Mariners pick up Guardado’s option

After recording a club-record 27 consecutive saves while pitching with a torn rotator cuff last season, closer Eddie Guardado thought the Seattle Mariners owed it to him to pick up the $6.25 million option on his contract.

Mariners general manager Bill Bavasi didn’t disappoint the veteran left-hander.

“You can’t ask for anything more,” Guardado said. “I got treated fair this year.”

At 35, Guardado is back for his third spring training with the Mariners – still with a torn rotator cuff, but feeling more healthy than ever after saving 36 of 41 opportunities in 2005, when he showed he still was one of baseball’s top relief pitchers.

Guardado is headed into the final season of a three-year contract he signed with the Mariners as a free agent in December 2003.

When he came to his second spring training with the Mariners last year, he was a major question for the team. Because of a strained right hamstring, he didn’t pitch in an official spring game.

“Since leaving a start for the San Francisco Giants in the fourth inning against Atlanta on Aug. 20, 2003, because of numbness in his right hand, Jesse Foppert’s career has slowed.

Foppert underwent Tommy John surgery on his right elbow Sept. 16, 2003, and has pitched in four major league games, all for the Giants.

Acquired by the Mariners last July in a trade, Foppert is at the Mariners’ spring training camp looking for a job in his new team’s rotation.

Before his elbow injury, Foppert had an 8-9 record with a 5.03 ERA in 21 starts and 111 innings for the Giants in 2003.

Younger Clemens goes deep

Roger Clemens’ son took dad deep on the first pitch of spring training, sending a fastball over the left-field fence in the Houston Astros camp.

“That was probably one of the harder fastballs I cut loose,” Roger Clemens said after throwing to Koby and other Houston Astros minor-leaguers.

Clemens, 43, got applause from about 100 fans as he walked to the mound behind the Astros’ minor-league complex. He threw 18 pitches from behind a screen before his 19-year-old son’s homer on his first pitch after the screen was moved away.

Clearing the bases

Los Angeles Angels outfielder Vladimir Guerrero was given Monday off after three cousins died in a car crash in the Dominican Republic on Sunday. … The Kansas City Royals had hoped to build future pitching staffs around 22-year-old Zack Greinke, but they are not planning on him being in the rotation when this season starts April 3. … Detroit Tigers reliever Troy Percival has left training camp. The 11-year major league veteran, who is 10th on the league’s career saves list with 324, left after a painful performance Sunday in a simulated game. He’s not expected back.