Mike Leake’s gem helps Mariners end losing streak with 7-2 victory over Red Sox

BOSTON – A synthesized pop country song that would never make anyone forget Johnny Cash blared in the visitors’ clubhouse late Saturday night at Fenway Park.
Music, even though it wasn’t particularly good music, meant the Mariners had won a game.
“This is my favorite song,” Seattle manager Scott Servais said.
Really?
“It is now,” he said with a laugh.
The Mariners’ longest losing streak of the 2018 season ended at five games Saturday night.
They won’t get swept at Fenway Park. They won’t lose every game on the road trip. The season is not over.
A decisive 7-2 victory over the Red Sox stopped the losing and quelled the outside panic … for now.
A night after Seattle pitchers gave up 14 runs on 20 hits, starter Mike Leake provided some calm to the storm of missed locations and hard-hit pitches. The veteran right-hander delivered his best outing of the season and in his time with the Mariners, tossing eight shutout innings and allowing just three hits with two walks and five strikeouts to improve to 8-5. It was his longest scoreless outing since Sept. 30, 2015.
“Unbelievable,” Servais said. “It was really, really big for our ballclub for him to step up like that. It’s exactly what we needed. We needed somebody to go out there and shut it down and steady things.”
Leake understood this wasn’t just his normal start before he took the mound.
“When you have a five-game losing streak, you need to end it,” he said. “It’s nice that my round ended it.”
Leake had 12 ground-ball outs and of the balls put into play, only three registered exit velocities of more than 100 mph, which is considered a “barreled” ball.
Why didn’t he get to try for the shutout?
Well, closer Edwin Diaz hadn’t thrown since June 16, which is the last day the Mariners had won a game.
Servais had to tell Leake he wouldn’t get a chance for the shutout since pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre didn’t want to deliver the news.
“It was very, very hard,” Servais said. “Mel was like, ‘You go tell him.’ And that’s fine. I tried to explain to him that going into this game Eddie Diaz had to pitch tonight. He hadn’t pitched in six days. I told Mike that ‘99 percent of the time there is no way I would take you out of this game, but we need to get Eddie out there.’ ”
Leake hates coming out of games for any reason, but he understood Servais’ decision. Still shutouts, even complete games, are rare occurrences in the current era of baseball. Every starter wants to get them when they have the chance. Coming into the day, there have been 22 complete games thrown in 2,250 games this season.
“I wanted it,” Leake said. “I was ready, but they wanted to get Diaz work. There’s no fight there. I just have to take it.”
Predictably, Diaz wasn’t as sharp as usual. He gave up a leadoff single to J.D. Martinez and a triple to Mitch Moreland for Boston’s first run of the game. Diaz came back to strike out the next two batters before giving up a run-scoring single to Eduardo Nunez. But he retired the next batter to end the game and get his work in.
“It will help Eddie tomorrow or the next time he gets out there,” Servais said.
Leake got some personal redemption in the outing. In his previous start, also against the Red Sox, but at Safeco Field, he gave up five runs in the third inning of what ended up being a 9-3 defeat.
“I had the curveball working today and I was able to use a different pitch than I had in that last game,” he said. “My changeup was pretty effective. I was probably getting ahead a little bit better.”
Boston starter Eduardo Rodríguez was making a second consecutive start against the Mariners, and his didn’t go as well as the last one when he allowed just two runs and six hits in six innings. This time, the Mariners knocked Rodriguez out of the game after just four innings, scoring five runs on him on seven hits and two walks.
The outing wasn’t all easy for Leake. After retiring the first two hitters in the first, he allowed a single to Martinez, a double to Moreland and walked Brock Holt to load the bases.
The Red Sox initially appeared to pick up a run when Rafael Devers swung and missed at a pitch in the dirt that got past catcher Chris Herrmann and rolled to the backstop. But both Leake and Herrmann immediately rushed to home-plate umpire Alfonso Marquez, pleading that the pitch hit Devers in the foot during the swing.
Servais came out and asked for a replay review. The replays showed it clearly hit Devers in the foot. By rule, it’s a dead ball. So Martinez had to go back to third. A pitch later, Devers grounded out to second to end the inning.
“If they put up a run or two, it would have made a difference,” Leake said.
From there, Leake found a rhythm. He got ahead early and kept hitters off balance with an assortment of off-speed pitches. There were no patterns or predictability to his methods, just execution.
“One thing that Mike told me that really struck out is just try to be creative on the plate and use all of his pitches,” Herrmann said.
The Mariners grabbed a 1-0 lead in the first. Dee Gordon led off the game with an infield single and Mitch Haniger immediately drove him in with a double.
They just kept adding to it. Nelson Cruz, who had three hits, doubled with one out in the second and later scored on an error by shortstop Tzu-Wei Lin. The Mariners hung three on Rodriguez in the fourth. Haniger smacked a two-run double off the green monster and later scored on Kyle Seager’s hustling infield single.
Seattle tacked on runs in the sixth and seventh against the Red Sox bullpen.
“It’s a good win,” Haniger said. “We just put those other games behind us. They were tough losses, but we’ve got a really good team. Everybody is upbeat and focusing on each day.”