Lawrence Butler crossed home plate like a switch-hitter, staring hard into the Athletics’ rowdy third-base dugout, before turning his attention back to the baseball. Butler tossed his bat aside, then jogged backwards toward first base -- still facing his teammates -- to start an epic home run trot. His helmet was next to go, pitched underhand as Butler rounded third. It tumbled all the way across the first-base line while Butler skipped his way into home plate. The Athletics’ most electric player had done it again. Butler has had more than his share of big moments with the A’s, including a pair of three-homer games during a breakout 2024 and an inside-the-park home run last season. But he’d never had anything like Sunday’s two-run, walk-off homer to deliver an 8-7 win over the Mariners -- Butler’s first walk-off homer, he said, at any level. “It’s amazing,” Butler said. “That’s probably the coolest thing I’ve done on the baseball field.” Against Seattle closer Andrés Muñoz in the ninth, with Zack Gelof aboard at first after a leadoff single in a 7-6 game, Butler readied himself in the batter’s box. Muñoz missed with his first three pitches, and Butler, taking all the way, watched a 3-0 fastball over the plate for strike one. He had no plans to look any further. “If it’s in the zone,” Butler told himself, “I’m swinging.” Muñoz’s next pitch was another fastball, right over the heart of the plate, and Butler tattooed it a Statcast-projected 402 feet to right-center for his second home run of the day. At 101.1 mph, it was the fastest pitch hit for a home run by an Athletics player under pitch tracking (since 2008, regular season and postseason). The dinger completed an impressive comeback effort by the A’s, who trailed 6-2 before rallying for four runs in the seventh inning. Gelof and Butler -- who hit back-to-back home runs in the first inning -- were in the middle of things yet again, both working long at-bats before Shea Langeliers tied it with a two-run pinch-hit single.
