Angels, Salmon Get No Relief

The Seattle Mariners appear mortal this season, a very good team but a beatable one. The Angels should have beaten the Mariners Monday night, but they lost in an ugly fashion that revealed two of their potential flaws.

The Mariners scored two runs in the seventh inning and three more in the eighth, posting a 5-4 victory that left the Angels with alarming questions about whether their bullpen can withstand the loss of closer Troy Percival and whether right fielder Tim Salmon can rebound from his disastrous 2001 season.

With bullpen roles jumbled while Percival rehabilitates a strained rib cage, Donne Wall, Ben Weber and Mark Lukasiewicz gave up six hits in a span of 11 batters in the seventh and eighth innings, turning a shutout into defeat before 16,908 at Edison Field.

“We have a lot of confidence in our bullpen,” Angel Manager Mike Scioscia said. “There aren’t going to be many nights like this one.”

Salmon, whose terrific spring raised hope that last season was an aberration, looked shaky in the field and did not get the ball out of the infield in four at-bats. In six games this season, Salmon is hitting .143, with three hits and seven strikeouts in 21 at-bats. In five games in right field, he has committed two errors.

Scioscia said he is “absolutely not” worried that Salmon might be no better this season than last. On defense, Scioscia said, “I don’t have any concerns.” On offense, Scioscia said, Salmon starts slowly even in the best of times.

“His bat speed is totally different than it was last year,” Scioscia said. “This is a more typical starting pattern for Tim, as opposed to what happened last year.”

Salmon was booed three times by the fans who stood by him during his miserable season last summer. In the fifth inning, he charged an apparently catchable fly ball hit by Jeff Cirillo, then abruptly stopped and safely played the ball on the short hop. In the seventh, with two on and one out, he tapped a grounder back to the pitcher.

The boos grew loudest in the eighth inning, when the Mariners scored the tying run on an error by Salmon.

The Angels led, 4-2, after seven innings, but Bret Boone led off the eighth with a home run. Ruben Sierra doubled, and Charles Gipson ran for him. Carlos Guillen singled to right field, and Salmon reached the ball quickly enough that Gipson held at third. But then Salmon bobbled and booted the ball for an error, allowing Gipson to score the tying run.

Cirillo eventually drove home Guillen with the winning run, on a sacrifice fly off Al Levine, the fifth Angel pitcher.

In his first game against his old team, Shigetoshi Hasegawa earned the victory in relief.

Kazuhiro Sasaki recorded the save, marking the first time in major league history that Japanese-born pitchers got the victory and the save for the same team in the same game.

Angel starter Jarrod Washburn departed in the sixth inning with a shutout intact, a statistic that suggests he was dominating on a night when he was anything but.

He needed 91 pitches to last five innings on opening night, and the pitch count Monday was every bit as unimpressive--94 through five innings, 100 when the Angels removed him with one out in the sixth.

Seattle got nine hits off Washburn, and two walks, but the Mariners ran themselves out of two innings and failed to produce a clutch hit.

And, in the fifth, Washburn preserved his shutout on guts. The Mariners loaded the bases with none out, on two singles and a walk. Coming up: Boone, the No. 3 hitter, and then Edgar Martinez, the cleanup hitter.

Boone struck out. Martinez grounded into a double play.

The statistics suggest Seattle’s Paul Abbott pitched a decent game, giving up four runs in 61/3 innings. The statistics do not take into account the extremely trying personal circumstances under which Abbott pitched, circumstances that rendered his performance impressive.

Abbott’s father, Lee, died Thursday. He suffered a stroke during spring training, and the death was not unexpected.

Still, the personal stress could only have been exacerbated by the fact that Abbott grew up in Fullerton, a few exits up the freeway from Edison Field.