WASHINGTON – For the first three innings, George Kirby was cool, efficient and, well, perfect. Nine batters had reached the plate and nine batters were retired in just 24 pitches. He threw nine pitches in the first, eight in the second and seven in the third.
Was something special building for him and the Mariners Friday night at Nationals Park?
Not quite.
Rather, it ended up being a familiar path to frustration and a common outcome on this road trip.
On a night where he would have needed to remain close to perfection to give his team a chance to win, thanks to another dismal offensive performance, Kirby’s outing fell apart in the fourth inning and the all-or-nothing offense of the Mariners responded with the latter in a 6-1 loss to the Nationals.
“There’s not much to say about that,” manager Scott Servais muttered under his breath before beginning his postgame statement. “They outpitched us, they outhit us, they outscored us. We didn’t have a great game tonight.”
Normally keen to look for some positives, Servais’ tone was less than hopeful. It was an obvious frustration. The Mariners fell to 3-5 on this 10-game road trip and would need to win the final two games of the series to salvage a .500 record in this East Coast run. Nothing in the way they are playing speaks to that being happening.
“I’m disappointed,” Servais said. “We need to play better than that. That’s where it is. We need to do it more offensively. “We can’t just rely on our pitching every night to go out and shut people up.”
Kirby seemed to have a shutout level in those first three innings. But his outing went from flawless to forgettable when the Nationals lineup faced him for the second time.
Leadoff hitter CJ Abrams hit a soft single to right for the Nats’ runner on first base to start the fourth inning. Kirby got Eddie Rosario to fly out to center for the first out. But Joey Meneses, who looked overwhelmed in his first at-bat, striking out on fly balls, hit a hard single to left with a fly sinker that stayed in the middle half of the plate.
Kirby’s next throw changed the entire game. He threw a first-pitch slider that landed thigh-high in the middle of the plate. Left-handed hitter Luis García smashed the left field fence to hit a three-run opposite field home run.
“I didn’t run that slider,” Kirby said. “That’s the one I want back.”
A quick look shows that Kirby’s slider had been thrown 168 times before his departure and he allowed 12 hits, including two doubles and two home runs with five strikeouts. But a closer look reveals that all the damage is to the sliders that remain in the middle of the plate. When he throws the pitch toward the edges or off the plate to chase it, he has only eight balls in play of the 100 sliders in those parts of the strike zone with 12 strikes, 23 called strikes and eight fouls.
“It’s just a matter of one or two centimeters,” he said. “A slider outside just dribbles to the middle. Those usually don’t get home runs. Lately they are, so I have to be a little finer with that pitch.”
Kirby came back to strike out Jesse Winker, but gave up consecutive singles to Keibert Ruiz and Nick Senzel. But Kirby held the damage to just three runs and was one out away from a quality start of six innings pitched, with three or fewer runs allowed.
But a two-out walk to Winker in the sixth after being up 1-2 in the count left him upset. Ruiz then took advantage of a 3-2 sinker up the middle and to the belt, hitting a two-run home run to right-center field.
Kirby’s final line: six innings pitched, five runs allowed, six hits with one walk and three strikeouts.
“Mistakes,” catcher Cal Raleigh said of the Nationals’ success after the first three innings. “It’s not just George, it’s anyone in the league. If you come here and throw balls down the middle, they’re going to get hit. Sometimes you can get away with it if you have elite stuff or off-speed or off-beat pitches, but the hitters in the MLB are too good.”
Meanwhile, the Mariners’ hitters were busy being blocked by the Nationals’ young left-hander, MacKenzie Gore.
The former top pitching prospect, who has a fastball that sits in the upper 90s along with a nasty slider, tied a career-high with seven innings pitched, allowing just one run on four hits with one walk and eight strikeouts.
“Gore has very good stuff and is having a good season,” Servais said. “Obviously he’s starting to realize some things. He has a really good fastball and secondary pitches to go with it, but we’ve had a hard time putting much together recently against the starting pitchers here. That has to improve. “You are not going to win games 1-0 or 2-1 away from home.”
The Mariners as a team managed only five hits that night. His only run came on Gore’s second pitch of the game. Leadoff hitter JP Crawford hit a solo home run to left-center field to give Seattle a 1-0 lead. The Mariners never threatened to score again.
“We hit some balls hard and they made some good defensive plays,” Servais said.
And yet …
“You can’t win that way, especially on the road,” Raleigh said. “You can’t score one or two runs and expect your pitching staff to carry us like that. It is not possible. We have to improve it a little. We have to find ways to score more runs. True, there have only been a few long balls, which have been good, but you can’t live and die by that.”
SCOREBOARD
Ryan Divish: rdivish@seattletimes.com; Ryan Divish covers the Mariners in Seattle and on the road. Look for his ‘Extra Innings’ podcast and mailbags throughout the season.
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