If pro athletes need training camps before the re-start of sports, so do fans.

Here's a prep question for what I'm calling the new covid-based sports world (What? You thought the virus was going away, like a miracle?) to get your sports brain and heart going again:

Will you accept, with understanding, a decision by any of your favorite team's players to sit out games, and perhaps whatever passes for a season, for reasons of personal safety?

READ MORE»

Buried 58 paragraphs into a well-reported story by ESPN.com's baseball staff this week was the money quote regarding the degree of difficulty in re-starting baseball in a pandemic that acts like a stalled hurricane with dozens of on-off switches.

An executive of a risk-management firm, who chairs a Texas task force charged with safely bringing back sports and entertainment, admitted the work "fried my brain" and caused much loss of sleep.

READ MORE»

As everyday life slowly crawls back up to the hilltop from which it was thrown seven weeks ago, some of the daily incremental developments provide a glimpse of hope. Even for the return of sports.

That includes an update from Gov. Jay Inslee Friday that outlined the four phases he and public health officials want the state's citizens to follow, lest we backslide from our quarantine results into an abyss from which even Seahawks coach Pete Carroll can't happy-talk us out of.

READ MORE»

You don't have to be an epidemiologist to have come to an understanding by now that confirmed cases of coronavirus can erupt anytime, anywhere, from an aircraft carrier in Guam to a prison near Seattle to a pork plant in South Dakota. That randomness haunts the nights of every elected in the country, perhaps save one.

READ MORE»

Mocking the stewardship of major league baseball is one of the game's great traditions, as fulfilling as dribbling tobacco juice down a chin, or second-guessing a manager's choice of reliever after the ball winds up in the right-field seats.

But this week, it's time to break from tradition. I have to admire the brain trust of MLB for conjuring up Bubble Ball.

READ MORE»

Note: Along with the rest of MLB, Mariners spring training is shut down as sports copes with the novel coronavirus. Before the doors closed Thursday, Jim Caple caught up with rookie Evan White.

PEORIA, AZ. -- Just 23, 1B Evan White has not played in the major leagues, and played only four games at AAA Tacoma – in 2018. He played the 2019 season with the AA Arkansas Travelers, where he batted .293 with 18 home runs in 92 games.

READ MORE»

Despite a smart, coherent, calm presentation Wednesday morning by Gov. Jay Inslee, executives of King, Pierce and Snohomish counties and Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan that was unique in civic history, my guess is there's still some skepticism about the drastic measures ordered to mitigate (not contain) COVID-19, the disease produced by novel coronavirus.

READ MORE»

PEORIA, AZ. -- Yusei Kikuchi started pitching when he was 14. He mimicked the American professional players he liked a lot, including one he was not much like.

“At the time growing up, Randy Johnson was my favorite player,’’ he said of the former Mariners star and Hall of Famer.

READ MORE»

At the moment, quiet apprehension fills the Seattle sports scene. Football is over, and so is Washington's college basketball's home seasons. The Mariners are away at spring training. But high school winter sports are building to their annual climaxes. The Sounders opened their MLS season Sunday with a win at the Clink in front of a typical crowd of 40,126.

READ MORE»

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.

READ MORE»

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.

READ MORE»

"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?

READ MORE»

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.

READ MORE»

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.

READ MORE»

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.

READ MORE»

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.

READ MORE»

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.

READ MORE»

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.

READ MORE»

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.

READ MORE»

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).

READ MORE»