SEATTLE – Lucky for the 28,764 at Safeco Field on Wednesday, bad baseball doesn’t have an odor.
Two home runs by Edgar Martinez, another hit by Ichiro Suzuki and a homer by Greg Dobbs in his first major league at-bat couldn’t overcome the figurative stench of what transpired around those feel-good moments.
Another mistake-filled game by the Mariners handed the Cleveland Indians a 9-5 victory.
There were three wild pitches, a blown pickoff play, a puzzling error by Bret Boone that led to four unearned runs and a star-crossed M’s catcher, Miguel Olivo, who couldn’t seem to block a pitch in the dirt.
It added up to the Mariners’ 87th loss with nothing but playoff contenders on the schedule for the remaining 24 games, beginning with the Boston Red Sox tonight.
And to think it began with such promise on Wednesday.
Mariners rookie starting pitcher Cha Seung Baek gave up two hits and a run in the first inning, then found a rhythm. In the meantime, Martinez gave him a lead and cemented himself further in Mariners lore.
He hit a solo home run in the first inning, then a two-run blow in the third that was the 308th homer of his career. The blast moved him past Jay Buhner into sole possession of second place on the team’s all-time home run list. Ken Griffey Jr. had 398 as a Mariner.
“Edgar is seeing the ball very well, hitting it to all fields and it seems like he’s hitting it hard every time,” Mariners manger Bob Melvin said.
Baek had straightened himself after the first inning, then gave up a hard ground ball to Matt Lawton leading off the fourth that changed everything.
Boone waved at the ball and knocked it into shallow right-center field, and Lawton easily reached second base. Travis Hafner’s one-out infield single scored Lawton and, with two outs, Ronnie Belliard pounded a three-run home run that gave the Indians a 5-3 lead.
“The numbers will say he didn’t pitch that well,” Melvin said of Baek, a rookie right-hander. “But I thought he started to get a lot more comfortable out there and the error cost him.”
It didn’t get any prettier for the Mariners until the game was out of hand.
Baek threw one wild pitch and reliever Matt Thornton two others, all on balls in the dirt that Olivo tried to stop with one hand.
“Some of those balls he definitely has to come up with,” Melvin said. “There might have been some crossups as far as what he thought was coming. That’s certainly a part of his game that he has to work on. He knows that and we know that.”
Thornton also had Lawton picked off in the seventh inning, but his throw pulled first baseman Willie Bloomquist off the bag and allowed Lawton to reach second without a throw. The Indians ended up scoring three times in that inning on Casey Blake’s RBI single and Ben Broussard’s two-run single.
Suzuki got his only hit in the bottom of the seventh, a one-out single that was his 227th hit of the season. He needs 30 more hits in the final 24 games to tie George Sisler’s 1920 major league single-season record.
Aaron Taylor, in his first major league appearance since rotator cuff surgery a year ago, got two outs in the ninth before Jody Gerut homered for the Indians’ ninth run.
Dobbs, pinch-hitting in the ninth, worked a full count against the Indians’ Bob Wickman, then crushed a fastball into the right-field seats to become the first player in Mariners history to hit a home run in his first at-bat. Jamie Nelson in 1983 and Alvin Davis in 1984 homered in their second at-bats.
“He worked himself into a nice count where he got the fastball,” Melvin said of Dobbs. “They’re not going to walk him to lead off the inning and it had all to do with how he got to that count. It’s a special day for him.”
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