King leaves with groin injury in M’s loss
ASTROS 3, MARINERS 0
Losing on Opening Day is never ideal. Getting shut out in that loss is not optimal. But having your Opening Day starting pitcher leave the game with an injury?
How’s your 2017 season so far Mariners?
Seattle’s 3-0 loss to the Astros on Monday at Minute Maid Park was a bit of a letdown beginning to a season filled with optimism and expectations. Mustering three hits and failing to score a run with a lineup that potent was frustrating and unexpected, but won’t be commonplace for the year.
The biggest concern is Felix Hernandez exiting the game after just five innings because of tightness in his groin. The injury isn’t deemed serious, but it was still concerning enough to remove Hernandez after just 65 pitches. The injury occurred with one out in the fourth inning on Josh Reddick’s crisp ground ball to the right side of the infield.
Hernandez was slow to react and leave the mound to cover first base. So when Danny Valencia fielded it with ease and was ready to flip it to Hernandez at first, he saw his pitcher in a mad dash trying to catch up.
Valencia made a nice toss to lead Hernandez, who caught the ball and beat Reddick to the bag by a step.
In a scene that has become alltoo-familiar when Hernandez makes those plays at first, he came up limping. Initially, the thought was he turned his right ankle. His ankles have shown the durability of dry spaghetti most of his career.
But it wasn’t the ankle. It was the groin. Hernandez met with manager Scott Servais and trainer Rick Griffin on the mound, threw a couple of warm-up tosses and declared himself good to go. He closed out the inning by getting Yulieski Gurriel to ground out to third.
Hernandez returned in the fifth inning and worked a 1-2-3 frame, which was aided by Jarrod Dyson’s outstanding catch in the left-field corner on a line drive off the bat of former Mariner Nori Aoki.
But in between innings, the pain in the groin continued to bother Hernandez. He met with trainers, Servais and pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre. When they decided to pull him, he was visibly irritated by the decision.
Hernandez’s line: five innings, two runs on five hits with no walks and six strikeouts.
The two runs came via a pair of solo homers, including one by the first hitter Hernandez faced.
George Springer, the Astros’ ultra-aggressive leadoff man, who swings hard and often and strikes out at a rate commensurate with that approach, became the third Astros player in club history to lead off the season with a homer.
Hernandez left a 2-1 fastball up in the zone on the inner half of the plate. Springer clubbed the mistake into the Crawford Boxes in left field for a 1-0 lead.
The Astros pushed the lead to 2-0 when Carlos Correa hit a majestic, towering homer to left field that stayed just inside the foul pole, but travelled out of the confines of Minute Maid. MLB Statcast measured the blast at 449 feet.
Like Hernandez, Astros Opening Day starter Dallas Keuchel was coming off a dismal 2016 where he spent time on the disabled list. Keuchel looked more like his 2015 version, the year he won the Cy Young, tossing seven shutout innings and giving up two hits with two walks and four strikeouts.
The two hits off Keuchel came on a single from Jean Segura to start the game and a single from Robinson Cano in the fourth.