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As well as Felix pitched in 2010, only to end up with a 13-12 record, he won the Cy Young that year because he was jobbed in 2009 when he went 19-5. The Ms were 25-9 in games he started, he was only pulled in the middle of an inning in 6 of his 34 starts. On May 9, he threw 81 pitches in a lousy 4 inning stint, and didn't throw less than 101 pitches in any start the rest of the year. In the 235 innings that he got the third out, the opposition went 1-2-3 in 157 of them.
If he had one weakness in his prime, it was his inability at times to avoid the big inning. For every game he should have won because of lack of run support, he has killed himself with the 3 and 4 run innings. I've always been a huge Mariner fan, and I've always pulled for Hernandez, and he was a very, very good pitcher, but I always thought he was just a step below the very elite, even at his very best. He always got the sympathy of the press for pitching for bad teams, and getting screwed in games that he definitely should have won, but he had a bad habit of imploding at times. It wasn't even as if he lost his cool or anything, he'd just kind of lose his stuff. Now, it's gone. He'll never reinvent himself, nor will the 95 MPH fastball ever come out of his arm again. The Mariners burnt him up.
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