Pitching has been the main problem for Minnesota, which has allowed 30 runs in its last three games. On Saturday night, Kevin Slowey (1-0, 7.94 ERA) will try to rebound from a pair of poor starts.
Slowey has allowed 22 hits in 11 1-3 innings this season, including a career-high 13 in 5 1-3 innings Monday against Toronto. The right-hander gave up five runs and two homers but didn't receive a decision in the Twins' 8-6 loss, and is still looking to recapture the strong form he showed during spring training.
"I'm sure I'll go back these next couple of days and go back to look at what I was doing then," Slowey said Monday. "But there's nothing that I can think of now where I can say I was doing this in spring and I'm not doing it now."
Slowey faced the Angels twice in 2008, with his lone decision - a loss - shortened by a biceps injury.
Normally a reliever, Darren Oliver (0-0, 2.45) will step in for Los Angeles' banged-up rotation Saturday in Adenhart's spot.
The left-hander has not started a game since 2004, when he had a 6.90 ERA in 10 starts for Florida and Houston. Oliver was 7-1 with a 2.88 ERA out of the bullpen last year, allowing one run in five innings against the Twins.
The Mariners were reminded Thursday, and none too gently, that in Baseball, fairy tales and magic can go "poof" and disappear at any moment.
For about half of their eventual 5-1 loss to the Los Angeles Angels at Safeco Field, it shaped up as another one of those high-spirited romps, filled with milestones and mayhem, that has marked their early 2009 season.
Chris Jakubauskas, whose back story could be sold to Hollywood, was breezing in his first major-league start, energizing the crowd of 18,528 12 more fans than the previous night. He was, as manager Don Wakamatsu would say afterward, "a man on a mission, and he pitched like it."
Ichiro delivered a fourth-inning single that made him the all-time hits leader among Japanese players. And then he came around to score the game's first run just maybe the only one the Mariners would need en route to what would have been their seventh consecutive win.
But that story line disappeared in the sixth inning, and was replaced by one entirely different, and much darker for Seattle fans a Mariners bullpen collapse that negated all the good work that preceded it. Especially Jakubauskas'.
One strike away from getting out of the inning with their 1-0 lead intact, Roy Corcoran yielded a bases-loaded single to Mike Napoli on an 0-2 pitch that allowed two inherited Jakubauskas runners to score.
