Mitch Haniger was the Mariners’ best player in 2018, batting .285 with 26 home runs, 93 RBIs, playing very good defense in the outfield, making the All-Star team and earning some MVP votes. His play helped them to an 89-73 record, their best since 2003.

Haniger also has been an influence in the clubhouse.

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Baseball spring training is probably the most over-wrought annual occurrence on the national sports calendar. In part, that's because sportswriters traveling from lousy winter climates become deliriously rhapsodic when struck by warm sunshine in Arizona and Florida.

Their work strains to convey significance upon the daily developments, pushing back against the irresistible fact that the mammoth 162-game regular season will render moot nearly all trends or conclusions identified in February and March.

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"What's puzzling you is the nature of my game."

-- Rolling Stones, Sympathy for the Devil

After attempting to understand Thursday from spring training the Astros' futile attempt to apologize for baseball's biggest scandal since PEDs, I confess to bewilderment. Mick Jagger's 1968 samba saga about the tangle between good and evil kept creeping into my head.

What is the nature of the Astros' game?

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Responding to a decade-long decline in attendance and relevance in American sports, Major League Baseball apparently is considering for the 2022 season expanding its playoff format from 10 to 14 teams, and throwing in a time-tested selection gimmick from one of reality TV's more mind-numbing shows.

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In a season with no stakes, the Mariners made a why-not transaction Wednesday when they signed former No. 1 draft choice Taijuan Walker, 27, to a one-year contract, in case he has something left after Tommy John surgery in April 2018.

ESPN reported Walker will get $2 million on a one-year deal, with performance bonuses that could raise the total to $3 million. As spring training opened, he was added to the 40-man roster after RHP Austin Adams was put the 60-day injury list following knee surgery to repair a torn ACL.

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Spring training starts Wednesday with Mariners pitchers and catchers reporting, and other position players roll in Monday. The weather definitely will be better in Peoria, AZ, than it has been in Seattle this winter -- how could it not? -- but the larger question is whether the Mariners will be better than the 68-win, self-inflicted sorrow of 2019.

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Dark arts?

Somehow the Houston Astros sign-stealing scandal has taken a trip down Diagon Alley into the world of Harry Potter.

The phrase from Hogwarts was borrowed by the Astros baseball-operations staff as a label in 2016 to describe an Excel spreadsheet program designed to out-smart the opposition by nefarious means.

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Marco Gonzales is not as imposing as Randy Johnson, nor as animated as Felix Hernandez. Nor is he a fluke like Paul Abbott, who had 17 of his 43 wins in an 11-year MLB career in one season (Seattle, 2001).

The one successful Mariners predecessor Gonzales seems to evoke is Jamie Moyer, projecting an earnestness that can bend silverware. A guy has to be earnest to be the winning pitcher, for Rocky Mountain High School in Fort Collins, in all four of his years in Colorado's state high school championship game.

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Distractions will be few in 2020.

No international games. No overwrought farewells for one-time heroes. The ways to celebrate Edgar Martinez's Hall of Fame induction will dwindle to maybe half a dozen. There won't even be the bearded-lady novelty of a real All-Star such as big-bucks Edwin Encarnacion passing through town for a few games until a good team panics during the season and trades for him.

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When it comes to new frontiers of misbehavior -- weaponizing the in-game banging of garbage cans certainly qualifies, especially when it goes undetected -- the office of the commissioner of Major League Baseball has an emergency tool. The commish is authorized to deal punishment, based on his judgment of the facts, "in the best interests of baseball."

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As the sports world knows, the Mariners haven’t been to the postseason for 18 years, an absence longer than any current franchise in baseball, football or basketball. But at least 16 of the players they have traded or let go the past couple years reached the postseason this month, including several for the first time.

At least some people with Seattle ties are enjoying personally the MLB postseason.

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This is the 18th consecutive season the Mariners have not made the playoffs, the longest current stretch of any team in major American pro sports. Seattle has never reached the World Series, the only current major league franchise that has never done so (the Washington Senators did so before they moved to D.C. from Montreal and became the Nationals).

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In February 2013, when the Mariners announced their massive contract extension for Felix Hernandez, which is coming to its merciful end next week, two developments foreshadowed the move.

After a third consecutive losing season (75 wins, following seasons of 67 and 61), Mariners' average attendance in 2012 at then-Safeco Field fell to 21,258, still the stadium's all-time low. Considering that 10 years earlier, the average was 43,710, the Mariners had lost half their in-house audience.

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The Mariners season has been in magnum dwindle for so long that it's easy to lose track, especially in the formidable shadow of the sprained-ankle portion of the Seahawks season. But every once in a while the baseball gods like to cross the streams with some unscripted intrigue that looks as if it were intentional: James Paxton in his first return to Seattle since being traded to the Yankees, facing off against the youngster, Justus Sheffield, who was the Mariners' prize in the four-player November deal.

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When Felix Hernandez made his return to the mound Saturday night after missing more than three months to injury, he wore King Felix on the back of his jersey. That’s because all players, per an MLB marketing gimmick, were wearing nicknames for the weekend. Wearing King Felix made sense because of his amazing 15-year career with the Mariners, even if the sentiment behind it no longer seemed relevant.

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In most of the aisle-end seats at T-Mobile Park, there is an image of Fred Hutchinson, showing the Seattle native as he prepares to deliver a pitch. Those images have been there since the park opened 20 years ago. For good reason. Fred Hutchinson means a lot to Seattle. And elsewhere.

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Another day, another Mariners embarassment. This time, it's Tim Beckham. The 29-year-old shortstop was suspended for 80 games Tuesday by MLB for the use of stanozolol, an old-school performance-enhancing steroid on the sport's banned list. He's done for this season, and the punishment will linger into next season for any team signing him.

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My seminal cringe-worthy Mariners game was the 1992 season opener. It was the first game following the stunning news a few months earlier that, from out of nowhere, international man of mystery Hiroshi Yamauchi bought the franchise from Jeff Smulyan to keep him from moving it to Tampa Bay.

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Mike Leake, 31, nearly pitched a perfect game two starts ago for the Mariners against the Angels and their Terminator, Mike Trout. Such is the wackiness of MLB that his value at the trade deadline Wednesday was a mere high-A infielder.

Jose Caballero, 22, was hitting .268 in the Diamondbacks system. He has 28 stolen bases, so if he does make the majors, it appears he's fast enough to keep the Mariners out of a few double plays. Incremental value, yes; but something.

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COOPERSTOWN, NY -- Officially inducted Sunday afternoon, Yankees closer Mariano Rivera was the first voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame by every single BBWAA voter. Not even Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron or Ken Griffey Jr. were unanimous.

Meanwhile, Edgar Martinez did not get voted in until his 10th and final year of eligibility in January.

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