Mariners
M's Franklin on the money

By Bob Finnigan
Seattle Times staff reporter

	MARK J. TERRILL / AP Mariners starter Ryan Franklin works against Anaheim’s Chone Figgins. Franklin recorded the first win by a Mariners starter this season.
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ANAHEIM, Calif. — If the Mariners use this game as a turning point, they may want to dedicate their season to Edna Franklin.

For it was Mrs. Franklin, mother of Ryan Franklin's dad, who was the impetus for the dazzling outing with which her grandson, for one night at least, righted the world of Seattle baseball.

After he had stuffed the Anaheim Angels on four hits over the first eight innings of last night's 6-2 win — a game in which the Mariners at last got both their game and their formula straight — Franklin quietly said he wanted to dedicate the game to his grandmother.

"Her name is Edna Franklin, and she just found out she has cancer," the 31-year-old pitcher said. "I love her dearly and I'm real close to her and I kind of want to dedicate this game to her back in Spiro. That's Spiro, Oklahoma."

He was nowhere near as gentle for the previous 2-1/2 hours, a textbook display of busting big hitters hard in, to leave them vulnerable to soft stuff away.

"Frankie was great; we needed his game, we needed this game," said Bret Boone, who played through being hit on the back of the left hand by Anaheim starter John Lackey in the fourth inning. "When I was on the ground, I thought maybe something was broken, but I was able to grip the bat after that, so I should be all right.

"It's been a weird trip for us, but although no one is knocking any walls down for us, we have kept scratching."

For the first time, Seattle linked pitching, defense and, after Lackey essentially shut them down for the first five innings, classic small-ball offense.

	AP Ichiro leaps to catch a Garret Anderson fly ball at the wall in the fourth last night in Anaheim, Calif.

The Munchkins rose for five runs to equal their high output for the year so far, cramming an error by shortstop Chone Figgins on Ichiro's leadoff ground ball down Anaheim's throat with five singles and another error.

But through it all there was Franklin, the first Seattle starter to record a win this year in the team's 2-7 start.

"When Frankie is economical with his pitch count is usually when he's pitching well," Mariners manager Bob Melvin said of the hurler, who used only 97 pitches and faced only 27 batters in his eight innings. "He's a strike thrower."

Yet, there are strikes, and there are strikes, some hittable and some where Franklin spotted them.

"He worked inside, threw good fastballs on the inside part of the plate," catcher Dan Wilson said. "He spotted all his pitches, and that means everything but the kitchen sink."

Franklin said he worked the Angels' big guys hard in, "until they started cheatin'. Then I could go soft away."

By cheatin', he meant Anaheim's hitters got so tired of being pounded in, they started stepping away with their lead foot to get their arms extended for swings on inside pitches.

	MARK J. TERRILL / AP Mariner John Olerud is congratulated by teammates after scoring on a Raul Ibanez single in the sixth last night. Seattle scored five runs in the inning.

As Melvin put it, "That leaves the outside lanes open."

Still, Adam Kennedy dotted Franklin for a homer in the second, a ball that hit the foul pole in right for a 2-0 lead.

From there, Franklin dug in and, with the help of several superb plays behind and in front of him, held the Angels' persistent offense to only two more hits.

Mixing up his many pitches to extreme effect, the Oklahoman retired 11 straight between Kennedy's homer and Darin Erstad's one-out double in the sixth.

Leading the defense, Franklin alertly covered first to double Figgins off the bag on Vladimir Guerrero's foul out to Olerud in the first.

In the fourth, Wilson made a fine catch of a Guerrero foul pop, sliding on his shin pads to minimize contact with the fence behind the first-base on-deck circle. Ichiro followed that with a jumping catch at the fence in right of Garret Anderson's towering fly ball.

Although the pitching and defense were in place, Seattle still had only one run, on Raul Ibanez's RBI double in the fourth after Boone was hit and stole second.

But they caught fire — OK, a brushfire — with the bats in the sixth and took a 6-2 lead.

It started when Figgins' high throw on an Ichiro grounder pulled Erstad off the bag. Erstad leaped in protest when umpire Jerry Layne ruled his sweep tag had missed the runner.

Four of the next five batters singled. Combined with a mindless throwing error by Anderson into the Anaheim dugout trying to get Ibanez at third, the Mariners gave rare support to a pitcher who got two runs or fewer in 11 of his 13 losses last year.

"It was fun. I got to give a high-five five times," Franklin said. "But it's a new year. Hopefully, I'll get six runs a game this year."

His view of the new year also helped him pull his club out of its funk.

"It's a new game, a fresh start," he said. "There's no sense worrying about what happened before."

Bob Finnigan: 206-464-8276 or bfinnigan@seattletimes.com

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