Mariners at Yankees: Wang Continues Mastery of Mariners

The Seattle Mariners have never been able to defeat Chien-Ming Wang. And Friday afternoon at Yankee Stadium was no different.

Wang gave up just one run through six innings of work as the Yankees defeated the Mariners 5-1.

Erik Bedard pitched seven strong innings for the Mariners giving up just one earned run, four hits and striking out six, but it wasn’t enough.

As disappointing as it was to see the Mariners struggle yet again to get hits, I can’t say I was entirely surprised. The Mariners have never been able to hit Wang. For some reason, he just owns them. He has ever since he came into the league. Whether it’s at Yankee Stadium or Safeco Field, if Wang is pitching, you might as well shoot up a goose egg for the Mariners. Unless Ichiro goes crazy on the basepaths like he did in the sixth inning last night when he stole second and third.

Some pitchers just own certain teams. It’s hard to explain.

Luckily for the Mariners, the Angels and Athletics both lost tonight so they didn’t fall even further off pace in the AL West. The key for the Mariners will now be to regroup and get ready to hit Mussina today. Mussina is far from what he once was. He is nowhere near the dominating pitcher he once was. He’s extremely mediocre at this point of his career. One good thing the Mariners have going for them is although Bedard suffered a tough-luck loss today, they still have Felix Hernandez and Carlos Silva to finish off the series. And the Yankee bats are still far from amazing. It wouldn’t be entirely surprising to see Hernandez shut down the Yankees tomorrow. If he does, which he should, the Mariners should be in good shape.

On the bright side, Ichiro continued his trek back to normality tonight going 2-4. In the last two days, his average has gone from .252 to .273. Like I said a couple days ago, the Mariners need Ichiro to get his bat going. Although it hasn’t done much the last two days to spark the team, I believe it will.

Other notes from the game:
Wladimir Balentien and Jeff Clement went 0-5 with three strikeouts Friday. But I’m not going to get too upset about it. Balentien is swinging at a bunch of pitches out of the strike zone right now and I think the more he plays, the more he’ll just become more patient. Same with Clement.