Don’t look now, but Sean White has come back to the Mariners and pitched three scoreless innings.
That includes an impressive one last night when he struck out Michael Young and Josh Hamilton, and seemed to have gotten Julio Borbon to hit a third-out ground ball before third baseman Jose Lopez threw a sinker to first base that allowed Borbon to reach on an error.
Speaking of sinkers, White shook off the error and used that pitch to get Nelson Cruz to ground out to Lopez for the third out.
Since being recalled from Class AAA Tacoma for the third time this season, White has been a different-looking pitcher. He has pitched three innings, allowed one hit and struck out three. It’s the first three-inning stretch fo scoreles relief he has thrown for the Mariners since mid-May.
Nice as it is for the Mariners to see that from White, nobody is ready to proclaim that he’s back to being the reliable late-inning reliever he was the first two months last year — White included. This three-inning sample size is too small, and White knows that.
“This is an opportunity for me to come back here and really pitch well and show the team who I am,” he said. “I want to be a guy that they go to. I want to be in the role that I feel I was successful in last year.”
He flourished in April and May with a 1.75 ERA in those months. In June and July, however, it ballooned to 4.37 and by September his shoulder was hurting so badly from tendinitis that the team shut him down.
White refuses to cite the injury as the reason he struggled early this season and spent two stints with Tacoma.
“My arm has felt really good all year. That’s a big plus for me,” he said. “I spent a lot of time in the offseason building strength.”
More than any physical issue, White said he struggled mentally as he tried to recapture the throwing mechanics that worked so well last year.
“There were a lot of mechanical thoughts that I was trying to fix,” he said. “Going down to Tacoma turned out being a good thing. It gave me a chance to back off a little bit and slow myself down and just get back to focusing on the batter opposed to what I’m doing with my delivery and everything. I was thinking about too many things.”
Wakamatsu said the difference now is the quality of White’s pitches down in the strike zone.
“He’s had the velocity all year but it’s been elevated and it hasn’t had the late life,” Wakamatsu said. “He’s played around with his mechanics. The one thing he’s assured us all year, it hasn’t been the result of the injury. At least his lack of success hasn’t been because of the injury.
“It’s been the feel, and sometimes you see that with guys that have injuries to end the year. Even though there’s no pain, you change your mechanics to protect that, and I think that’s a little of what you saw earlier. Now it looks like he found some mechanics down in Triple-A, he’s been able to relax a little more.”
White’s challenge is to keep pitching this way.
“It’s something that might take some time, but I feel like I’ve made a lot of progress in the last couple of weeks,” he said. “It’s just (a matter of) getting myself comfortable back on the mound again. I want to get back to where I know I can pitch.”
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