SEATTLE – In his Seattle Mariners pitching debut on April 4, Miguel Batista made himself an easy target for anyone with access to a blog and the freedom to say what a poor acquisition he was.
Batista was admittedly awful in that game, having allowed 10 hits and eight runs, two walks and two balks in 42/3 innings against Oakland. If he was that bad against the A’s, some reasoned, then what might the heavy-hitting Texas Rangers do against him?
Saturday, Batista answered.
Pitching for the first time in 10 days, he held the Rangers to five hits and three runs in 62/3 innings in the Mariners’ 8-3 victory at Safeco Field.
“A lot of people have emphasized the fact that this team has spent a lot of money bringing in guys like guys like me,” Batista said. “People who haven’t seen me or Jeff Weaver or Horacio Ramirez on a daily basis don’t know how much faith the team has in us. They brought us to a team that they thought we would fit perfectly. We’re all trying to prove that we are a winning team.”
Amid all the hand-wringing over the five games called off because of bad weather on their last road trip, Batista needed the extra time between starts.
“There’s no doubt I needed time to heal,” he said. “I was pretty beat up the last two weeks of spring training.”
He had a back problem late in camp and was hit in the chest by a line drive against the Rangers in the last week of spring training. Then, in his first outing of the regular season, Shannon Stewart of the A’s blistered a liner up the middle that hit Batista on his left foot.
He stayed in the game and completed a 1-2-3 first inning but was never the same afterward. He didn’t make excuses about the effect his ailing foot had on how he pitched, but Batista suffered a deep bone bruise and it was a factor.
“I was trying to pitch as quick as I could to keep it warm because when it got cold, it was painful,” he said. “No pitcher wants to get hurt on his landing point. The first thing you do is feel when you plant your foot is the twist, and that’s when everything goes wrong. That’s when your pitches start getting flat.”
Batista said the foot didn’t feel good again until he threw in the bullpen on Tuesday at Boston. It still hurt where he’d been hit, but the entire foot didn’t throb like it once did, and it didn’t affect his throwing mechanics.
He was a different pitcher Saturday, especially after Kenny Lofton led off the game with a single. Batista didn’t give up another hit until Lofton grounded an infield single with two outs in the fifth.
By then, the Mariners had scored six times off Rangers starter Vicente Padilla – aided by two Texas errors that helped the M’s score four runs in the third inning.
Batista and an offense that produced two-run homers by Adrian Beltre and Jose Guillen were plenty to give the Mariners their fourth victory in seven games this season. And, with the Angels losing at Boston, it pushed the Mariners into first place in the American League West Division.
It’s too early to get gleeful over that, just as it was too soon for the doom-and-gloomers to pronounce Batista as a mistake after his first outing.
“I’m just glad I’m helping this team to win,” he said. “We all want to pitch and we all want to show people that we’re here not just to compete, but to win.”
Saturday’s game also featured a couple of plunkings that caused umpires to warn both teams.
Padilla hit Ichiro Suzuki on the back of his right arm with runners on second and third and nobody out in the third inning. Batista answered with his first pitch in the top of the fourth, hitting the Rangers’ Michael Young on the backside, and plate umpire Paul Emmel immediately warned both teams.
“It was awfully suspicious,” Mariners manager Mike Hargrove said of Padilla’s up-and-in pitch to Suzuki, who’s been getting pushed off the plate a lot lately by opposing pitchers.
Batista all but said he hit Young as retaliation.
“You have to protect your players,” he said. “You don’t want to do it, but when somebody hurts one of your sons, you’re going to hurt somebody else.”
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