Baseball Schedule

Yesterday the Valpak mailer showed up in my mailbox. Normally I toss it without opening it. This time I browsed through the offers from various local businesses hoping there might be a coupon for Shur-Kleen car wash. There wasn’t, but the Valpak included something better—the 2014 Seattle Mariners baseball schedule.

At first I was puzzled. Baseball? It’s still winter. True, Major League Baseball pitchers and catchers reported for spring training a few weeks ago, and the Mariners started Cactus League play in Arizona earlier today. But the regular season is still months away, right? Actually it isn’t.

The Mariners open on the road this year, playing the Los Angeles Angels in Anaheim on March 31st. That’s a month from tomorrow! The home opener at Seattle’s Safeco Field, also against the Angels, is on April 8th. A sure sign of spring.

OK, so the Valpak included a strong signal that a long, wet (recently), and cold (sometimes) winter is coming to an end. That’s a good enough reason to rejoice, but will the optimism that always accompanies baseball’s opening day quickly fade? Do we have a better team than last year’s club, which finished in fourth place in the AL West with a record of 71-91?

We better if we hope to contend with the Texas Rangers and Oakland A’s. The A’s were in the playoffs last year, and the Rangers missed out by one game. The Angels made some roster changes over the winter and will likely improve on 2013’s 78-84 mark. A sub-.500 club isn’t acceptable in Anaheim.

The Mariners biggest offseason move was the signing of Robinson Cano, one of baseball’s top all-around players. With his bat we will have more offense as long as other teams can’t pitch around him. Re-signing Kendrys Morales and Raul Ibanez might have helped there. But the Angels offered Ibanez more money, and Morales is still a free agent.

We also have decent starting pitching—at least in the top two spots with Felix Hernandez and Hisashi Iwakuma. And rising stars like Kyle Seager and Nick Franklin should benefit from the experience they got from last year’s trial by fire.

Manager Eric Wedge is gone after a dysfunctional front office couldn’t get its act together on his contract or their public support for him. The new manager is ex-Pirates skipper Lloyd McClendon. In TV interviews he comes across as a no-nonsense players-manager whose teams will be strong on fundamentals. Whether that also translates to clutch hitting and lights-out pitching when we need it remains to be seen.

So much for my surface tour of the 2014 Mariners. I’m just a fan, not a baseball analyst. I hope we are better than last year, and I will be tuning in my radio on March 31st to find out.