Seattle’s Scott Servais will soon be where Jeff Banister was with Texas a year ago – making his debut as a big league manager and hoping to lift a team with questions back into contention.
Robinson Cano hit an RBI double in his final at-bat of spring training and Nathan Karns was sharp over six innings as the Seattle Mariners beat the Colorado Rockies 8-5 on Saturday.
Through all the various remodels over the course of too many lost seasons there have been two constants for Seattle baseball for the past decade: Felix Hernandez and missing the playoffs.
The emphasis will be on the two-out throwing error by Colorado pitcher Austin House in the ninth inning on Friday that let the Mariners escape with a 1-1 tie at Peoria Stadium. But don’t overlook Ketel Marte’s two-out triple into the right-field corner prior to the House’s error.
It was a tapered late-spring tuneup start against minor-league players and, judged on that scale, Seattle Mariners right-hander Hisashi Iwakuma declared himself satisfied.
The road from San Diego to Seattle is never shorter than in spring training. All reliever Nick Vincent had to do Wednesday was walk across the parking lot at the Peoria Sports Complex.
The Seattle Mariners rounded out their bullpen Wednesday just before the start of the season by acquiring right-hander Nick Vincent from the San Diego Padres for a player to be named.
Yan Gomes hit his fifth spring homer and drove in three runs, leading the Cleveland Indians to a 4-1 victory over the Seattle Mariners on Tuesday night.
Veteran reliever Joel Peralta, once a long shot as a nonroster invite, didn’t hide the sense of personal satisfaction that accompanied the recent news that he would open the season as a member of the Mariners’ bullpen.
