SEATTLE — So maybe all Mike Sweeney needed was a chance.
His at-bats were so sporadic through the first five weeks of the Seattle Mariners’ season that nobody really knew what to make of his .500 spring training batting average.
Was it merely a feast on pitchers getting into shape? Or did Sweeney really have something left in his bat and just needed some regular at-bats to prove it?
He got those in the past week, when the Mariners faced a string of left-handed starting pitchers who provided manager an opportunity to start him more than a few times a week.
Friday night, when Sweeney started for the sixth time in the past nine games, he provided a week’s worth of hitting in the Mariners’ 15-8 victory at Safeco Field.
Sweeney hit two home runs, drove in six runs and finished with a 4-for-5 game. The 15 runs were a single-game high for the Mariners this season, beating the 11 they scored on April 16 against the Detroit Tigers.
“It was a nice breakout win,” manager Don Wakamatsu said. “To see these guys relax a little bit and attack the baseball was special.”
Sweeney lifted his average to .276.
On May 13, when he made the first of those six starts, that average was 100 points lower Sweeney had wobbled through 34 at-bats without a home run. He had provided little more than fodder to the argument that the Mariners’ two-headed DH monster — Sweeney against left-handers and Ken Griffey Jr. against righties — was devouring only their own offense.
That night in Baltimore, however, Sweeney hit the first home run by a Mariners DH this season, and he followed it with a homer in each of the next two games.
Friday, in a game projected to be a pitching duel between the Mariners’ Cliff Lee (2.08 earned run average) and the Padres’ Wade LeBlanc (1.54), Sweeney broke out.
To put his night in perspective with the Mariners’ offensive struggles this season, the six runs Sweeney produced were more than the team had managed in all but five games this season.
His three-run homer was the big blow in the Mariners’ seven-run second inning.
That inning began with the Mariners trailing 2-0 and Milton Bradley hitting an innocent-looking grounder down the third-base line. As Padres third baseman Chase Headley went to back-hand the ball, it hit the bag and bounced away for a hit.
LeBlanc walked the next two hitters before Josh Wilson dumped a single into right field, scoring Bradley. Ichiro Suzuki followed with another hit to push home Casey Kotchman and tie the score 2-2, and Chone Figgins backed that up with a sacrifice fly that scored Josh Bard for a 3-2 Mariners lead.
Like Bradley’s ball off the bag, the Mariners got another gift on another grounder to third base, this one handed to them by Headley. Playing deep for the double play, he instead threw the ball home, too wide and too late to get Wilson.
Sweeney, the next hitter, hooked a drive just wide of the left-field foul pole. Then, on a 1-1 curveball down in the zone but over the plate, he launched a drive that bounced off the scoreboard above the bullpens. The three-run homer gave the Mariners a 7-2 lead.
The seven-run spree matched the Mariners’ single-inning high this season. They also did it April 19 against the Orioles.
There was more, much more.
Josh Bard, who for now has won the catching duty because of his play behind the plate and his hot bat, hit a solo homer with one out in the third inning.
Then the Mariners scored five runs in the fourth, including Sweeney’s two-run homer to left field off Padres reliever Cesar Ramos. Bard also hit a two-run double in the inning.
Sweeney also hit an RBI single in the Mariners’ two-run fifth.
Then it was up to Lee to maintain that lead, and it wasn’t a breeze.
The Padres already had scored twice off him in the second inning, and they got two more in the third and three in the seventh.
Why was he still around at that point?
The Mariners’ bullpen is a little bare now that they’re operating with an 11-man pitching staff. And, with Ian Snell scheduled to start tonight and possibly need relief help, Lee extended himself to 115 pitches.
“Cliff wasn’t as sharp, but he battled and went to 115 pitches,” Wakamatsu said. “We have a couple of extra days before his next start to play with.”
Read Kirby Arnold’s blog on the Mariners at www.heraldnet.com/marinersblog
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