The ball appeared in Jeff Fassero’s line of vision suddenly, like a coin from behind a magician’s ear, in the last place he thought to search.
“My first instinct was to look up,” the 34-year-old Seattle Mariners left-hander said. “Then I ran out of places to look, and I looked down.”
The sharply hit grounder by Baltimore’s B.J. Surhoff came with the bases loaded and two outs in the first inning. It came with Seattle facing being swept in the American League divisional series and with the Mariners and their teetering bullpen in dire need of a starting pitcher to hold his chin over the bar for most of the game.
Fassero spun frantically, found the ball where it had trickled a few inches away at the base of the pitcher’s mound and threw to first for the out. Two innings later, he found his groove in his first postseason game and retired 18 straight Orioles to lay the groundwork for a 4-2 Seattle victory before a stadium-record crowd of 49,137 in Oriole Park at Camden Yards.
Baltimore starter Jimmy Key was nicked for two runs on eight hits in 4 2/3 innings and took the loss.
“We needed something like that and we got it,” Mariners manager Lou Piniella said of Fassero. “It was just an outstanding, gutsy performance.”
Seattle scored single runs in the third and fifth innings, and padded the lead with back-to-back homers by Jay Buhner and Paul Sorrento in the ninth.
Fassero, who starred in football and baseball at Springfield Griffin High School, spent seven-plus seasons in the minors. He came to Seattle from Montreal in an off-season trade and had a 16-9 record with a 3.61 ERA this season.
“I had butterflies doing something I haven’t done before,” he said.
Fassero is still wistful about what might have been in the strike season of 1994. The Expos led their division when play was curtailed in August.
“This is the biggest game I’ve ever pitched in my life . . . the biggest day of my life so far,” he said.
Fassero labored early, throwing 30 pitches in the first inning alone. After singlehandedly quelling Baltimore’s first-inning threat, he seemed to falter again in the third when Brady Anderson led off with a single and advanced to third on a double by Robbie Alomar. Fassero struck out two and then induced a ground ball that started a rundown play to end the inning.
“We had our Nos. 3 and 4 hitters coming up and we didn’t get anything,” Orioles manager Davey Johnson said. “It was kind of deflating.”
Fassero’s perfect stretch ended when he walked Orioles DH Geronimo Berroa to lead off the ninth. Piniella lifted Fassero in favor of reliever Heathcliff Slocumb and watched, stomach churning, as the Orioles tried to climb back.
Rafael Palmeiro singled, and he and Berroa came home behind Jeffrey Hammonds’ two-out double. But pinch hitter Harold Baines popped to short and thwarted the Orioles’ bid for their first postseason series sweep since 1971.
No team has come back to win a best-of-five series after losing the first two games at home, but if anyone can, the Mariners believe they’re the team. In 1995, Seattle lost the first two games at Yankee Stadium and swept three from New York in the Kingdome.
“Anything can happen, when you think about what we did in ’95,” Buhner said. “Quite a few of us have been in this situation before. It’s not really new to us.”
Randy Johnson will pitch for the Mariners against Baltimore’s Mike Mussina in Game 4.
