Seattle Returns Home After Losing To Chicago

The rookie pitched well. A handful of hard-hit balls knocked down by the wind, run down near the warning track. A three-game-sweep became two out of three.

“Who said this was gonna be easy?” manager Lou Piniella said, looking around his office Sunday.

No one who follows baseball this season.

The Seattle Mariners lost an edge-of-the-seat game to the Chicago White Sox on Sunday, 2-1, then flew home to start the biggest stretch of home games in franchise history in a position they’ve not seen once in their first 18 years. Twelve games left to the season - and a one-game lead in the run for the American League wild-card berth.

“It’s down to 12 games now, and we’ve still got a slight edge and the next eight games at home,” Piniella said. “We’ve got Randy Johnson, Chris Bosio and Andy Benes pitching the next three games.”

“Eight games at home, that should be a big edge,” Mike Blowers said. “I don’t know if we can win this thing at home, but we can put some distance between us and some of the teams right behind us.”

And what the Mariners hope to do is share the next eight days with fans - plenty of them.

“We’re not asking for 60,000, but 25,000, 30,000, that would be great,” Ken Griffey Jr. said. “The last couple games at home, you could have put everybody in the dome on one level and still had room. You hate to see that.

“Fans got to forget the owners, forget the players and remember they’ve got a major league team in town - this week they’ll decide if they want to keep the team or not. But whether we stay or go, this is the most important part of baseball history in Seattle. I hope they want to be part of it.”

The Mariners run for the postseason has stirred clubhouse emotions, and on Sunday the team was reminded of the flip side of all those come-from-behind victories - a tough loss.

Win and they’d have opened up ground in the wild-card standings. And rookie right-hander Bob Wolcott put them in position to win, pitching a solid 6 innings and giving up just two runs on five hits.

“He pitched like a veteran,” Piniella said.

Wolcott beamed at the compliment. “If we win a World Series, I get a ring, too,” he said. “I want to be able to say I helped get us there.”

The Mariners didn’t lose without an opportunity to win. Seattle had men on base most every inning, but for the first time in the last five games, did the wrong thing at the wrong time.

Mariners were left in scoring position in the first, second, fifth, sixth, seventh and ninth innings as Seattle out-hit Chicago, 8-5. The most galling rally was in the sixth inning, when the Mariners almost had to score - and didn’t.

Griffey led off with a double off the center-field wall, then tried to take third base on a ground ball to shortstop. Bad move. Ozzie Guillen threw him out at third base. Jay Buhner followed with what would have been an RBI single but wasn’t. With two outs, Tino Martinez walked to load the bases.

Kirk McCaskill then got a routine ground ball from Felix Fermin, and the threat was gone.

Should Griffey have gone? Textbook baseball said no, but Junior disagreed. “Ozzie had to go back on the grass to get the ball, then throw off-balance,” he said. “It’s a 1-1 game - if I make it, we might go ahead. If I don’t, I look like an idiot. It was worth the risk.”

Though that sixth inning was the best point-blank shot at Seattle breaking through, the Mariners shook their heads and shrugged off a loss in which most of their best shots were stopped not by the White Sox, but the wind.

“We hit a lot of balls that they ran down on the warning track,” Piniella said.

“I think we had six bolts that stayed in that would have gone out,” Griffey said.

Chicago center fielder Lance Johnson laughed and agreed. “I thought Junior’s ball was gone, I thought one (Dan) Wilson hit in the second inning was gone, I thought the ball Joey (Cora) hit in the ninth might get out…” he said.

“There could have been a lot of runs scored today.”