M’s Meche tames Tigers

SEATTLE – Pick the words that go together: Gil Meche and …

(A) Tall, strong.

(B) Untapped potential.

(C) Underachiever.

(D) Mentally soft.

At various times in his career, all of those might have applied to the right-handed pitcher whose raw talent seemed undermined by forces that prevented it from fully developing.

Sunday, after Meche gutted his way through a day without his good curveball and beat the Detroit Tigers 3-2 at Safeco Field, other words apply.

He’s got backbone.

“Definitely,” manager Mike Hargrove said. “Every person at this level has to have that because it gives you an edge. It doesn’t always work. But at this level, the talent is so comparable. Little advantages can make for huge results.”

Like Sunday, for example.

Meche appeared to be finished midway through the series finale against the Detroit Tigers. He’d reached 73 pitches in the fourth inning, when the Tigers bopped him for their first four hits, including a two-run home run by Magglio Ordonez that gave the Tigers a 2-0 lead.

On turn-back-the-clock day with the Mariners wearing the uniforms of the 1969 Seattle Pilots, the fourth turned into a here-we-go-again inning. The Mariners had lost seven of the eight games on the homestand, including six straight, and needed anything but a seventh straight to send them into the All-Star break.

Somebody had to get tough, and this time it was Meche.

“I didn’t realize how manly pitches I had until after the fifth inning,” he said. “It was a pretty high number and I told myself I had to go out and throw a couple of quick innings.”

He did, getting through the fifth and sixth with nothing more than a walk.

Little-used backup catcher Rene Rivera tied the score with a two-run homer in the fifth, leaving Hargrove and pitching coach Rafael Chaves to decide whether to let Meche keep going.

With a bullpen that was relatively fresh and no need to save it because of the All-Star break, Hargrove was ready to go there. In the dugout after the sixth, Hargrove and pitching coach Rafael Chaves approached Meche, with Chaves doing the talking.

“You’ve got to be honest with us,” Chaves said. “How are you feeling?”

While Meche said he was fine, Hargrove looked into his eyes as much as he listened to the conviction in his voice.

“Most of the time a pitcher will say, ‘Naw, I’m OK,’ when they’re really not,” Hargrove said. “They want to have that macho BS.”

Chaves asked again: “Have you had enough?”

Meche looked him in the eyes and said, “I’m absolutely honest. I want to go back out there.”

Hargrove, who’d angered Meche in his last start by pulling him after 87 pitches and five innings, sent him back to the mound.

“It was the look in his eyes and the tone that he said it,” Hargrove said.

Despite a pitch count that had climbed well past 100, Meche wanted the seventh inning because he had complete faith in his slider, a pitch he rarely threw the past few seasons. It became his out pitch Sunday because his fastball was ordinary and his curve almost non-existent.

“It was a pitch I kept going to over and over to get out of some jams,” Meche said.

He’d used it on Craig Monroe to stop the Tigers in the sixth, and he worked a 1-2-3 seventh, finishing with strikeouts of Chris Shelton and Brandon Inge.

Meche left after throwing 126 pitches, and in the bottom of the seventh Yuniesky Betancourt provided the hit that made him an eight-game winner. Betancourt’s roller between shortstop and third snaked past Inge and Carlos Guillen, scoring Eduardo Perez for a 3-2 Mariners lead.

Rafael Soriano pitched a perfect eighth and J.J. Putz strolled through the ninth to record his 16th save.

It left the Mariners with a 2-7 homestand, still a disappointment after they went 18-8 in June, but they entered the break just 2 games behind first-place Oakland and Texas in the mediocre – but tight – AL West Division.

The Mariners won’t touch a baseball again until they work out at Safeco Field on Thursday, then fly to Toronto to begin an important trip against the Blue Jays and Yankees.

“Any time you go into the break with a positive, that’s good,” Hargrove said. “But we’ve still got a lot of baseball left to play. We feel good about our ballclub. The one characteristic we have is that we’ve shown up to play every day and we’ve given our best effort. You can’t say that about a lot of teams.”