Peabody: Life, Friends Baseball

That gives everyone a chance to shower off and get the splatter rinsed off from the crash landing that has been the Mariner’s off season.

Nominally it seems as if the Mariners have some available money to spend, which would mean some additions to the roster, but it is generally accepted now that the Mariners have cut payroll by about $15 million from last season, give or take a million here or there. They could always trade Felix for another first baseman/dh/lf or sign another worn out player from Japan which would change things, but I think they might be done for the winter.

Here is what the candidates for spots look like going into the season by position:

Catcher: Five guys for two spots. Olivo, Jaso, Montero, Moore and Gimenez. Gimenez is probably kicking himself about staying with the Mariners. I would love to hear what Moore thinks about his time with the Mariners.

First Base: Smoak, Carp, Montero. A little overlap here.

Second Base: Ackley, Rodriguez, Kawasaki

Short Stop: Ryan, Kawasaki, Rodriguez. I wonder if Luis Rodriguez and Gimenez talk to each other.

Third Base: Seager, Liddi, Kawasaki, Figgins

Left Field: Carp, Wells, six other guys (Robinson, Saunders, Hsien-Chiang, Peguero, Chavez, Wilson)…I probably forgot somebody.

Center Field: Gutierrez, Wells, Robinson, Saunders

Right Fielder for life: Suzuki

Designated Hitter: Carp, Montero, Olivo, Peguero

Starting Rotation: Hernandez, Vargas, Millwood, Iwakuna, Beavan, Furbush, Noesi, Paxton, Hultzen

Relief Pitchers: League, Wilhelmsen, Delabar, Sherrill, Wright, Ruffin, Perez,

All those guys add up to more than 25 players. Politics and bad contracts abound, Figgins, Gutierrez, Ichiro are locks. I need confirmation of this, but somebody thinks that Figgins can be traded with the new team actually accepting part of Figgin’s deal. My new name for Chuck Armstrong is Wooden Head. I suspect that Wooden Head believes some other team will do that. That means that Figgins will have a roster spot until he spontaneously combusts or he remembers how to hit again. Wooden Head will announce Ichiro’s extension in Tokyo so he will be here for another five years or so.

Time will tell.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 25th, 2012 at 8:59 am by terrybenish and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.