Pitchers And Catchers Report In Twelve Days
The Major League Baseball offseason is a grind. The World Series ends, then the free agents all kind of just sit there, waiting for someone to flinch. Someone eventually flinches, and then everyone does, and then things die down again. And then finally, mercifully, pitchers and catchers report. That’s happening, in less than two weeks.
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By Friday, February 20th, we should be seeing a steady stream of tweets and photos of Seattle Mariners pitchers and catchers arriving in Peoria, Arizona. They show up, hang out, and start the month-and-a-half long process of getting ready for a six month season. And, we hope, a month of postseason play. I’m sure baseball players do other stuff sometimes, but man, do they ever spend a lot of time playing baseball.
After spending Friday afternoon attending meet-and-greets and playing icebreaker games, the team starts working out on the 21st. On Tuesday the 24th the rest of the team arrives, rendering previous icebreakers and meet-and-greets moot. So they all say hello again, and on the 25th work out as a team.
Workouts last a week before the Catcus League gets going. In order to properly prepare for playing really high-octane baseball 162 times, teams must first play low-octane baseball 31 times. Did I mention how baseball players play a lot a lot of baseball?
The M’s open their spring slate at “home,” in Peoria, on March 4th against the San Diego Padres. But it’s a charity game, so it doesn’t count in the spring training standings. Because someone really keeps track of these games. There really are standings.
For some reason, the regular season doesn’t get going until April 6th this year. Which means, you guessed it – spring training runs all the way through April 4th. The Mariners wrap up their spring schedule on the road against the Colorado Rockies. Then they pack up the trucks and head to Seattle, where they open the season at home against the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.
Pitchers and catchers, then. Want to know who all’s going to be there? It’s quite a list. Here, pitchers: Roenis Elias, Danny Farquhar, Charlie Furbush, Mayckol Guaipe, J.A. Happ, Felix Hernandez, Danny Hultzen, Hisashi Iwakuma, Mike Kickham, Dominic Leone, Lucas Luetge, Yoervis Medina, Edgar Olmos, James Paxton, Erasmo Ramirez, Fernando Rodney, David Rollins, Carson Smith, Taijuan Walker, Tom Wilhelmsen, Sam Gaviglio, Justin Germano, Stephen Landazuri, Mark Lowe, Tyler Olson, Jordan Pries, and Forrest Snow. Here, catchers: John Hicks, Jesus Sucre, Mike Zunino, John Baker, Steve Baron, Mike Dowd, and Tyler Marlette.
Those names all belong to people, and those people are all Seattle Mariners in some capacity or another. In twelve short days all those folks will meet up in Peoria to begin a journey that, for all intents and purposes, is supposed to be a march towards the World Series. That’s why we count down to this date: it’s the start of something, and all we can hope is that it’s something huge. If we’re looking back from October, we’ll see that it all started on February 20th.
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