SEATTLE -- The Indians might struggle to find just the right word to describe Jamie Moyer's performance Sunday afternoon in their 9-1 loss to the Mariners.

But here's a little help: try dazzling, frustrating, masterful or dominating. Any one of those words would surely fit like a tailored suit as a description of the outing the 42-year-old left-hander crafted inside wind-chilled Safeco Field.

Moyer's weapon of choice in his latest destruction of the Indians was the weapon he's always relied on: his soft stuff.

"Super, super slow," Ryan Ludwick said of Moyer's stuff.

Other Indians shared those thoughts on Moyer.

"There's a lot of different ways that you can get guys out," said Josh Bard, who went hitless -- as did Ludwick -- against Moyer. "You can either throw over the hitting speed or under it. He throws under it."

Under hitting speed can be, as Bard put it, a surefire recipe for success, and Moyer has proved how true that point is time and again against the Indians, who have not beaten him in Seattle since April 1, 1998.

And from the start Sunday, Moyer offered no reason to believe that his unbeaten streak against the Tribe would come to an end this day. He kept the Indians hitters a half-tick or two late on almost every pitch.

In 95 pitches over eight innings, Moyer (4-0, 2.53 ERA) had the Indians either squibbing his "super, super slow" stuff harmlessly to his infielders, lofting lazy flies everywhere or flailing away at unhittable pitches for strike three.

"It's almost like it's got a time-clock in it," Ludwick said of Moyer's slow balls. "When the time-clock goes off, it just dies."

Still, Moyer found himself and the Mariners in a close ballgame early on because right-hander Scott Elarton had pitched well for the Indians, too. Elarton (0-1, 7.58 ERA) gave up one run in the first inning, but he held the Mariners in check for the next four innings.

"Basically, it was fastball command," Elarton said. "I did fall behind some hitters, but I made the pitches when I had to."

Then came the sixth inning, and Elarton saw the Mariners turn what had been a 1-0 pitchers' duel into a rout.

Things started to unravel for Elarton when he gave up a leadoff single to Ichiro Suzuki and then walked Jeremy Reed. Chaos reigned from there.

The Mariners knocked Elarton out of the ballgame and pushed across a couple of runs and still had the bases loaded with one out. And the runs kept coming, thanks in part to two errors in the inning.

Six runs later, a 1-0 ballgame had turned into a 7-0 ballgame.

"The sixth inning got away from us, for sure," manager Eric Wedge said. "The two errors hurt. ... Obviously, it was a tight game. But we make the plays, and it'd definitely be a different inning."

No matter how radically different it might have been, the Tribe would have still been in deep trouble for letting the Mariners score anything else. At that point, Moyer had shown he had the stuff to shut down the Indians offense.

So the last thing Moyer needed was a seven-run cushion, which made him even tougher for the Indians to deal with.

"It's no secret what Jamie does," Wedge said. "He frustrates hitters. He keeps you off-balance, he keeps you out in front for the most part. He keeps you honest with working both sides of the plate with his fastball."