Tacoma falls 7-6 in 10 innings as El Paso walks it off

Tacoma had enough offense to survive most of the afternoon, but not enough to finish the job once the game tightened. The Rainiers dropped a 7-6 decision in 10 innings to the El Paso Chihuahuas on Sunday at Southwest University Park, a loss that turned a strong weekend into a split-second reminder of how small the margin is in Triple-A baseball.

Brock Rodden was still the headline hitter in the series finale. He launched his fourth homer of the week in El Paso and finished the six-game set with 14 RBI, a run production total that kept Tacoma in striking range throughout the weekend. Brennen Davis, Victor Labrada and Brian O’Keefe also turned in multi-hit games, giving the Rainiers enough traffic to force extra innings and keep pressure on El Paso.

That pressure lasted until the bottom of the 10th, when Mason McCoy lined the game-ending single to finish it. It was El Paso’s second walk-off win of the series and its fourth walk-off victory of the season, a fitting end for a club that had already shown earlier in the week it could erase a deficit and keep attacking. On Wednesday, the Chihuahuas climbed out of a 6-0 hole to beat Tacoma 11-10, and by Sunday they had won six of the first eight meetings between the teams this season.

For Tacoma, the final result said less about one bad inning than about how the series kept shifting from one extreme to another. The Rainiers opened the weekend with power and pace, then were forced into a more uncomfortable, leverage-heavy game where every pitch mattered. They did enough to stay alive through nine innings, but one clean swing from McCoy ended it and left Tacoma at 18-21, with El Paso moving to 19-20. The weekend had already proven Rodden’s bat could tilt a series; Sunday proved the other side of that equation, where one late at-bat can wipe out everything that came before it.