Late dramatics can't do anything to salvage season

The losing streak ended with one lighting strike.

Adrian Beltre jumped on an outside fastball from Ron Villone and, for a moment, as the ball hit the yellow line at the top of the right-field wall and umpire Jeff Nelson whirled his arm signaling the hit was a home run, the moment felt important.

The Mariners paid Beltre all that money for games like this. And as he rounded the bases, as his teammates tumbled out of the dugout, as the crowd rose and roared, it briefly felt like 2001 again.

Once upon a time nights like this routinely lit up the city. Only five years ago, the Mariners and the New York Yankees were the two best teams in the American League. And, after the Mariners' playoff win in 1995, this briefly became one of the best rivalries in baseball.

Two years in a row — 2000 and 2001 — the M's and Yankees met in the American League Championship Series.

But Tuesday, these were two very different ships passing in the night game.

In a 75-hour stretch at Fenway Park, the Yankees had made a New York-sized statement by sweeping the Boston Red Sox in five games, beating the Red Sox every which way.

Meanwhile, the Mariners' season was terminally losing its way. The M's lost all 11 games on their road trip. They lost every which way. Blowing saves. Striking out with men on base. Losing early. Losing late.

Losing. Losing. Losing. Until it didn't matter anymore.

"This thing has gone on way too damn long," the Mariners' beleaguered manager, Mike Hargrove, said before his team snapped its 11-game losing streak with this entertaining 6-5 win in its first game back at Safeco Field. "We're not just sitting back waiting for it to end. We're trying to do things to get this thing over quickly."

But after 11 losses in a row, there is no such thing as quickly.

Before the game, the talk was about turning around a season that can't be turned. About fixing a team that is unfixable. About changing the fortunes of another unfortunate year.

This Mariner season is toast and no amount of sunshiny optimism and talk about getting back to playing baseball the way they're capable of playing can change that.

Even a win this good against a team that hot can't change reality.

There are no scoreboards to watch. No scenarios to wish for. No hope left.

This team officially has entered the experimental portion of the season. This is the wait-till-next-year phase, something that is becoming wearily familiar in Seattle.

It's the season of opportunity. Not for the team, but for a gaggle of young players like Tuesday night's starting pitcher Cha Seung Baek and right fielder Chris Snelling and catcher Rene Rivera.

This is the show-me season for players like T.J. Bohn, who made his major league debut pinch-hitting with two outs in the eighth inning of a tied game and struck out on a Villone fastball. And reliever Eric O'Flaherty, who gave up a go-ahead two-run home run to Alex Rodriguez that landed halfway into the upper deck in left.

This is like spring training for the Mariners, only real.

Against the maddeningly patient Yankees hitters, Baek, who arrived from Tacoma in the early afternoon, threw 103 pitches in five innings, but only allowed three runs and three hits in a serviceable season's debut.

He won 12 games for the Rainiers and has earned the right to get another half-dozen starts this season.

After all it's March in August in Seattle.

Again.

After their 0-for-11 road trip, there is nothing left of this season. The Mariners are playing for 2007. Wait till next year is getting old, but it's all they have.

For the rest of this season, Ichiro will stay in center field. And Snelling, the Aussie with the explosive, compact swing and the troublesome knees, should get the bulk of the starts in right field.

Against the Yankees, in a too-little, too-late way, the Mariners showed life.

Beltre hit a two-run homer in the first, and Richie Sexson hit a solo home run in the third off New York's emergency starter Jeffrey Karsten.

Beltre slid hard into second baseman Nick Green in the seventh, breaking up a possible inning-ending double play. Raul Ibanez followed with a tying single, briefly lighting a fire under the 42,454 at Safeco.

This was a night that made you nostalgic for the turn of this century. It reminded you how much fun baseball used to be here. It ended a losing streak that had choked the life out of another year.

"Obviously there were games on that trip that we should have won and didn't," Hargrove said. "It is fun? Not even a little bit. ... Anytime you go through things like this, where you're not scoring runs and you're not getting wins, it feels like it's never ever going to stop. But it will stop."

And it did stop. But it was too late to matter.

In Seattle, it's already March again in August.

Steve Kelley: 206-464-2176 or skelley@seattletimes.com