SEATTLE — When will Ryan Rowland-Smith return to the Seattle Mariners as part of the starting rotation?
Before Monday’s game, manager Jim Riggleman gave so few clues he might as well have answered when pigs fly and the Mariners score 10 times in the same inning.
Monday night — in the dreaded calm before the Mariners stormed from behind for a Raul Ibanez-induced 11-6 victory over the Minnesota Twins — Miguel Batista may have answered for him.
While Rowland-Smith was mowing down hitters for a third straight start at Class AAA Tacoma, Batista added another brief outing to his season full of them. The Twins popped him for seven hits, including Nick Punto’s leadoff home run in the third inning, and four walks in three innings before Riggleman made another early walk to the mound.
When Batista walked off, he had a 6.80 earned run average.
His record was headed toward 4-12 before the Mariners overcame a 6-0 deficit with their biggest scoring spree of the season.
After a run in the sixth inning, they scored 10 in the seventh — six produced by Ibanez.
Ibanez hit a grand slam off Twins starter Glen Perkins and drove home two more with a bases-loaded single, setting a franchise record with six RBI in one inning. It broke the record held by Ken Griffey Jr., who had five RBI in an inning on April 29, 1999, against the Tigers.
Ibanez, the subject of serious trade talk between the Mariners and Blue Jays last week before a deal fell apart, has a team-high 73 RBI this season.
“Realizing we were still down at the time, I was trying not to do too much,” said Ibanez, who has two grand slams this season and seven in his career. “Fortunately I got a good pitch to hit and I caught it decent enough to hit it out of the ballpark.”
Then the good at-bats continued against Perkins, a left-hander who entered the game 8-3 and had baffled the M’s to that point.
Adrian Beltre followed Ibanez’s slam with a double and Jose Lopez drove him home with a single, tying the score 6-6. Then Jeff Clement hit a pinch-hit RBI single for a 7-6 lead, and the Mariners did something rare.
They added on.
Yuniesky Betancourt singled to score a run and the Twins contributed one more with an error. Walks to Ichiro Suzuki and Willie Bloomquist loaded the bases again for Ibanez, who singled up the middle to score two more for a five-run Mariners lead.
The Mariners’ bullpen, as it has done most of the season, quieted the Twins after their early spree off Batista.
Jake Woods pitched three scoreless innings, followed by Roy Corcoran, Cesar Jimenez and Mark Lowe with a scoreless inning apiece.
It’s what happened long before all the heroics that is likely to become the next high-level discussion among the Mariners.
Monday’s outing was the fourth in Batista’s past seven starts in which he has lasted three innings or less.
Meanwhile, in Tacoma, Rowland-Smith held Round Rock to six hits and two runs in six innings. He’s 2-0 with a 2.95 ERA in three starts since he was sent down to be groomed as a starter.
Riggleman repeated after the game Monday what he said that afternoon, that the club continues to discuss the plan for bringing Rowland-Smith back as a starter.
“We’ll continue to monitor how he’s doing,” Riggleman said. “We want to get him up here but we don’t have any timetable on it. We’ll keep discussing it and see when the right time is and make the adjustments on the roster when it happens.”
As for Batista, Riggleman said only that he battled against a good-hitting team.
“He just didn’t have it,” Riggleman said. “But like the other guys, he’s leaving it all out there for you. He’s trying to get outs but that’s a good ballclub he’s facing and they got him.”
Thankfully for Batista, the Mariners got the Twins back with that Ibanez-fueled 10-run seventh. Asked if he’d ever come to bat twice in the same inning with the bases loaded, Ibanez smiled.
“I wasn’t even sure it was the same inning,” he said.
Read Kirby Arnold’s blog on the Mariners at www.heraldnet.com
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