Different day, same old story
ANAHEIM, Calif. — Compared to the first three games of this series, Sunday was different. It did not go down breathlessly to the final pitch.
But for Scott Spiezio, the Seattle Mariners’ 3-2 loss to the Anaheim Angels — in which no one scored after the sixth inning — was similarly sorrowful to too many that went before it.
With Ryan Franklin clinging to a 2-0 lead, courtesy of Bucky Jacobsen’s booming opposite-field homer in the fourth, Seattle had its daily chance to add on an inning later.
With two outs, Bret Boone and Raul Ibanez singled, and Jacobsen took a respectful 3-2 slider just outside for a walk that brought Spiezio to the plate with the bases loaded.
In the same setup Saturday, he hit into a 1-6-3 double play to ruin a rally. On Sunday, with a 1-2 count, Bartolo Colon fed him a hittable fastball.
“Right down the middle, and I swung right through it,” Spiezio said. “I can’t remember the last time I did that.”
He also can’t remember the last August he was hitting .208, or .160 with runners in scoring position.
“It’s not a matter of pressing,” Spiezio said. “Something’s going on, either mental or mechanical.”
As far as his swing goes, he said everything feels the same, but he spoke with hitting coach Paul Molitor.
“He told me he thinks he found something wrong,” Spiezio said. “I hope so. I’ve gone through stretches like this before, but nothing this long. I’m going crazy. I can’t figure it out.”
It has reached a point that manager Bob Melvin has hit for Spiezio twice on this trip, including the eighth inning Sunday when Edgar Martinez had a pinch single in his place.
“I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve been hit for before in my career,” Spiezio said. “But you can’t argue it. I can stop it by starting to hit.”
When it came to hitting in the finale of the series Anaheim took with one-run wins in the last three games, the Mariners outhit the Angels 10-7, but the home team bunched four hits for all of its runs after Spiezio’s key miss.
Franklin had as much trouble with first-base umpire Angel Hernandez in the early innings as he did with Anaheim hitters.
The Angels got only two hits off Franklin in the first four frames and Hernandez got him for two balks, claiming he buckled his left knee as he turned to make a throw to first, which is called a ‘balk move’ since it supposedly fools the runner into believing a pitch will be delivered.
“The balks bothered me but didn’t hurt me except they made me pitch a bit more in those innings,” Franklin said.
What hurt was a bad fastball for a homer by Robb Quinlan, his third of the season, his career and the third off Seattle, to make it 2-1 in the fifth.
What hurt more was a bad slider on an 0-2 pitch to Vladimir Guerrero, from which the Angels created a two-run winning inning in the sixth.
Guerrero’s ground-rule double put runners at second and third, and the Angels scored them both – on a sacrifice fly by Darin Erstad and a double by Quinlan.