Sheffield knocked off his game at Big A
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Walks and home runs -- two things Justus Sheffield had avoided with great success this season -- jumped up to bite the Mariners rookie on Saturday as the Angels rolled to a 16-3 victory in Anaheim.
Sheffield hadn’t allowed a long ball in his first five starts, but he saw that streak ended by Jo Adell as the Angels’ No. 1 prospect unloaded a 437-foot, two-run blast in the second inning for his first career home run.
Sheffield had walked just two batters in his previous three outings while posting a 1.00 ERA with 16 strikeouts. But the Angels worked him for four walks in 4 2/3 innings, and three of those wound up scoring as the young southpaw gave up six runs despite allowing only four hits.
“I’ve got to finish guys and stay ahead and attack,” Sheffield said. “You can’t leave two-strike pitches over the plate. And definitely the walks -- that’s what killed me tonight -- and I think started a trend over the whole game tonight. It definitely wasn’t my best.”
The loss dropped the 24-year-old Sheffield to 2-3 with a 4.75 ERA. He’s 0-2 with an 11.74 ERA in two starts against the Angels and 2-1 with a 2.38 ERA in his other four outings.
Adell added a second home run off rookie reliever Aaron Fletcher in the sixth as the Angels broke the game wide open against Seattle’s bullpen. The Mariners had won five of their last six games coming into the series, but they dropped to 13-22 with their second straight loss to the 12-22 Angels.
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Base on balls weren’t strictly a culprit for Sheffield. Fletcher and Zac Grotz combined to walk six batters and hit two more in the sixth and seventh innings as the Angels scored eight more times.
Manager Scott Servais has stressed getting ahead in counts and controlling the strike zone in recent weeks, and he has seen considerable improvement in that regard until Saturday’s stinker.
“We’ve done an outstanding job the last two weeks, being really consistent with the progress we were making,” Servais said. “We just took a little step back tonight. It’s not going to stop the progress we’ve got going with a lot of our young guys. They know. They absolutely know. It’s not like we have to go out there and tell them they have to throw strikes.
“But you have to be in attack mode all the time and trust your stuff early in the count and take a big chunk of the plate and be aggressive. And the umpire had a smaller zone tonight as well. We didn’t get a whole lot of pitches on the edges.”
Mike Trout unleashed a three-run homer of Grotz in the seventh as the Angels slugger went 3-for-4 with four runs scored and six RBIs. He now has 46 homers and 119 RBIs in 162 career games against Seattle.
Utility man Tim Lopes pitched the eighth inning for Seattle and issued another walk -- the Mariners’ 11th of the night -- and gave up a pair of hits and two more runs while lobbing in an assortment of 47-50 mph pitches. Lopes did retire Trout on a sacrifice fly to the warning track and finished the outing with another deep flyout by Anthony Rendon.
The 16 runs allowed was five more than Seattle’s previous high this season, while the 13 hits and 11 walks equaled the most the Mariners have allowed in a game.
“We knew we were going to have some nights like this this year,” said Servais, who has the youngest roster in the Majors. “It’s just disappointing because we’ve been playing really good baseball. We haven’t had one of these games in a while. There’s not much you can do about this one. We have to learn from it, go take a shower and come back and get right after it again.”