SEATTLE — This time, the home crowd cheered Ryan Feierabend.
In lieu of a victory that was snatched away by a bullpen hiccup Friday night, that’s the best thing that could have happened to the left-hander on his 23rd birthday.
Feierabend held the Oakland A’s to one run in five innings and, even though the bullpen gave up a three-run lead and his chance at victory, the Mariners rallied late for a 7-5 triumph at Safeco Field.
Jeff Clement doubled twice and drove in three runs, including one in the seventh when the Mariners scored twice to break a 5-5 tie.
Feierabend made a major turnaround from his last outing, when he gave up six runs in three innings at Minnesota on Sunday, pitching on three days of rest for the first time in his career.
“It made a big difference to go through my four days of workouts and being able to prepare for the hitters,” he said.
It also erased one of the worst — and most perplexing — outings of his career 14 months to the day earlier.
On June 22, 2007, Feierabend started a Friday night game against the Cincinnati Reds at Safeco Field, where most in a capacity crowd cheered every move that Ken Griffey Jr. made in his return to Seattle.
Not only that, but they booed Feierabend loudly in the first inning when he made two pickoff moves to first base while Griffey batted. The scene unnerved Feierabend, who needed 42 pitches to get out of the inning, allowing four runs.
Feierabend allowed nine runs in 2 2/3 innings before he was lifted from what became a 16-1 Reds victory.
Friday finally was a chance for Feierabend to build good memories and he did, although not without some major stress in the third inning.
He’d cruised through the first two, allowing only Bobby Crosby’s one-out infield single in the first, then faced Frank Thomas with the bases loaded and two outs in the third.
Thomas had hit a towering fly in the first inning that had home-run distance but dropped to the foul side of the left-field foul pole before Feierabend struck him out.
This time, Feierabend threw three straight balls to Thomas, then got back into the count with two strikes.
Then, before anyone could remember June 22 last year or even the nightmare Sunday at Minnesota, Feierabend struck out Thomas with an 88 mph fastball on the inside corner.
Feierabend’s only strife the rest of his time was Rajai Davis’ solo home run with one out in the fourth to break a scoreless tie.
The Mariners got that one back _ and more _ in the bottom of the fourth against A’s left-hander Gio Gonzalez.
They scored four times on just two hits, Jose Lopez’s RBI double and Clement’s two-run double. The A’s helped the Mariners with an error, but the M’s helped themselves with Bryan LaHair’s sacrifice bunt and Miguel Cairo’s squeeze bunt. That scored Clement to give the Mariners a 4-1 lead.
After Feierabend got through the fifth, manager Jim Riggleman decided to pull him while all was well. He’d thrown 93 pitches.
“We wanted to make sure we sent him home with a good feeling about his performance,” Riggleman said. “As it turned out, it cost us some runs and made for kind of a hairy situation.”
That’s a good way to describe what happened in the sixth.
Sean Green hit the first two batters he faced in the sixth, then gave up two bloop singles, one by Carlos Gonzalez to score a run, and an RBI double by Barton to make the score 4-3.
Riggleman brought in left-hander Cesar Jimenez and he jammed Cliff Pennington, who still was able to bloop a single to right that scored two more runs for a 5-4 A’s lead.
The Mariners came back again, tying the score in the bottom of the sixth on Ichiro Suzuki’s RBI ground out, then scoring twice in the seventh on Lopez’s RBI single and Clement’s RBI double.
Clement, a left-handed hitter who struggled terribly early this season, continued his impressive hitting against left-handed pitching, getting both of his RBI doubles against lefties. He’s batting .227 for the season, but .289 with five of his 20 RBI against left-handers.
This time, the bullpen held the A’s.
Roy Corcoran gave up one hit and a walk in two innings and pushed his record to 4-0, and J.J. Putz gave up a hit and a walk in the ninth but got Thomas to hit into a double play that ended the game. Putz recorded his eighth save, his first since June 9.
Read Kirby Arnold’s blog on the Mariners at www.heraldnet.com
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