Nats rip M’s Dickey
SEATTLE – When the Seattle Mariners decided to start R.A. Dickey in Friday’s game in place of Miguel Batista, they didn’t expect him to pitch just like Batista.
That’s what they got in a 7-6 loss to the Washington Nationals, who had Dickey out of the game after 12/3 innings.
In his first start after replacing Batista in the rotation, Dickey was the victim of a flat knuckleball and a six-run second inning.
“This was on me,” said Dickey (1-2). “I gave up seven runs and we lost 7-6. It was nightmarish. I had minimal movement and the ball stayed up. It just wouldn’t drop. I had a bad knuckler in the first, and the second wasn’t any better. When I threw good ones, they hit those too.”
The deficit was too much for the Mariners to overcome, although they nearly did.
The bullpen followed Dickey with 71/3 scoreless innings while the offense responded with 15 hits and made it a one-run game in the eighth.
All the rally caps aside, the Mariners couldn’t complete the comeback and fell to 0-40 when trailing after eight innings.
It was Dickey’s worst outing of the season after he’d earned a chance at the rotation with a 2.67 earned run average and a string of stellar relief appearances.
Batista had put together a stretch of difficult outings – averaging five innings in his past five starts – and the Mariners decided Thursday to move him to the bullpen and Dickey to the rotation for at least two starts.
The first start was difficult from the beginning.
Dickey got two ground-ball outs to start the game, then gave up three straight singles and a run before getting out of the inning.
He never made it out of the second.
The Mariners, who’d tied the score in the first when Ichiro Suzuki led off with a double and scored on Raul Ibanez’s ground out, had at least one baserunner in all but the sixth inning.
They scored twice in the third on RBI singles by Jose Vidro and Adrian Beltre and twice again in the fifth when Kenji Johjima drove in two runs with a double.
Jose Lopez’s sacrifice fly in the eighth drove in Yuniesky Betancourt before Vidro flied to deep right-center to end that inning.