SEATTLE – One day after he joined baseball’s 40-home-run club, Manny Ramirez dragged Jamie Moyer into it.
Ramirez hit his 41st homer of the season with a first-inning blast off Moyer that launched the Boston Red Sox to a 9-0 victory Saturday night over the Seattle Mariners at Safeco Field.
It was the 40th home run allowed this season by Moyer – and not the last.
Mark Bellhorn hit a two-run homer in the fifth inning, when the Red Sox scored four times and sealed Moyer’s eighth straight loss. Moyer, 6-11, hasn’t won since June 18 at Pittsburgh, a span of 15 starts.
Home runs have hurt him badly. The two he allowed Saturday made him one of eight pitchers in major league history who have allowed 41 or more in a season. Bert Blyleven holds the record of 50 in 1986.
Moyer has pitched without his pinpoint control much this season, and opposing teams have crushed his mistakes. Against a Red Sox team that has scored 22 runs in the last two games, he had little chance.
“I looked up in the fifth inning and they only had five hits, but it seemed like whenever they got a hit, it was for an RBI,” catcher Dan Wilson said.
The first was a first-inning solo home run by Ramirez after hitting two the night before.
The Red Sox scored two more runs in the second inning before Moyer retired the next seven hitters.
“I thought there were parts of the game where he cruised and had some great stuff,” Wilson said. “Hopefully, that’s what he’ll take away from this game. They scored three early, and then we kind of maintained 3-0 and tried to get ourselves back into it.”
That didn’t happen, with Red Sox starter Bronson Arroyo making the M’s hitters look like they were facing Pedro Martinez.
Arroyo cruised through seven innings, allowing four hits and only one on solid contact, a seventh-inning single by Jolbert Cabrera.
Boston relievers Mike Timlin and Alan Embree finished of the M’s in the eighth and ninth.
The Red Sox, held scoreless against M’s relievers Scott Atchison in the sixth, Ron Villone in the seventh and Masao Kida in the eighth, scored two more runs in the ninth off rookie Randy Williams, the 14th Mariner to make his major league debut this season.
“To a certain extent, some of the young guys have been out-pitching some of the veterans,” pitching coach Bryan Price said. “Eventually, believe it or not, we’ll be glad we got to see as much of these guys as we saw.”
As for Moyer, he’ll go back to searching for the consistency that made him a 21-game winner last year.
“Right now, he’s constantly in a state of trying to gain consistency within the mechanics to repeat good pitches,” Price said. “Now we need to get a little more creative and find a way to finish the year strong and go into ‘05 with him feeling good about what he’s doing.”
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