SEATTLE — For six innings, Ryan Rowland-Smith did his best impersonation of the Seattle Mariners’ Big Three on Friday night.
For the light-hitting Mariners, whose top three pitchers are having great seasons, good starting pitching isn’t good enough.
Rowland-Smith’s return to the rotation included a three-run seventh, more offensive struggles and a bullpen meltdown as the Mariners lost 9-0 to the Cleveland Indians at Safeco Field.
“You look at the final score, and you’re not happy,” manager Don Wakamatsu said afterward. “But there were some pretty good things that happened.”
The only obvious one was the starting pitching.
Rowland-Smith, who has spent most of the past two months fine-tuning his game at Class AAA Tacoma, was on cruise control for much of Friday night. After allowing a run on a bases-loaded sacrifice fly in the top of the second inning, he retired 13 consecutive batters before Jhonny Peralta’s leadoff single in the seventh.
But the next batter, Travis Hafner, homered to center field to give the Indians a 3-0 lead. Two outs later, Ben Francisco hit a solo shot off Rowland-Smith.
Ryan Garko and Jamey Carroll added back-to-back homers off reliever Miguel Batista in a five-run ninth inning to cap off the Indians’ blowout win. Batista gave up more runs in two-thirds of inning’s work than the Mariners have scored in their past three games.
In just his second major-league start of 2009, Rowland-Smith (0-1) went seven innings and allowed four runs off five hits. But he also made a pretty good case for a full-time spot in the Mariners’ rotation.
“I thought he had a good outing,” Wakamatsu said. “He set the tone early, his tempo was great and he had a feel for all his pitches. … The wheels fell off (in the seventh), but I thought, for the first outing back, he showed pretty good stuff.”
The southpaw got plenty of help from his defense.
On the same night that center fielder Franklin Gutierrez returned from a wall-crashing injury that caused him to miss two games, right fielder Ichiro Suzuki made a couple of nice catches against the wall while avoiding injury. Suzuki crashed into the padded wall in foul territory for the first out of the third inning, then he tracked down a long fly ball off Francisco’s bat in the fifth.
In between, third baseman Jack Hannahan did a nice job replacing injured starter Adrian Beltre with a stab-and-throw of a Jamey Carroll grounder.
But pitching and defense, which have been staples of the Mariners’ unexpected success this season, weren’t enough on Friday night. The offense got a pair of singles in the first inning but got only two hits the rest of the way.
Cleveland starter Aaron Laffey, who entered the game with a 4.27 ERA, made the Mariners’ bats look like Laffy Taffy. He pitched seven scoreless innings and allowed just three hits, striking out seven. Laffey retired the last 13 batters he faced.
“Laffey threw a heck of a ball game,” Wakamatsu said. “He changed speeds and kept out hitters off balance.”
In their past three games, the Mariners (51-45) have had just four runs and 14 hits.
Those numbers are not that far from what Batista gave up while working part of the ninth. He allowed four consecutive hits to start the inning, capped off by the back-to-back homers.
Batista allowed six hits and a walk before coming out of Friday’s game with two outs in the ninth. He has now given up 11 hits and nine earned runs in his past five innings of work.
Despite the Mariners’ red-hot rotation — top-three starters Felix Hernandez, Erik Bedard and Jarrod Washburn have allowed 15 earned runs in their nine combined starts since July 1 — the AL West race is gradually slipping from Seattle’s grasp. The Los Angeles Angels won their seventh consecutive game Friday night and pulled 6½ games ahead of the third-place Mariners.
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