For Former Eagle, Replacement Ball Brings No Regrets

For the definitive semipro baseball league, the Seattle Mariners went out and found the definitive semipro player.

Rather, he found them.

Barry Aden represents the warm and fuzzy side of replacement ball - selected and neglected as he was 13 years ago out of Eastern Washington University, pitching away his summers in ballyards up and down I-5, finagling a tryout with his hometown club.

He is 33 years old with three sons, playing hooky from his high school biology classes and living with his grandmother while his impossible dream runs its course.

He would be Walter Mitty, except that his earned-run average is 9.00 and he’s giving up a home run to every seventh batter.

Besides, everyone in spring training this year is Walter Mitty.

“I would have liked to have had some better performances to feel good about,” he admitted, “but each day is an opportunity and I’m not going to be discouraged about anything. I’m just darned fortunate to be here.”

Well, yes.

Ordinarily, he would be hitting fungoes to his baseball team at Liberty High School in Issaquah, where he’s been the coach for 11 years. The Patriots open their season Friday against Interlake, but they’ll do it with a replacement coach.

Fellow named Dan Spillner. Maybe you have his baseball card. The former Cleveland Indian has a son on Aden’s team.

It is just another irony of this misbegotten labor dispute that someone with a major-league pedigree is filling in for a high school coach with no professional playing experience who wants to be a fill-in Mariner.

Of course, if Aden had his druthers, his resume would be a little more impressive.

He was a pretty fair pitcher at Centralia College and for coach Jim Wasem at EWU second team All-Pac-10 North as a senior - who was drafted twice.

“But I didn’t take the opportunity to sign when I was drafted pretty high out of JC,” he said. “At Eastern, I thought I’d pitched well enough to get another chance, and I was drafted, but wasn’t signed. I felt a bit slighted by the system, and I carried that frustration with me for a very short time.

“Then I found my niche with semipro ball.”

Did he say niche? More like destiny.

For 14 years, going back to his days at EWU, Aden spent his summer vacation pitching for the Seattle Studs of what’s now the Pacific International League. Then he helped start a new team, the Tacoma Timbers, and coached and pitched for them.

“I’ve thrown eight, nine games a year every summer,” he said. “Back in college, I was throwing 12 or 13 games a summer. I figured out one time that I’ve thrown about 1,000 innings of semipro baseball. My record is something like 91-31. I’ve never stopped pitching.”

Amazingly, being the Cy Young of semipro paid off - not that he was going to be discovered by some bird dog.

As replacement ball lurched toward reality, Aden played his hole card. He knew M’s vice president Woody Woodward, who occasionally had tried to place young players in semipro programs when there was no room in the farm system. Liberty’s school district has a second week of winter break that allowed Aden to fly south and sell the M’s on a tryout.

“They made no promises,” Aden said, “because I didn’t have a flowery professional history. But I thought if I didn’t do it, I’d kick myself for not having tried. I just didn’t want to have to look back and second-guess myself.”

And he doesn’t. Like the other replacements, he reasons that the owners were determined to field replacements and that one of them might as well be him. He has no illusions about hanging around or landing a spot in the farm system once the strike is settled.

“But the longer you’re here, the more you increase your standards of performance. Initially, you’re in awe. It’s a wonderful deal, a dream, fantasy camp, Club Med - all of the above. But it’s getting a little more serious now, and you can’t help but start raising your expectations for yourself.”

The competition isn’t helping. Aden has an ERA about three times the staff average of 3.23. The three home runs he’s allowed have come in just four innings.

“But if you eat yourself up with the frustration, you’re taking away from the moment,” he said. “You have to enjoy the moment because tomorrow it might be gone.”

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Blanchette The Spokesman-Review