SEATTLE – On the day the Seattle Mariners’ trade activity backed up the baseball belief that a franchise can never have enough pitching, they proved it on the field, too.
The Cleveland Indians hammered Joel Pineiro for eight hits and seven runs in five innings Sunday, and his outing again forced the Mariners into the bullpen early in a 9-7 loss at Safeco Field.
The defeat left Pineiro 3-7 and continued a season-long struggle for the right-hander, who the Mariners had hoped would become the staff ace.
Since a victory on April 26 that gave him a 2-1 record, Pineiro has gone 1-6 in 16 starts. The seven earned runs Sunday tied his season high.
What’s next?
“Joel has been a very good pitcher in the past and I firmly believe he will be again,” Seattle manager Mike Hargrove said. “The only way you get that out of a pitcher is to keep running him out there. For the foreseeable future, that’s what we will do.”
Hargrove praised Pineiro after his last start, even though Pineiro allowed 10 hits in 51/3 innings of a no-decision against the Tigers. Many of those hits were bloops into the outfield and bouncers through the infield.
Sunday, there were none of those.
The Indians jumped on Pineiro early, with five hits in the first two innings, when he struggled with his control and also walked three. They scored two runs in the first inning and three in the second, then one each in the fourth and fifth.
“I didn’t have any fastball location,” Pineiro said. “That hurt me pretty bad. I felt fine, no excuses.”
Jhonny Peralta delivered the biggest blow, a three-run double with two outs in the second inning after the Mariners had tied the score 2-2 in the bottom of the first.
Pineiro retired the Indians 1-2-3 only in the third inning, and the runs he gave up in the second, fourth and fifth never allowed the Mariners to find any momentum despite a good offensive day of their own.
The Mariners trailed 2-0 before their first at-bat, but tied the game in the bottom of the first on a run-scoring single by Richie Sexson and an RBI double by Adrian Beltre.
The Mariners also scored once in the second, when Raul Ibanez’s ground out brought home Wiki Gonzalez, but the Indians already had five runs by then.
Pineiro was finished after five innings and 87 pitches, and reliever Matt Thornton didn’t slow the Indians. They loaded the bases with nobody out in the sixth and scored twice more – on Coco Crisp’s sacrifice fly and Peralta’s RBI ground out.
Jeff Nelson and George Sherrill worked the final 22/3 innings without allowing a hit. Their work came too late and the offense, while productive with 14 hits and seven runs, too little.
Barely.
Mike Morse drove a double off the top of the center field wall in the ninth off Indians closer Bob Wickman. Dave Hansen lined out to left before Wickman walked Gonzalez.
Yuniesky Betancourt stung a liner to the left-field wall, but Crisp made a running back-hand catch on the warning track for the second out.
“I don’t know how much harder you can hit a ball,” Hargrove said. “He crushed that ball, but the topspin got him when it came down.”
Topspin got Ichiro Suzuki, too, when he hit a bouncer to second base for the final out – finishing just the third 0-for-6 game of his career and the Mariners’ third loss of the four-game series.
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