Rainiers rally from five down, but fall 12-8 to Salt Lake

Jakson Reetz sparked the push back, but Tacoma could not finish the job. The Rainiers erased a five-run deficit in the sixth inning, took their first lead of the day, and still left The Ballpark at America First Square with a 12-8 loss to Salt Lake after the Bees answered immediately and reclaimed control.

Reetz tied his career high with three hits and put Tacoma on the board with a solo homer in the fourth, a shot that trimmed the early damage after Salt Lake had built a 4-0 lead. Ryan Bliss and Alejo Lopez also turned in multi-hit games for the Rainiers, giving Tacoma enough traffic to keep pressing even as the score kept climbing in the Pacific Coast League West matchup between clubs separated by a handful of games in the standings. Tacoma entered at 23-28; Salt Lake came in at 25-25.

The game turned in Tacoma’s six-run sixth, when 11 Rainiers came to the plate and the inning kept stretching into more than one momentum swing. Victor Labrada started it with a walk, Reetz doubled, and Carson Taylor drove in two with a single. Lopez added an RBI double, Bliss followed with the tying hit, and Brock Rodden doubled Tacoma in front for the first time at 7-5. Labrada then capped the burst with a sacrifice fly, giving the Rainiers a rally they could point to for the rest of the trip.

That edge lasted only briefly. Salt Lake tied it right back in the bottom of the sixth, then went ahead for good in the seventh on Josh Lowe’s two-out RBI double after Austin Wynns singled with one out. The sequence turned a comeback story into a game that got away, because Tacoma never found the shutdown inning it needed after spending so much energy wiping out the deficit. In a Triple-A setting where leads can disappear as quickly as they are built, the Rainiers had done the hard part and still were left chasing.

Salt Lake’s early punch came from Wynns, whose three-run homer in the second helped put the Bees in charge, and Yolmer Sánchez later added another RBI double. Trey Mancini also chipped in as the Bees kept pressure on all afternoon in their new home in South Jordan, where The Ballpark at America First Square opened in April 2025 as the centerpiece of Downtown Daybreak. Tacoma made it a game with one of its sharper offensive innings of the season, but Salt Lake answered too often for the comeback to hold.