Seattle, Beltre belt Boston

SEATTLE – The Seattle Mariners’ starting pitching has been consistent in its inferiority this week, and yet Friday night gave reason for hope.

Hope that the Mariners’ scrawny-armed offense can look like an 800-pound Gorilla every night, thereby rendering it a moot point how anyone pitches.

Playing in front of a crowd that featured plenty of fans rooting for the visiting team, the Mariners actually showed more offense than the defending World Series champion Boston Red Sox. Seattle piled up a season-high 15 hits, including eight that went for extra bases, and overmatched the best lineup in baseball, beating the Red Sox 14-7 to end a three-game skid.

“Good things are contagious, just like bad things are contagious,” Mariners designated hitter Raul Ibanez said. “Hopefully, this will carry over. It’s good to see us get hits collectively.”

While starter Joel Pineiro added to the woes of a struggling rotation, Seattle’s bats lit up the scoreboard so often that Ray Allen temporarily became this city’s second-most dangerous offensive weapon.

After Adrian Beltre’s three-run homer in the fourth inning gave Seattle an 8-6 lead, the Mariners continued to pile it on. They hit five extra-base hits over the next two innings to circumvent any possibility of Boston’s high-octane offense sparking a comeback.

Over the past two games, Seattle has tallied 29 hits and 23 runs off the American League’s premier teams – Boston and the New York Yankees.

That’s the bright side. The bad news is that the Mariners’ starting pitchers have combined for just six innings of work in those two games, allowing 18 hits and 11 runs. Ryan Franklin’s 6-4 win over the Red Sox last Sunday remains the only victory from a member of Seattle’s starting rotation in the past 12 games.

Unless the Mariners’ offense can put up 15 hits every night, recent accomplishments are not a safe recipe for winning baseball.

For one night at least, it worked. Seattle had four doubles, including three in the fifth inning alone. The 15 hits and 14 runs both marked season bests for the Mariners (14-21).

Every starting position player but Wilson Valdez had a hit, and five had multiple hits. Beltre, Richie Sexson and Raul Ibanez all homered, with Sexson and Ibanez going back to back in the third to mark the first back-to-back Seattle homers all season.

The performance marked quite a turnaround for a team that had scored eight runs in its first five games of May.

Then there was Pineiro, who entered the game with a 5.66 ERA. He was mostly a victim of his inability to throw first-pitch strikes, as only three of Boston’s first 11 batters fell behind on the first pitch. Pineiro eventually gave up four walks and hit a batter in 3 2/3 innings.

“He just didn’t have command of anything,” Seattle manager Mike Hargrove said. “He couldn’t throw strikes, and that’s just not him. He didn’t pitch ahead of hitters and have command like he normally does.”

Pineiro left the game with Seattle trailing 6-5 in the top of the fourth, but the Mariners’ offense took over from there. Boston starter Jeremi Gonzalez got chased from the game after giving up back-to-back singles in the bottom of the fourth, then Beltre welcomed former Mariners pitcher John Halama to the game by hitting a three-run homer on the Boston reliever’s first pitch. The upper-deck shot gave Seattle an 8-6 lead – one the Mariners would never relinquish.

Bret Boone, Wiki Gonzalez and Randy Winn all doubled off Halama in the four-run fifth, with Winn’s three-run, bases-clearing double giving Seattle a 12-6 lead. Gonzalez added an RBI double, and Ichiro Suzuki an RBI triple, in the sixth.

Seattle reliever Julio Mateo, who has been solid all season, pitched 3 1/3 scoreless innings to get the Mariners into the eighth with a comfortable lead. He hasn’t allowed a run in his last 15 innings and has allowed just one in 22 innings of work for the entire season.

Boston managed to get 13 hits, including a pair by Johnny Damon to extend his hitting streak to a career-high 18 games. Damon entered the game leading the American League in hitting with a batting average of .383.

The game marked Boston’s second loss in the last 10 games, while Seattle won for the second time in 12 outings. Both wins came against the Red Sox.

The most baffling part was that the Mariners’ best offensive performance of the season went underappreciated by the home fans.

About a fifth of the 44,534 fans were on the Red Sox bandwagon, many of them cheering the defending champions as they stretched before batting practice.