Rangers end Mariners’ four-game winning streak
SEATTLE – Hector Noesi pitched brilliantly for the Mariners on Tuesday night. Well, except for the one inning when he didn’t, that is.
And on a night when the Mariners lineup was also stymied by a strong pitching performance, Noesi’s one rough inning was enough for the Rangers to walk away with a 3-1 victory in front of 15,604 at Safeco Field.
Noesi pitched eight innings, giving up three runs and three hits while striking out seven, and in six of those innings, he didn’t allow a base runner. The third inning, however, was a different story for Noesi. After walking a pair of batters, Noesi was one strike from escaping the self-inflicted jam, but he hung a 1-2 curveball to Elvis Andrus, who lined a triple into left-center field to score a pair of runs. Josh Hamilton drove in Andrus with a bloop double, and that was all the runs the Rangers would get, or need, against Noesi.
“One bad pitch, he hung a breaking ball to Andrus, that was it,” said Mariners manager Eric Wedge, whose team had won four straight prior to Tuesday’s loss. “Other than that he was outstanding today. Eight strong innings, did a great job against that lineup, and didn’t let that get to him either, which I think says a great deal about that young man. He gave us every opportunity to win the ballgame.”
Noesi agreed with his manager that the game turned on that one pitch to Andrus. Asked where he wanted that pitch to end up, Noesi replied, “The ground.”
Unlike the Rangers, the Mariners weren’t able to take full advantage of an opposing pitcher’s early struggles. Seattle did get one run across in the first off of Rangers starter Matt Harrison when Alex Liddi scored on a Justin Smoak single, but could have done much more damage having left the bases loaded. Harrison threw 35 pitches in that first inning, but settled down after that and did not allow another run while pitching into the eighth.
It wasn’t entirely Harrison’s pitching that kept the Mariners from doing more damage; they were also the victims of a few impressive defensive plays, as well as their own spacious ballpark. The final out that allowed Harrison to escape in the first was a Casper Wells drive that Hamilton tracked down with a running catch at the centerfield wall. Two innings later, Liddi thought he had a home run, or at the least a double off the wall, but Hamilton robbed him with a leaping catch against the wall.
“I hit it pretty good, I thought it had a chance to go out, then he made a good play and he caught it,” Liddi said. “I thought (Wells’ fly out) was going to go out too. That’s how it goes.”
The Mariners also missed a chance to get a run back in the fifth when Brendan Ryan, who had doubled two batters earlier, was held at third after a Liddi grounder bounced off of Adrian Beltre’s glove and into shallow left field. It appeared Ryan would have scored on the play had third base coach Jeff Datz sent him, and Ryan looked to be frustrated after he stopped and saw where the ball ended up. Ichiro Suzuki then grounded out to end the inning with Ryan stranded on third.
Datz told reporters after the game that he “screwed that up” by not sending Ryan, but Wedge pointed out that it was a tougher play to diagnose for Datz because of the way the ball was moving directly away from him.
“I think it was a tough angle for those guys over there,” Wedge said. “It’s a lot easier angle for us in the dugout, but from over there it’s a tough angle to read that play.”
Gutierrez improves
Franklin Gutierrez has taken his first steps in coming back from a problematic foot injury that came when the Seattle Mariners center fielder was trying to recover from a strained pectoral muscle.
Gutierrez took batting practice before Tuesday’s game against Texas and is expected to test the plantar fasciitis in his foot by doing running and agility drills today. Gutierrez has been back in Seattle getting treatment on his foot for a couple of weeks but the hitting and running marks a step ahead for the oft-injured outfielder.