Freddy Peralta entered Wednesday coming off three straight rocky outings, and his afternoon in Seattle didn’t get off to an encouraging start. Handed a first-inning lead, Peralta gave up a lead-off home run to J.P. Crawford, evening the score. After Peralta struck out Julio Rodríguez and induced a pop-out from Josh Naylor, he walked Randy Arozarena to extend the inning. Peralta fanned Luke Raley to escape further trouble, but had to throw 24 pitches in the frame.

In the second inning, Peralta worked out around a two-out single by Jhonny Pereda with two groundouts and a popout in a scoreless inning. However, the righty found himself in immediate trouble in the third inning, as Crawford led off the inning with a double and Rordríguez followed with a walk. Peralta was able to get out of the inning unscathed, though, getting Naylor to fly out and Arozarena to hit into a double play – just the second he had induced all year.

After the Mets staked Peralta to a 5-1 lead in the fourth inning, the right-hander struck out Raley for a second time, but got into another jam on back-to-back singles by Cole Young and Dominic Canzone. Pereda stepped up and worked a full count, but in a rare occurrence, was called out for taking multiple timeouts in his plate appearance. Once the dust settled from that, Peralta struck out Colt Emerson to escape the jam.

With another lengthy inning behind him, Peralta was able to make quick work of the Mariners in the fifth inning, working around an infield single by Crawford with a forceout and his second double play of the game, this one coming from Naylor. Peralta finished his outing in the sixth with only 1-2-3 inning of the afternoon – ringing up Arozarena and getting a lineout from Raley and a groundout from Young.

“Good outing by Freddy,” Carlos Mendoza said after the game. “Six innings from him, had to work. They had some traffic, but he made pitches when he needed to.”

Peralta generated a season-high 18 whiffs on the day – most of which came on his secondary pitches. His fastball got eight whiffs on 25 swings, while his change-up and slider generated 10 on 19 attempts. Peralta also leaned on his slider more than usual, using it 21 percent of the time, compared to his season average of nine percent. Peralta’s fastball averaged 94.3 mph, which is higher than his season average, and it topped out at 97.7 mph. This was just the fifth time in his 13 starts that he completed six innings, but it was only the second time he had allowed a first-inning run this year.

“I learned that it’s like ‘this is the only one you should get today’, keep fighting, forget about that one, keep moving forward, that’s the way I see it,” Peralta said on recovering from giving up a lead-off home run.

Peralta’s season ERA sits at 3.38, which might not be an ace-type mark, but he continues to give the team a chance to win, even on days when he’s not at his sharpest. His next start is lined up to be against his old NL Central foes – the St. Louis Cardinals – on the upcoming home stand.