By Kirby Arnold
Herald Writer
SEATTLE – Tenacious B is back.
Kicked in the seat by an on-mound lecture from manager Lou Piniella, pitcher James Baldwin returned to his old self just before it was too late, pitching with aggression in the Seattle Mariners’ 7-4 victory over the Tampa Bay Devil Rays.
It ended the Mariners’ four-game losing streak and gave Baldwin (4-4), his first victory after three straight losses.
Baldwin, known to his teammates as “J.B.,” is at his best when he pitches aggressively with a fastball that tops 90 mph.
In his last three starts, Baldwin had neither the tenacity nor the velocity, and it continued in the first inning Thursday when he allowed two doubles, a walk and a single that gave the Devil Rays a 2-0 lead.
“I was trying to be Jamie Moyer,” Baldwin said. “I was trying to hit my spots instead of being the power pitcher that I am.”
It took, of course, some eyeball-to-eyeball “inspiration” from Piniella, who beat a quick path to the mound after John Flaherty’s RBI single with one out.
“I asked him if his arm was hurting,” Piniella said. “He said no, and I told him to get on top of it and let the damn thing go.”
Baldwin did as he was told, and the game wasn’t the same again.
He retired 20 of the next 21 hitters, including 18 straight after Jared Sandberg led off the second inning with a home run into the second deck in left field.
“The last six innings he threw, the last 18 hitters, he couldn’t have thrown the ball better,” pitching coach Bryan Price said.
Nobody seemed happier to see Baldwin return to form than Price, who worked with the right-hander on getting more on top of the ball with his arm angle instead of dropping down and aiming his pitches.
“Hopefully this is a lesson because I’ve been wondering if we were going to see the stuff that we’ve been working on,” Price said. “That was the intent of our bullpen on Monday. Get back on top and start throwing the ball 90, 90-plus miles an hour and be aggressive and start going after these people.”
In other words, be the James Baldwin who went 3-1 in his first six starts, not the guy who tried to emulate Moyer and lost each of his last three.
“He was changing his arm angle to create movement and you can’t do that,” Price said. “It’s a significant mistake. His curveball was breaking sideways, his sinker was breaking off the plate at 86 mph, and they were hammering him.
“He wasn’t playing the power game until the game was out of hand. And then he’d throw some frustration fastballs at 92 (mph) and we’d go, ‘Where was that in the first inning?’ “
When the game started Thursday, Baldwin was trying to be Moyer again.
It was Piniella – not Price, who usually gives mechanical and motivational advice – who went to the mound.
“If it takes Lou to go out there and say, ‘Hey listen son, I’m sick and tired of watching you get pounded. Start throwing the ball instead of aiming it,’ that’s great managing,” Price said.
“That,” Baldwin said, “is why he’s a winning manager.”
Baldwin’s velocity picked up and the Devil Rays had little chance.
Sandberg got the only mistake Baldwin threw the rest of the game and crushed it for a 3-2 Devil Rays lead in the second inning, but they didn’t get a hit the rest of the day.
“He just started pumping strikes in there,” said Sandberg, a native of Olympia. “We stayed aggressive but he just kept coming and didn’t back down.”
With an offense that finally did some hitting, the Mariners ended their four-game losing streak.
They got 11 hits, the first time since last Thursday’s 16-hit barrage in Toronto that the Mariners hit in double figures. Both Ichiro Suzuki and Ruben Sierra went 3-for-5 and continued to dispel any theories about the difficulty hitters have in day games at Safeco Field.
Sierra leads the American League with a .514 average in day games this season and Suzuki is second at .433.
For all they did, the Mariners still had to come from behind for the 16th time.
They scored twice in the first inning on Sierra’s bases-loaded single to tie the score, once in the fourth on Bret Boone’s run-scoring double that made it 3-3, and once in the fifth when catcher Ben Davis singled to left, scoring Carlos Guillen with the go-ahead run.
“It was nice to help out, because I haven’t been helping this club out much,” Davis said.
The Mariners scored five of their seven runs with two outs, including the last three on one swing by John Olerud that created a lot of breathing room in the eighth inning.
Olerud pounded a three-run homer, his seventh this season, off reliever Doug Creek to expand a one-run lead.
“I haven’t been swinging the bat real well lately,” said Olerud, whose homer was the Mariners’ first since Saturday when Sierra hit one in Boston. “To square one up is a real good feeling.”
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