November 14, 2004 in Sports

Saving pitcher Ryan

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Associated Press photo

Ryan Anderson’s mound time for Seattle has been scarce since this April 2000 exhibition game.
(Full-size photo)

KEY BISCAYNE, Fla. – The offers went out Friday, nearly a half dozen of them as the Seattle Mariners tried to land free agents capable of turning the franchise around in 2005.

“We made more than a bread basket’s worth and less than 10,” Mariners general manager Bill Bavasi joked. “No one got them and accepted, but no one ever does right away. If you look at the market the last few years, that’s what we’re going to see this winter. With so many players on the market – I think the total is over 200 again – it’s going to take time.”

The one free agent the Mariners have already landed since the season ended was one of their own, a left-handed pitcher who seems equal part promise and baggage.

Ryan Anderson.

Now 24, Anderson was Seattle’s first-round draft pick in 1997, then a high school phenom who at 6-foot-10 was hitting 100 mph on the radar. On the cusp of making it to the big leagues in the spring of 2000, Anderson felt discomfort in his left shoulder, and hasn’t pitched in a game since that season.

Anderson went down when Lou Piniella was the manager, and his successor, Bob Melvin, never saw Anderson on a mound. When Anderson became a minor league free agent at the end of last season, the Mariners had paid for three major surgeries and more than three years of rehabilitation that never got Anderson in a baseball game.

Time to say goodbye?

“I think we were all on the fence initially,” said Seattle assistant general manager Benny Looper. “We’ve had so many highs and lows with Ryan since signing him. Since his first injury, we’d be optimistic about him coming along and he’d have another setback.

“He’d rehabilitate, get close, something else would happen.

“One of the options was to sever the ties, just let him go. Ryan has always been high-maintenance, but in any business those guys are often the most productive people, too.”

Looper and his minor league staff finally landed on the side of bringing Anderson back, and signed him to a non-guaranteed, one-year contract.

“We decided to make the best of it, hope we get him back on the mound,” Looper said. “In the end, everyone on our staff agreed, it was worth the risk.”

Next spring, Anderson will be paid $10,000 a month. How much has the team spent on him since the ‘97 draft?

“When I was a scout, someone asked me how many nights I spent a year on the road. I started adding them up and decided I didn’t want to know,” Looper said. “You ask how much we’ve spent on Ryan? Same thing. I don’t want to know, but it’s a lot.”

Anderson didn’t throw a pitch from the mound last season, when he spent most of the year in Arizona, slowly coming back from a third shoulder operation.

“Ryan’s matured,” Looper said. “He’s been humbled, and his work ethic has improved. In the instructional league last month, he threw off the mound, not in a game, but off the mound.

“At the minimum, we hope he can be a situational left-handed reliever. We’re hoping for more, and so is he.

“The goal in spring training is to get him ready to pitch in games. Where isn’t the issue. He just needs to pitch, needs to regain his confidence out there. It’s been three, 3 1/2 years.”

As the major league general managers meetings closed Friday, the Mariners had done what they’d come to Florida for, by talking to all 29 other major league teams in the span of four days.

“It’s always more fun when something comes together and you close a deal,” Bavasi said, “but we made progress on a lot of fronts. We talked to teams about trades, we talked to agents about their players and we’ve made some offers.

“No one came here expecting a lot to happen, and no team did much.”

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