Trent Grisham's Two Homers Flip the Yankees' Night Against Seattle

Trent Grisham hit two home runs and drove in four Wednesday night in the Bronx, and the Yankees turned an early hole into a 10-5 win over a Seattle team that cannot find the exit ramp. The loudest swings were the two over the fence. The one that actually decided it was a double.

That's the part worth sitting with. Grisham's go-ahead double came in the seventh, after the Mariners had already handed New York a deficit to chew on and after Grisham had already announced himself twice. A two-homer night gets the highlight package. A two-homer night plus the biggest at-bat of the game is a different kind of evening.

What happened in the Yankees' 10-5 win over the Mariners

New York trailed early and erased it, which has become the shape of a lot of these Yankee wins: absorb the first punch, wait for the middle innings, then let the lineup turn over one extra time. Seattle got the early lead. Seattle did not get to keep it. By the time the seventh arrived and Grisham doubled, the game had shifted from a grind into a scoreboard problem, and the Yankees pulled away from there.

Five runs allowed is not a disaster night for a Seattle staff. Ten runs surrendered is, and the back half of the game is where that number lived.

Trent Grisham with the Yankees: the throw-in who keeps carrying innings

Here's the context that makes this fun rather than routine. Grisham arrived in New York as the secondary piece in the Juan Soto trade, the name in the transaction that most people skimmed past on their way to the star. He came with two Gold Gloves from his San Diego years and a reputation as a defender who would give you outs in center and take his chances at the plate.

He is now a guy who puts up four-RBI nights in a divisional interleague spot and does it without anybody in the ballpark being surprised. That's a real career arc. Players who get labeled early rarely get to rewrite the label, and Grisham has spent the last two summers doing exactly that in the loudest park in the sport.

Wednesday was the compressed version of the whole story: power, and then patience, and then the swing that mattered most being the one that stayed in the yard.

What comes next for the skidding Mariners

Seattle's problem is not one bad seventh inning. It's the word "skidding" attaching itself to a club in the middle of August, when there is no more runway to promise it will sort itself out later. This is the stretch where teams either steady the pitching or start explaining things.

The two clubs close it out Thursday at 1:36 PM ET in the Bronx, an early first pitch after a long night, which is the sort of turnaround that tends to reveal whose bullpen has anything left. Seattle needs length from the start. New York needs the version of its lineup that showed up in the middle innings Wednesday rather than the one that spotted Seattle a lead.

It was a loud night across the league, for what it's worth. Alex Bregman picked the same Wednesday to hit three home runs and drive in a career-high seven in the Cubs' 12-6 win over Washington, so Grisham's four RBI weren't even the biggest individual line on the ledger. Some nights the baseball just decides to travel.

What I'm watching Thursday afternoon: whether Grisham stays in the middle of that order and whether Seattle can get through six clean innings for the first time in what feels like a while. The Mariners don't need a hot streak this afternoon. They need one quiet inning after another.