Mariners’ big hitters find the zone

SEATTLE – Familiarity obviously breeds content for Adrian Beltre.

Beltre, the $64 million slugger who wobbled through the first two months of the season against American League pitchers he’d rarely seen, found his comfort zone Saturday night.

Against a pitcher he’d batted against 35 times in his career, the Mariners’ new third baseman put the belt back in Beltre, at least for a night, to help the Seattle Mariners beat the San Diego Padres 5-3 at Safeco Field.

Beltre hit the ball hard in every at-bat against Padres starter Brian Lawrence, including a sixth-inning home run off the facing of the upper deck in left field that jolted life into a Mariners offense that had fallen listless.

“It doesn’t mean that I’m going to hit good against him, but when you’ve seen a guy before, you know what to expect,” Beltre said. “It’s kind of hard when you go to home plate against a guy you’ve never seen before and don’t know what he throws.”

Beltre knows Lawrence precisely – “Sinker, slider and a cutter away,” he said.

He then backed it up with three hard-hit balls.

In addition to his home run, he also had a single during the Mariners’ three-run first inning and smashed a hard liner to center field in the third.

“When he’s got the ball sinking like normal he’s pretty tough to hit,” Beltre said of Lawrence. “I’m here to hit mistakes, and today he left some pitches up that we took advantage of.”

Richie Sexson, also a former National Leaguer but with just eight at-bats off Lawrence, got his licks off the Padres right-hander, too.

Sexson hit a two-run double in the first inning when the Mariners took a 3-0 lead, and he followed Beltre’s homer in the sixth with a 449-foot drive over the center field fence on the next pitch from Lawrence. Sexson’s homer, his 12th this season to give the Mariners a 5-2 lead, carried six feet farther than Beltre’s, according to stadium measurements.

“They’re both strong individuals. I’m not sure they can hit the ball any harder than they hit those two,” manager Mike Hargrove said.

Beltre, whose average was .221 on May 4, has pushed it higher point-by-point since then. He’s back to .238 and feeling better about his swing.

“I will have good at-bats for two or three games, then for some reason I won’t,” he said. “But I’ve felt like that last five or six games, I’ve taken good swings. I feel like it’s coming along.”

It took more than hitting for the Mariners to end the Padres’ eight-game winning streak. Defense and pitching were huge.

Sexson made a diving backhand stop of Phil Nevin’s grounder to get the final out in the first inning with two runners on base. Ichiro Suzuki leaped high against the right-field wall and denied Ryan Klesko a home run, which would have tied the score in the third inning.

“When he hit it I thought it was out of here,” Hargrove said. “I thought there was no doubt, but Ichiro made a great play.”

Mariners starter Gil Meche pitched a game he could feel good about, although he struggled through most of his six innings with wayward control of his curveball. Still, he gave up only two hits and two runs.

The Mariners have been waiting for Meche, 4-2, to get through one of these, when he survived without his best stuff.

“It was encouraging because all the good ones are able to do that,” Hargrove said. “They say a pitcher has five starts when nobody can touch him and there’s five starts when they can’t get anybody out. Then there’s the other 25 starts and this was one of those for Gil. It wasn’t that he couldn’t get anybody out and it wasn’t that he was lights-out. He was somewhere in the middle and he found a way to make pitches when we needed them.”

So did the Mariners’ bullpen.

Julio Mateo got two outs in the seventh before Dave Roberts grounded a triple into the right-field corner and scored when Sexson booted Mark Sweeney’s ground ball for an error. Ron Villone walked Klesko but struck out Brian Giles to end the seventh, and Hargrove brought in right-hander Jeff Nelson in the eighth.

Nelson retired all three hitters, including Phil Nevin and Sean Burroughs on strikeouts.

Closer Eddie Guardado pitched a 1-2-3 ninth to get his 11th save.