Third botch: M's get swept

MINNEAPOLIS — While they managed to avoid a triple play with the bases loaded, the Mariners found a way to put their growing stamp of odd baseball on the Sunday effort, a 4-3 loss to the Minnesota Twins.

For the third and fourth times in the series, the Mariners had a runner put out at third.

But it was the runner who never even advanced to third who cost them a chance to lead in the 10th inning, when Ichiro failed to tag up at second base on Raul Ibanez's first-out liner deep to right field.

Richie Sexson followed with a 400-foot fly ball to the wall in center on which Ichiro might have crawled home to break a 3-3 tie — had he been on third.

Needless to say, after all their misadventures, the series-sweeping loss to the Twins — on Lew Ford's homer off Eddie Guardado in the 10th — was merely the other shoe dropping.

While there was nothing as outrageously obvious as Saturday night's botches, Seattle was loaded with bad baseball again. The team went 0 for 11 with runners in scoring position, finishing 4 for 31 in the series.

"We were bleeping terrible, embarrassing," Guardado said flatly, only minutes after he could be heard inside the clubhouse screaming in frustration. "I was terrible. I'm embarrassed. We should all be, and we all know it."

The reliever was referring to himself as much as anyone.

"I've got to do better. We've all got to do better," he said. "As a team, we've all got to do a better job. I think today we should have killed those guys, even with one of their best pitchers [Johan Santana] going. I'm telling this how it is."

Was this loss the worst in a season of too many tough losses?

"Every loss is frustrating," Guardado said. "We've just got to do a better job — all of us. We're all in this together."

The Mariners wasted leadoff doubles in the third and fourth innings, but that was just a warmup for the real waste.

In the seventh, they wasted a triple by Ichiro, who had four hits, when Jose Lopez popped a squeeze bunt with Ichiro scurrying toward the plate on the pitch.

"Santana throws strikes all day, and on that one throws his worst pitch of the day, high, the toughest pitch to bunt," Mariners manager Mike Hargrove said of his blown-up strategy. "Jose is our best bunter, and he had no chance."

Said Lopez, "I tried to get on top and get the ball down. I would have had to jump to get any higher."

In the ninth inning, Willie Bloomquist was out trying for third on a grounder to shortstop Nick Punto.

"I had a good secondary lead," Bloomquist said, "and, after my first step, I thought he'd backdoor me if I tried to go back to second. Honestly, I didn't expect him to go to third."

But the biggest miss on the bases seemed to be Ichiro's failure to make third on Ibanez's deep line drive.

"We said this before: It's the toughest read on the bases," Hargrove said. "As hard as that ball was hit, it was a difficult decision for Ichiro, to tag up or go halfway. The worst thing that can happen is you don't advance to third, which is what happened."

Ichiro said, "On a play like that, you consider the score. And I put too much thought into the score, which was my mistake. If the ball falls in, you can go to third. But you can score, too, on that play."

Would he second-guess himself or let it go? "Both," he said.

Other oddities included two Seattle infielders gloving grounders and not making throws to first base.

In the fifth inning, Yuniesky Betancourt simply did not make a throw after a routine pickup.

In the sixth, Mike Morse made a superb sprawling snag of Michael Cuddyer's grounder to third base. It saved a run since it held Joe Mauer on third. But it cost them because Morse double-clutched and did not throw over to get Cuddyer. With only one out, Minnesota went on to tie the score 3-3 on Mike Redmond's sacrifice fly.

After the Mariners held a number of mini-meetings, the most essential meeting, that of the meat of the bat with the ball, was mostly missing again after Lopez's homer in the first inning gave Joel Pineiro a 2-0 lead.

Pineiro was much improved after allowing 16 runs in his three previous starts. Using a sinker to great effect, he was solid until Justin Morneau's two-run tying homer in the fourth.

While the right-hander did surrender the lead a second time on Redmond's sacrifice fly, he pitched well enough to win most games.

That is, most normal games. But how normal can it be when fate decrees that Seattle's leading run producer, Lopez, comes up three times to bunt? He got one down, fouled off one in the 10th, and then there was the squeeze strategy that he popped back to the mound.

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