CHICAGO — Sure there was a little wind blowing out to right field on Wednesday afternoon. And to be clear, 15-17 mph gusts in Chicago are considered a light breeze. But Mike Zunino doesn’t need any extra help to hit the ball out of the park — even to the opposite field.
The Mariners’ starting catcher, possibly the strongest player on the roster, smashed his second homer of the season and the series, showcasing that strength with a solo blast to right field in the top of the sixth — giving his team its first lead of the game.
And that one-run lead was all the Mariners would need. A rested bullpen made it stand up, not allowing a hit or run from the White Sox for the final three innings of the game to secure a 4-3 victory.
“He’s got that kind of power,” manager Scott Servais said of Zunino. “The at-bats have been more consistent. He’s staying on it. Z is starting to come around.”
Zunino had two hits in the game and has looked more comfortable at the plate with each game. A slow start wasn’t unexpected after missing the first few weeks of the season with a strained oblique.
“The rhythm and timing is my biggest thing,” he said.
And the homer?
“I knew I barreled it,” he said. “With the height of the ball and the how the wind was was, it swirls here, I knew I hit it well and I’m just happy I got it high enough to clear the fence.”
For the second straight game, the bullpen held a one-run lead to victory. The trio of James Pazos, Juan Nicasio and Edwin Diaz looked dominant from the seventh inning to the ninth. Diaz notched his league-leading 10th save on the season as the Mariners (13-10) won their second straight three-game series of the road trip.
“It wasn’t pretty,” Servais said. “There wasn’t a ton of offense. We are used to scoring more. And we had some chances to score more runs today and didn’t get it done. But the key to this series was our bullpen. It was a good team effort. But now we’ve got a big series coming up.”
Indeed, the road trip gets significantly more difficult for the Mariners starting on Thursday night as they open a four-game series at Progressive Field against the Cleveland Indians. Seattle took two of three games in the season-opening series vs. the Indians, but a split of the four games would be more than acceptable, giving Seattle a winning road trip. Anything beyond that would be a bonus.
Mariners starter Felix Hernandez picked up his third win of the season. He pitched six innings, allowing three runs on seven hits with two walks and six strikeouts.
“I thought Felix did exactly what we needed out of him today,” Servais said. “We needed him to give us six innings and he did it.”
It wasn’t an auspicious beginning to Hernandez’s start. His first pitch of the game — an 87-mph sinker — was right over the middle of the plate. And like several others hitters have done to Hernandez to start the game, Yoan Moncada took a vicious hack at it. The result was a line drive solo homer over the wall in right and 1-0 lead.
Hernandez’s second pitch of the game yielded only slightly better results for him. Another first-pitch sinker was drilled to deep right-center by Yolmer Sanchez. The ball didn’t fly over the wall, but hopped over it for a double. Sanchez would later score on a bloop broken-bat single from Tim Anderson to make it 2-0.
“I don’t what I was thinking after that,” Hernandez said. “I guess it was, ‘Really? Really? Is this going to happen?’ But I made some adjustments after that. That first pitch was in the middle of the plate, you know it’s the first pitch. And second pitch was the same, they were just swinging.”
Would he consider maybe throwing something different on first pitch?
“I’m not throwing something else, but maybe I’ll throw all the way up and in or off the backstop,” he joked. “I just have to make better pitches in the first inning.”
After the 20-pitch first inning, Hernandez reeled in his outing from being a disaster. He came back with a 1-2-3 second inning. After allowing a run in the third inning, he worked the next three innings without allowing a run. With a rested bullpen, Servais went to it instead of brining Hernandez out for the seventh.
Down 2-0, the Mariners tied the game in the top of the third. Zunino led off the inning with a double into the left field corner and scored on Jean Segura’s RBI single to left. Segura later scored on the first of two RBI singles from designated hitter Nelson Cruz, both of which tied the game.
With two outs in the fifth inning, Cruz had a check-swing on the first pitch he saw from James Shields. It didn’t seem violent but that stress caused his recovering right ankle to ache. He stepped out of the box in obvious pain. Servais and athletic trainer Matt Toth came out to check on him.
“Check swings are the ones that really bother me,” he said. “The pain lasts for a few minutes.”
After a brief conversation, Cruz stayed in the game and hit the next pitch up the middle for a RBI single and tying the game at 3-3.
“He just needed a breather,” Servais joked.
So was there anyway he was coming out of that key at-bat?
