Catcher Burke pitches; Mariners lose anyway

One by one, they came up to Mariners manager Jim Riggleman in the dugout.

"Skip, I can pitch if you need me to."

Willie Bloomquist. Adrian Beltre. Ichiro Suzuki. Even R.A. Dickey, who had thrown 105 pitches less than 24 hours earlier.

To Riggleman, those gestures during Sunday's 2-1, 15-inning loss to Detroit exemplified why he believes this group is more than just the lousy baseball team everyone else sees.

"For us to be where we are in the standings, and for those guys to be risking injury to go out there and extend themselves ... to offer to do that, it makes a real statement about how they feel about their teammates," Riggleman said.

In the end, it was little-used catcher Jamie Burke who took the mound for the 15th inning, leaving Mariners fans doing double-takes at their televisions. After 14 innings of stellar pitching, it had come to this.

"I don't want to think about this situation, but if it comes up, I'll give everything I can give out there to try to put a zero up," Burke said.

He didn't put a zero up, but even though he did give up a run and take the loss, Burke didn't embarrass himself.

Miguel Cabrera led off the inning with a double, then went to third when Burke threw one over Marcus Thames' head and all the way to the backstop.

"It was a slider," he said to a throng of reporters. "The ball was slippery."

Thames hit a sacrifice fly to left field to make it 2-1, then Burke got future Hall of Famer Ivan Rodriguez to ground out and induced a line drive from Edgar Renteria.

Bloomquist was hit by a pitch leading off the bottom of the 15th. While the baseball handbook would have had Yuniesky Betancourt trying to bunt him to second, Riggleman had decided that with the bullpen already wiped out, he wasn't playing to re-tie the game. They had to win it or lose it in the 15th.

They lost it, as Betancourt grounded into a double play and Ichiro flied out to left. The Mariners managed just six hits in the 15 frames and couldn't push a run across after the third inning.

The Mariners might consider themselves lucky to have scored at all against Tigers starter Nate Robertson, who was at the top of his game. A Bloomquist single in the third, followed by Betancourt's RBI double, were the only base runners Robertson allowed in the first six innings.

Robertson finished nine innings in 100 pitches, while the Mariners needed four pitchers and 165 pitches to keep pace.

"He was really tying us up," Riggleman said of Robertson. "That was the key. I thought we were going to get him. Our pitching was doing such a great job, and we've got some great numbers against left-handed pitching."

Detroit's only run in the first 14 innings came on a single pitch, as No. 9 hitter Ryan Rayburn led off the fifth with a home run against Seattle starter Ryan Rowland-Smith.

"I was saying to some of the guys in about the 13th inning, if I had thrown a different pitch or located a little better, we would have been on the plane already," Rowland-Smith said.

As the Mariners burned through relievers, they started running out of options. Brandon Morrow had pitched four of the past five games, and they wouldn't chance using him again. Arthur Rhodes had slept awkwardly on his pitching arm, and bullpen coach Norm Charlton shut him down after seeing him warm up.

By the 11th inning, the Mariners were down to Cesar Jimenez available in the bullpen, and rode him for a career-high four innings of relief. Then they hit the end of the line. The only other pitchers on the roster were Jarrod Washburn and Carlos Silva, who were scheduled to start the next two games, and Erik Bedard, who had a sore arm and had already been scratched from his next start.

Riggleman looked down the bench and saw Burke, the man who has been rendered odd man out as the third catcher. He called Burke over and asked if he'd ever pitched.

Burke told the manager that he had in fact pitched, twice at Triple-A. He went three innings and got a win in a marathon game in 1999 and pitched an inning in a blowout in 2002.

"Everybody thinks they can do everything," Burke said. "We all want to get out there and try something. But I know how hard it is to get up on that mound."

Burke threw a couple of wild pitches as he was warming up, but said he was just concentrating on throwing strikes.

"I try not to look at (the fact that) I'm a catcher," he said. "As long as I can throw strikes and let them put it in play, and make things happen and not walk people around the bases, that's good."

Burke hit 87 with his fastball, but several times could be seen shaking off catcher Jeff Clement.

"There was a couple times he wanted me to throw changeup or slider and I was like, oh no," he said. "I can't get a good feel of it."

"Burke did a good job for us," Riggleman said. "He kept it to a one-run game."

Burke became the third position player in Mariners history to pitch in a game. The first was Manny Castillo, who gave up seven earned runs in a 19-7 blowout loss in 1983. The other was John Mabry, who gave up two runs in two-thirds of an inning in a 14-4 loss in 2000.

Role Reversal

When catcher Jamie Burke pitched the 15th inning of Seattle's 2-1 loss to the Detroit Tigers at Safeco Field on Sunday (he took the loss), he became the third position player to pitch in a game for the Mariners and the first to both play a position and pitch in the same game (neither Manny Castillo nor John Mabry played a position in the games in which they pitched). Mariners position players who pitched:

Date	Player	IP	H	R	BB	SO	Dec.
June 26, 1983	Manny Castillo	2 2/3	8	7	3	2	ND
May 28, 2000	John Mabry	2/3	3	2	1	0	ND
Jul 6, 2008	Jamie Burke	1	1	1	0	0	L

Year	Date	Player	IP	H	R	BB	SO	Dec.	Skinny
1983	June 26	Manny Castillo	2.2	8	7	3	2	ND	Backup infielder entered game vs. Toronto with M's trailing 12-3; faced 19 batters, allowed three home runs.
2000	May 28	John Mabry	0.2	3	2	1	0	ND	Replaced Jose Mesa after Senior Smoke gave up seven runs in the eighth of a 14-4 loss to Tampa Bay.
2008	July 6	Jamie Burke	1.0	1	1	0	0	L	After replacing Kenji Johjima, Burke caught innings 9 through 14; faced 4 batters in 15th and took the loss.