Raleigh, Seattle staff stay hot to win nightcap

DENVER -- “A long day of baseball.”

That’s how Mariners manager Scott Servais described a strange 12 hours at the ballpark on Sunday. It was long, to be sure. But it was also bizarre, even for Coors Field, where bizarre is the norm.

By the time they came off the field for the final time after 19 innings of baseball, the Mariners had split a split doubleheader with the Rockies. The first game in the twin bill was unusual in a sense that you wouldn’t normally guess in the hitter’s haven of Coors Field: For only the third time in the ballpark’s 30-season history -- 2,297 games entering Sunday -- the contest was scoreless into extra innings.

And in the nightcap, “normalcy” returned to the venue, with 12 combined runs being scored.

The Mariners lost Game 1, 2-1, in 10 innings. They won Game 2, 10-2. As they prepared to move on to Texas for a series with the Rangers beginning on Tuesday, they had taken two of three in Denver after a snow-out, a Luis Castillo gem, a game in which they broke a scoreless tie in the 10th only to lose in the bottom of the frame and a convincing win in the series finale.

Beyond “weird,” the themes over the weekend for Seattle were two-fold: the continuation of tremendous starting pitching and the hot bat of Cal Raleigh.

The catcher affectionately known as “Big Dumper” smashed his fifth homer of the season, a two-run shot in the sixth inning over the center-field wall, and drove in three runs to lead Seattle’s lineup in the nightcap. Over his past four games, he’s 7-for-15 with three homers.

Raleigh said that the notion that “hitting is contagious” is more than a cliché. And now that the Mariners are hitting -- they’ve scored 35 runs across their past six games -- the nature of the contagion is positive.

“It’s real both ways,” he said. “When guys aren’t hitting well, it seems to drag down the lineup, and then when guys are hitting well, it seems to track up and down the lineup. We just got off to one of those bad starts. We don’t want to do that, but that’s how it went. We were able to right the ship and we’ve just gotta keep it going.”

While he went 0-for-5 in Game 1, Raleigh did something no Mariners catcher had done in nearly three decades in the series opener on Saturday by tallying four hits -- including a solo homer -- and reaching base five times. The last Seattle backstop to accomplish that was Dan Wilson against the Twins on June 11, 1996.

It all added up to a batting average that was 50 points higher than when he got to the Mile High City, jumping from .208 to .258 in the span of 24 hours. And Raleigh wasn’t done making history; his sixth-inning homer in Game 2 on Sunday was the 7,500th in franchise history.

The offensive outburst from Raleigh and the Mariners -- Game 1 of Sunday’s doubleheader notwithstanding -- backed up more of the same from Seattle’s pitching staff, particularly the starting rotation. With five scoreless frames by George Kirby in the first game Sunday, followed by six strong innings in which Emerson Hancock yielded only two runs (one earned), Seattle starters own a 1.44 ERA over their last 10 games (10 earned runs in 62 2/3 innings). Opponents hit .175 against them in that span.

“It’s fun,” said Hancock, a 24-year-old rookie right-hander who was inserted into the rotation when Bryan Woo was injured. “ … We love watching each other and hopefully we can keep it rolling.”

While Raleigh and the Mariners’ offense has emerged from an early-season slumber, Seattle knows its greatest strength lies with its rotation. And given what the starters have been doing lately, the club is beginning to function the way it was built to function.

“That’s who we are,” Servais said. “We have outstanding pitching. We have played really good defense. Our pitching’s been good, but when your defense plays that well, now you can hold teams to one or two runs and you don’t have to have a whole lot of offense to win ball games.”

Still, it’s nice to have a whole lot of offense, especially when you have a day like Sunday.

“We got here about 9:30 this morning,” Servais said. “And we’ll leave about 9:30 tonight. Guys were locked in all day. It’s a credit to our group.”