguez, who scored on Naylor’s first homer.

Naylor, Raleigh and Rodríguez — the core of the Mariners’ batting order — have all had slow starts to the season, but Naylor’s has been particularly tough. The first baseman failed to score in his first 44 at-bats — the most at-bats by far of any other scoreless player in the league — prior to the Mariners’ series against the Astros.

Naylor finally picked up that first run on Friday, and now has four this season after the weekend.

Seattle came into this season with big expectations after last year’s historic playoffs run, but hasn’t looked particularly confident so far, falling to 4-9 before the Astros sweep. Much of that drop came down to an early slump from the stars; when the bat on Ichiro’s statue broke during the unveiling on Friday, it felt like a very on-the-nose metaphor.

Since then, though, things have turned around. Raleigh, after leading the league with 60 homers last year, didn’t hit his first home run of the year until last week; Rodríguez, who finished with 32 homers, finally hit his first of the year Saturday in the Mariners’ walk-off 8-7 win over Houston.

Before this series, Raleigh and Rodríguez had combined for six total runs (plus Naylor’s zero runs). Now, the trio has 18, after all three scored four runs over the course of the weekend.

With the Mariners’ stars struggling, the rest of the lineup has stepped up. Leadoff man (and recent acquisition) Brendan Donovan and utility outfielder Luke Raley lead the team in homers, with three apiece; Raley was also the cause of the only non-Naylor run on Monday, hitting an RBI single in the fifth that sent Rodriguez home. Randy Arozarena leads Seattle in hits (16) and runs (12), with 22-year-old second baseman Cole Young sitting in second with 14 hits, 11 runs and two homers.

Now that Rodríguez, Raleigh and Naylor’s bats are hot(ter), the M’s will still hope to get that kind of production from the full lineup to keep the team’s streak going.

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