The coronavirus, always in the lead, is beginning to put distance between its relentless self and the local and national sports sensibilities.

The highlight event of the Seattle sports calendar in September, the visit of the Michigan Wolverines and coach Jim Harbaugh to Husky Stadium for a season-opening game Sept. 5 against Washington, was cancelled Thursday.

READ MORE»

Given what the Mariners organization wants out of its pitchers, the words of Emerson Hancock must sound like poetry.

“I didn’t like walking people,’’ he said after a recent practice at T-Mobile Park. “Growing up, playing travel ball or playing in high school, my mentality was always just go right after people, attack."

READ MORE»

For what it's worth, the Mariners have been told they are booked to start their 60-game schedule of a most irregular season at 6:10 p.m. PT Friday, July 24 against the defending American League champion Astros in Houston, a city whose area hospitals nearly have reached capacity with the overload of coronavirus cases.

By July 24, maybe covid-19 will have disappeared by then, you know, like a miracle.

READ MORE»

Summer camp was as stilted as spring training was casual. Nobody wanted to catch viral cooties, but what's a batting cage for but to hang out, shoulder to shoulder? How can you tell if your clubhouse prank worked if you can't see a whole face full of anguish? And where's the party if there's no condo pool?

READ MORE»

The Mariners are open for the business of baseball training in Seattle Wednesday. Tuesday in Tacoma and Everett, baseball was closed for the season.

News of the fate of the the Mariners' Class AAA affiliate to the south and the Class A affiliate to the north was no surprise. It is hard is to play baseball without players.

READ MORE»

Puke and all, American sports fans will welcome back Major League Baseball.

Always have. Owners are betting fans always will be there -- even when they aren't permitted to attend in person. The belief has been supported by two bedrock truths:

Fans are suckers.

Owners are monopoly operators.

READ MORE»

We sentimentalize and romanticize baseball like no other American team sport.  Maybe that's why we keep giving it the freedom to break the collective sporting heart. We can't seem to quit on it.

But now might be the easiest time yet to slam the door off its hinges.

READ MORE»

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»