SEATTLE – Oakland starter Rich Harden, pitching his first game since May 13 because of an oblique injury, held Seattle to two hits and a run in five innings before relievers Keiichi Yabu, Ricardo Rincon and Justin Duchscherer held the Mariners off en route to a 4-2 victory on Tuesday night at Safeco Field.

Yes, the Mariners continue to look up at the .500 mark – they’re now 31-38 and just 1/2 game ahead of Oakland and the basement in the American League West Division – but they’ve been competitive most of the time, just not victorious.

Of the Mariners’ 69 games, 47 have been decided by three runs or less, and 23 of those were by one run.

“That says a lot about this ballclub,” Hargrove said. “We’ve given ourselves a chance night in and night out to win games, and eventually it’s going to start turning our way.”

It could have turned on three different at-bats Tuesday, when the Mariners had runners on the bases and hit the ball hard without scoring.

Richie Sexson grounded into two inning-ending double plays, in the sixth and eighth innings, after the Mariners had put two runners on base with one out. In the fifth, with Oakland ahead 4-1, two runners on and two outs, Pat Borders launched a fly to the wall that A’s center fielder Mark Kotsay caught on the dead run.

“That probably is the one that hurt the most,” Hargrove said. “It would score a minimum of two runs and gets us back to 4-3.”

Instead, the Mariners were left to keep the game close and work up another rally, which they nearly did twice.

In the sixth, with Adrian Beltre on first and Ichiro Suzuki on second, Sexson hit a sharp grounder to third baseman Eric Chavez, who turned an around-the-horn double play that kept the score 4-1.

In the eighth, a carbon copy.

The Mariners had scored once in the inning on Beltre’s RBI single to make it a 4-2 score. Sexson came up with Beltre on first, Randy Winn on second and Hargrove loving how the situation set itself.

“I’ll take my chances any day with Richie Sexson,” Hargrove said. “He hit both those balls hard.”

He hit it hard, but to the wrong spot.

Sexson’s sharp one-hopper to Chavez began another double play that wiped out the Mariners’ final chance to score. Duchscherer retired the Mariners in order in the ninth.

“Truth be told, we probably hit the ball harder than they hit it tonight,” Hargrove said. “But they bunched them all in two innings and got four runs out of it. Theirs fell in and ours didn’t.”

Two innings, the third and fourth, cost Mariners starter Joel Pineiro, who fell to 2-4 after a string of six no-decisions.