In the First, Finley Doesn’t Succeed

SEATTLE —  Chuck Finley waited 15 years for this ? He left his wife, two daughters and his Newport Beach home, the Southern California lifestyle he so embraced and the familiarity of a franchise that nurtured him for 14 years, moved into a Cleveland hotel for six months a year, living on room service and bedside chocolates, all so he could experience this ?

What a letdown. Finley got his first taste of the playoffs since 1986 on Thursday, and after 14 pitches, he felt like spitting it out. That’s how long it took the Seattle Mariners to score four runs off Finley en route to a 5-1 American League division series Game 2 victory that was essentially over in the time it takes cream to color coffee.

Mike Cameron and Edgar Martinez bombed Finley for two-run home runs in the first inning, and soft-serving Mariner left-hander Jamie Moyer lulled Indian bats to sleep, giving up one run and five hits in six innings before a pumped-up Safeco Field crowd of 48,052. Seattle evened the best-of-five series, 1-1, with Game 3 scheduled for Saturday in Cleveland.

“It all happened so quick,” said Finley, the former Angel left-hander who signed with the Indians after 1999, thinking it was his best chance to win a World Series. “I was looking forward to this for a long time, and I tried to tell myself to relax and enjoy it, but I didn’t relax as much as I could have in the first inning. I was a little over-amped.”

So were Mariner bats, which barely moved the needle on the voltmeter in Tuesday’s 5-0 loss to Cleveland in Game 1. But Cameron, a career .059 hitter (one for 17) against Finley, and Martinez, a career .243 hitter (17 for 70) against Finley, put a charge into the Mariner offense in the first inning.

Ichiro Suzuki opened with a walk, and Finley quickly got ahead of Cameron with two strikes. Those who know Finley knew what was coming next: the forkball that made Finley famous, a pitch that looks like a fastball before darting into the dirt and has made batters look silly for a decade and a half.

Finley, perhaps outguessing himself, went with a fastball, but instead of throwing it at Cameron’s hands, he threw it thigh-high and over the plate. Cameron belted it over the wall in left for a two-run homer.

“That’s the advantage of having speed at first base,” Seattle Manager Lou Piniella said. “It’s easy to run on the split-fingered fastball. It’s a little slower to the plate, and it can bounce in the dirt. I’m sure that had something to do with [Finley’s] thinking.”

Cameron also thought Suzuki’s speed was a factor in Finley’s pitch selection, but Finley said it wasn’t so.

“I felt it was the right pitch; it was just a bad spot,” said Finley, who entered with a 19-8 career record and 2.81 earned-run average against Seattle. “I always try to establish my fastball in the first inning. I tried to come in on Cameron and left it over the plate.”

Bret Boone followed with a single to center, and Martinez hammered Finley’s next pitch, another fastball, over the center-field wall for a two-run homer and a 4-0 lead.

“I thought I made a decent pitch to Edgar, and he hit it pretty good,” Finley said. “But he’s so good, he could pretty much put a patch over one eye and hit.”

Finley wanted to cover both eyes. Here he was, 14 pitches into his first playoff game since he was a 23-year-old Angel rookie in the 1986 AL championship series against Boston, and he put his team in a four-run hole.

“Emotions run high in games like this, and mistakes kill you,” Finley said. “That’s what happened today. I made three or four mistakes, and that cost us the game. You spot a team like that four runs in the first inning, and that makes it pretty tough.”

Finley settled down after Martinez’s homer, retiring the next 10 batters, but Mariner third baseman David Bell’s homer in the fifth gave Seattle a 5-0 lead. The Indians threatened in the fourth, putting runners on first and second with one out, but Moyer got Ellis Burks to fly to right and struck out Jim Thome with an 85-mph fastball.

Burks and Thome opened the seventh with singles off Moyer, and Seattle reliever Jeff Nelson walked Travis Fryman to load the bases with no out. But Nelson got Marty Cordova to bounce into a 6-4-3 double play, with Burks scoring, retired Einar Diaz on a fly ball to shallow center, and the Indian offense barely made a peep the rest of the game.

“Today was big; we had to win today, even though it wasn’t an elimination game,” Nelson said. “You don’t want to go to Cleveland down, two games to none.”