Mariners’ Randy Johnson Is Back, It Seems Like He Never Really Left

Seattle Mariners ace Randy Johnson took the mound last weekend and confirmed the worst fears of the American League. He’s back -- better still, his back’s back -- and he appears ready to reestablish himself as the game’s most dominant starting pitcher.

But when Johnson left the mound last weekend, he confirmed the worst fears of fans in the Pacific Northwest. The Mariners’ bullpen took over and gave up six runs to turn an uplifting performance by Johnson into a gut-wrenching, late-inning loss to the Boston Red Sox.

Closer Norm Charlton gave up a three-run homer to Nomar Garciaparra in the ninth to squander a six-inning performance in which Johnson gave up five hits, struck out eight and did not walk a batter. He was brilliant, but that isn’t exactly the scenario everyone envisioned when the Mariners were ordained as this season’s team to watch.

Nobody gets to the World Series without a decent bullpen, and that is an area the Mariners have to wonder about after Saturday’s collapse and the ugly 16-2 loss to the Yankees three nights earlier. Charlton is a tough hombre, but he will have to be more consistent if the M’s are to accumulate enough W’s to get into the postseason.

Now, back to the good news. Johnson’s strong performance is a watershed event because his looming presence in the rotation has a dramatic impact on team chemistry. When he is right, he is so dominating he can affect an entire series.

How can that be, since he only is available to pitch once every five days? Because conventional wisdom dictates that successful teams approach a three-game series with the hope of winning two games. Johnson has been so successful the past few years that if he is scheduled to pitch, the Mariners only have to worry about winning one.

Johnson has been all but automatic since the start of his outstanding 1995 season. The loss on Saturday (through no fault of his own) was only the fourth in the 39 games he has started since. That’s not a typo. The Mariners were 35-3 the past two seasons when Johnson took the mound, including the month he pitched last year with a bulging disk in his back.

That means the Mariners enter each series he’s scheduled to pitch needing to split the other two games to go away a winner. That makes it easy to relax. That puts more pressure on the opposition. That makes Johnson the most valuable player in the league when he’s 100 percent.

OK, that was only one game, but the reason the Mariners were at the top of everyone’s preseason list was because of the way Johnson pitched last year. He was 5-0 with a lower back that was so inflamed that it required surgery to repair the bulging disk. Johnson underwent that operation late last summer and appears to have made a successful recovery.

That doesn’t mean he won’t have an occasional twinge or miss an occasional start. He still was experiencing some soreness this spring. It does mean he knows how to manage the discomfort, which should not be anywhere close to what he experienced last April.

The Mariners, however, still have to get their pitching staff reassembled. Veteran Jamie Moyer, who went 13-3 for Seattle and Boston last season, is on the disabled list, and newcomer Scott Sanders took a beating from the Yankees in that 16-run fiasco. The only Mariners victory the first time through the rotation came from veteran Jeff Fassero, the other big reason Seattle was elevated to the status of division favorite over the defending champion Texas Rangers.

The bullpen always has been the bigger question. The Mariners have some good veteran relievers, but they do not have a John Wetteland or the kind of setup relief that carried the Yankees into the World Series. Of course, that could change by the late-summer trading deadline.

There is no reason to panic, even with the M’s 2-3 start, because division rival Texas got off to a similar 2-2 start. The Rangers’ rotation got slapped around by the Baltimore Orioles over the weekend and is no lock to be as effective as it was through the first half of ’96.