Pineiro hangs tough after five-run first
Friday, September 23, 2005TORONTO -- Joel Pineiro may have shown more moxie to his teammates during the course of his 10th loss than he had in any of his seven victories.
Pineiro gave up a tiebreaking, two-run home run in the eighth inning Thursday as Toronto scored a 7-5 victory to salvage a split of a four-game series with the Mariners.
But the decisive home run by Alex Rios was hardly the complete story of Pineiro's performance.
He barely made it out of the first inning, giving up seven hits and five runs and looking more or less like a human batting tee. But from the second through the seventh, he looked like a Cy Young contender, allowing one hit and no walks.
That stretch allowed the Mariners to climb back into the game. And when Adrian Beltre tied the score at 5-5 with a two-run double in the fifth inning, Beltre seemed sure what would happen next.
"I always think we're going to win," Beltre said. "But after Joel did what he did and we came from five runs down, I was sure of it."
As it happened, the Mariners got just three more hits, all singles, and didn't score again.
"Joel showed us some real (guts) right there," Beltre said. "It's the kind of thing you want to see in your pitchers. He had a bad inning, but he didn't let that stop him from giving us a chance to win."
Fellow starting pitcher Ryan Franklin stopped by Pineiro's locker after the game to offer his congratulations, even if the result was a loss.
"That shows real guts and other things you can't put in the paper," Franklin said. "I think half the people in the league would have laid down right there, down 5-0 and pitching in the last two weeks of the season.
"Joel didn't. He's not that kind of guy. If what he did tonight doesn't show people a lot about the kind of pitcher he is, then something's wrong."
What exactly did Thursday's start do for Pineiro?
With a 7-10 record and a 5.42 ERA, there will be no Cy Young votes for the right-hander. And there is no certainty about next season. He's gone 4-3 since the start of August with 4.33 ERA, and most of the damage -- 15 of the 33 earned runs allowed in that time -- came in two games.
"How Joel came back tonight will be a factor in how we evaluate him," manager Mike Hargrove said. "How big a factor, I can't say. But we gave him a chance to get it sorted out, and he threw the ball extremely well the rest of the night."
When Pineiro jumped at the opportunity, he wasn't thinking about 2006.
"I know I'm going to be in the rotation next year, somewhere one through five," he said. "Where doesn't matter to me. So that wasn't something I focused on. My focus was on turning it around."
The difference for Pineiro was catcher Yorvit Torrealba's suggestion to get away from throwing his slider. Five of the seven first-inning hits were off sliders, and the pitch clearly wasn't working. When Pineiro changed his approach, throwing mainly fastballs and changeups, things turned around.
"I looked like two different pitchers out there," Pineiro said. "I didn't think I was going to get out of the first inning. But I was able to settle in after going to the changeup."
It was a sad bit of irony for Pineiro that the changeup, the pitch that saved him, also cost him the final two runs.
He hung a changeup that Rios hit off the left-field foul pole for the decisive home run.
"It's a loss, and you don't like to lose," Mariners pitching coach Bryan Price said. "But he could have buried our bullpen if he'd had to come out in the first inning. It's kind of a moral victory for him and for us.
"Now we have a fresh bullpen for Detroit."
At the 153-game mark of a 162-game season, moral victories are all that's left for a team that clinched last place in the AL West Thursday.
But there is a bright spot.
"I'm going home to be with my wife (Shirley) for the birth of our daughter," Pineiro said.
The couple's second child will be named Juliana and is scheduled to be born this weekend in Seattle.
"I wish I could have gone back home with a win, but I'm looking forward to seeing my daughter," he said.
Source: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/
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