Morgan masters Tri-City

YAKIMA -- Sean Morgan's stuff, they insist, had never been lost.

He had retained the knee-buckling breaking pitches and grounder-inducing sinkers that had enticed the Arizona Diamondbacks into drafting him in the fourth round last year out of Tulane University.

They had only been misplaced, it now seems, during a four-month, injury-induced exile.

"When you don't throw for that long," the 6-foot-3 right-hander said, "your mechanics get lost."

Morgan's mechanics were back Monday night, along with everything else, for six superlative innings of the Bears' 5-3 defeat of Tri-City at Yakima County Stadium.

With an announced crowd of 1,536 looking on, Morgan allowed only two hits and a scratch run. He struck out six, walked three and got his first victory since incurring a 30 percent tear of his rotator cuff.

"I didn't have surgery," he said, having completed his postgame exercises under the supervision of strength coach Travis Pugliese. "I took some cortisone shots and rehabbed down in Tucson, then came back here."

His efforts Monday were just what the doctor ordered for Yakima, which had been shut out Sunday for the sixth time of a season which now stands at 27-47.

The Bears will host the Dust Devils (35-39), from whom they have won three of four, in their home finale tonight before ending the year Wednesday at Pasco.

"We'd kind of been waiting for that," Yakima manager Bob Didier said of Morgan's performance. "We'd seen his stuff, and tonight he threw some pretty nasty breaking balls and sinkers. It was by far his best outing."

In support, the Bears bunched three hits -- more than they'd totaled the previous game -- for three first-inning runs.

Anthony Smith's two-out, RBI single to center was followed by Jimmy Principe's base hit, after which Justin Parker plated both runners with a triple to the right-center.

Yakima added two unearned runs in the fifth on two errors, Alfredo Marte's double and Smith's sacrifice fly, and relievers Ben Dollar, Jason Durst and Jordan Meaker made them stand up.

Meaker, though he walked the tying runs aboard in the ninth, earned his sixth save. Dollar yielded two runs in the seventh, but both were unearned.

For Morgan, the road to Monday's success had hardly been smooth.

In one of his first appearances since his return here (Morgan was 1-1 with a 5.46 ERA in 28 innings as a Bear in 2007), he came out of the bullpen in the eighth inning with a 4-1 lead against Spokane.

Morgan walked his first three hitters, then gave up a two-run single before being replaced, and the Bears lost 5-4.

"I remember that night," he said. "I couldn't throw a strike and it wasn't much fun. But D.C. (pitching coach Dan Carlson) and I kept working at it, and we found a happy medium as far as my mechanics were concerned.

"With an injury like mine, there are good days and bad days when you're coming back. Sometimes you have phantom pains. I've just been trying to build back my arm strength back and block the other stuff out of my mind."

Principe had three hits, raising his batting average to a team-best .294, Parker had two and Smith's pair of RBI boosted his team-leading total in that department to 31.

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