Mariners At Royals, Game Three Notes

This one was pretty ugly from the start. Jason Vargas had already given up five runs by the time he was through the first, and the Mariners couldn’t seem to get anything done with runners on base. They had no problem getting those guys on base, though, as they did rack up 12 hits on the night. Unfortunately, only two of those hits translated into runs.

• The Mariners had the great honor of giving Royals ace Bruce Chen his first win since 2005. That’s right, he hadn’t won a game in nearly four years, and he was 0-6 in 2009 coming into this game. I guess one good thought coming out of a game like this, is you know you made one guy really, really happy, and you have to figure he needed it.

• Jason Vargas: 109 pitches, 1 swinging strike, 0 strikeouts.Bruce Chen: 103 pitches, 8 swinging strikes, 4 strikeouts.

I’m not sure exactly what happened in that first inning, but Vargas got absolutely murdered. The sequence of events looked like this:

Four pitch walk, ground out, home run, line drive single, line drive single, line drive double, deep fly out, line drive double, ground out

• By my count, 23 of the 32 pitches Vargas threw in the first inning were fastballs, and a lot of them were right over the heart of the plate. Keeping the ball down hasn’t seemed to be all that much of a problem for him this season, so hopefully today’s game was a fluke, but if it wasn’t, it’s something that’s going to need to be worked on.

• Despite the fact that Mike Sweeney really hasn’t done much for the Mariners on the field, you still have to like the guy, and seeing him tip his helmet to the crowd after hitting his 100th home run in Kansas City gave me all kinds of warm fuzzies. It was apparently something he really wanted to accomplish, and it’s pretty amazing that of the four home runs he’s hit this season, one of them came today, in what will probably his last game at Kauffman Stadium. It was also awesome to see Ian Snell getting in on the hug action.

• Don Wakamatsu stated before this game that he intended to save the bullpen, and that if it got Ugly, he was going to keep Vargas in there. Well, he kept his word. Not only did he leave him in after a five run first, but he also left him in after the fifth, in which the M’s deficit had grown from three runs to six runs. I think it says a little bit about Jason Vargas’ make-up that after a 32 pitch, five run first, he was able to hang tough for seven innings.

• These are the worst types of a losses. With a one or two run loss, at least you don’t lose interest half way through the game. But in a blowout loss against an awful team like the Royals, it’s so ugly that you just want to go do something else, but in the back of your mind you know there’s still the possibility of a comeback. If we had been getting blown out by say, the Yankees, I don’t think that would have been a problem for me.

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