‘A bump in the road’

  • By Kirby Arnold / Herald Writer
  • Sunday, June 4, 2006 9:00pm
  • Sports

SEATTLE – It’s one of the basic principles of baseball: Throw the ball up in the strike zone and major league hitters will pound it.

Yes, that includes the Kansas City Royals.

Seattle Mariners starter Jarrod Washburn struggled to keep the ball down and the Royals slapped him around because of it, beating the Mariners 9-4 Sunday at Safeco Field.

“You just can’t pitch up in the big leagues,” Mariners manager Mike Hargrove said. “Good hitters will do what Kansas City did, and Kansas City’s got good hitters.”

The nine runs were the Royals’ biggest output since they scored 10 against Cleveland on May 10, and the victory ended a nine-game losing streak at Safeco Field.

“They’ve got talent on that ballclub,” Hargrove said. “Before they came here they took two of three from Oakland. They were playing good baseball coming in here.”

Besides that, another baseball tenet came into play Sunday: Start a left-handed pitcher against the Mariners this year and your chances are good.

Even if you’re the Royals.

Mark Redman came off 11 days of bereavement leave and held the Mariners to eight hits and four runs in 52/3 innings. He won not only for the first time this season, but for the first time since July 24 last year to end a streak of 16 starts without a victory.

Adrian Beltre’s two-run homer in the first inning gave the Mariners a 2-0 lead, and Richie Sexson’s hit-and-run single in the third tied the score 3-3.

The Royals, who had scored one run in their previous three games, kept scoring. They added two runs in the fourth, two in the fifth and two in the sixth.

The Mariners have lost 15 of the 21 games they’ve played against left-handed starters, and it didn’t matter that they were facing the worst team in baseball.

The Royals won for just the 14th time this season and sixth time on the road. Also, the Royals won their first road day game of the season after going 0-12, although this one wasn’t played in the glare of the sunshine over Safeco Field.

A brief rain shower moved through the area less than an hour before the first pitch and the stadium roof rolled overhead. It didn’t move again, despite a dry blue-sky afternoon the rest of the day.

Washburn labored through his worst start of the season, allowing seven runs and eight hits in 41/3 innings. Among them was Emil Brown’s solo homer in the second inning and John Buck’s two-run homer in the fourth.

The Mariners didn’t help themselves with two errors – catcher Kenji Johjima’s bad throw that allowed a run to score in the fifth, and shortstop Yuniesky Betancourt’s misplay of a grounder in the sixth that led to a run – and a blown hit-and-run. Mike Morse missed a sign with one out in the fourth, leaving Willie Bloomquist stranded between first and second before he was tagged out.

“Those things do happen,” Hargrove said. “I thought we played over those and didn’t let them affect us.”

The Royals, meanwhile, manufactured three of their runs with two sacrifice bunts and a sacrifice fly, then simply took advantage of Washburn’s mistakes.

“It was a strange game,” Washburn said. “I felt good in the first inning, felt good in the second inning. Then I left that one changeup up (to Brown) and after that I couldn’t hit spots. I really never said to myself that I’m in trouble. It was more trying to straighten it out and hit my spots.”

That never happened and Washburn fell to 3-7.

“It’s a bump in the road,” he said. “Forget about it and go get them in five days.”

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