PEORIA, Ariz. – Dustin Ackley, the second player taken in last June’s draft, won’t start the season with Seattle.

        The Mariners made that clear Tuesday when Ackley was optioned to the club’s Double-A West Tennessee roster.

        That being said, Ackley made a lot of fans when he was with the Mariners in the last three weeks or so, and it would surprise no one if the left-handed hitting former University of North Carolina star would make it to Triple-A and the majors both later this year.

        Ackley, an outfielder for the Tar Heels who wound up playing first base because of an arm injury, is being converted to second base.

        "I’m very proud of what he’s done so far,’’ general manager Jack Zduriencik said. "He’s worked very hard on his defense, and he wants to...

    PEORIA, Ariz. – The message was clear – Rob Johnson wasn’t alone in this.

    The Seattle catcher got the word from former Mariner shortstop Alex Rodriguez that Johnson’s hip surgeries of the offseason wouldn’t keep him out of games forever.

    Johnson was a little concerned when his rehab didn’t go as smoothly as he would have liked, so Seattle trainer Rick Griffin reached out to Rodriguez when Johnson started to question his ability to come back from a similar set of problems.

    Rodriguez answered the call by telling Griffin to tell Johnson that there is sunlight at the end of the rehab tunnel.

    “I didn’t talk to A-Rod myself, but what Rick was told was that I should expect seven good days for every two bad days,” Johnson said Monday. “When you feel good, you feel real good.”

    Johnson’s motions don’t show any holdover pain,...

     Cliff Lee (Photo courtesy Artolog via Wikimedia Commons)

    TUCSON, Ariz. – It’s a good bet you can see almost anything in a big league game during spring training.

    One thing, however, you would not expect to see. You wouldn’t expect to see a big league pitcher ejected for throwing at a big league hitter.

    Yet that exact scenario played out Monday in Tucson Electric Park when Seattle pitcher Cliff Lee was ejected from a Cactus League game for having come close to hitting Arizona catcher Chris Snyder.

    Snyder walked slowly but pointedly toward Lee after the third-inning pitch sailed over his head.  Both dugouts and both benches emptied, although nothing else ensued.

    Earlier in the game, Lee was trying to back up home plate when Snyder, moving over from the on-deck circle tried to occupy the same territory. Lee fell to the ground, although he said that incident ha no...

    TUCSON, Ariz. – The Seattle Mariners are deep into the second week of the Cactus League season, but it was only Sunday that opening day starter Felix Hernandez got on the mound for the first time.

     The Mariners are being exceedingly careful with Hernandez, who threw 262.1 innings last year, including the World Baseball Classic, spring training, the All-Star Game and the regular season. That total was 42.1 innings more than before in his career.

    Hernandez had flourished in those innings, going 19-5 with a 2.49 ERA while earning enough Cy Young Award votes to finish second to Kansas City’s Zack Greinke in that postseason award race.

    The extra innings are of concern to the Mariners, so they are holding Hernandez back. Before Sunday, he’d pitched against batters just twice, both times in simulated games. And in one of those, batters were instructed not to swing.

    So Sunday’s game was of...

Some local athletes are making big news at the Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver on and off the ice. Sports commentator Art Thiel talks about that and more with KPLU's Kirsten Kendrick this week in his latest report from Vancouver. Listen here.

FURTHER LISTENING

Art Thiel: Tragedy, triumph of spirit mark Olympic games (Feb. 26)

Northwest Olympic athletes can't end US drought in cross-country skiing (Feb. 25)

Art Thiel: Snow-challenged Olympics begin in Vancouver (Feb. 12) 

        After having a reasonably successful 2009 season in Seattle, veteran first baseman/designated hitter Mike Sweeney had a relatively unsuccessful offseason.

        So after almost three months of a fruitless job search – Sweeney is coming back to the Mariners. He’s accepted their offer of a minor league contract with an invitation to spring training.

        Together with Ken Griffey Jr., Sweeney revolutionized the atmosphere in the Seattle clubhouse as the Mariners went from 101 losses to 85 wins. Along the way, Sweeney hit .281 in 242 at-bats with eight homers.

        When the Mariner winter remake included the addition of a first baseman, Casey Kotchman, who is expected to play every day, and a left fielder, Milton Bradley, who is expected to share time at DH with Griffey when he’s not in the field, there didn’t seem to be room on the roster for Sweeney....

        After having a reasonably successful 2009 season in Seattle, veteran first baseman/designated hitter Mike Sweeney had a relatively unsuccessful offseason.

        So after almost three months of a fruitless job search – Sweeney is coming back to the Mariners. He’s accepted their offer of a minor league contract with an invitation to spring training.

        Together with Ken Griffey Jr., Sweeney revolutionized the atmosphere in the Seattle clubhouse as the Mariners went from 101 losses to 85 wins. Along the way, Sweeney hit .281 in 242 at-bats with eight homers.

        When the Mariner winter remake included the addition of a first baseman, Casey Kotchman, who is expected to play every day, and a left fielder, Milton Bradley, who is expected to share time at DH with Griffey when he’s not in the field, there didn’t seem to be room on the roster for Sweeney....

Sunday's Super Bowl marks the New Orleans Saints' first-ever trip to the big game and they're viewed as the underdog against the Indianapolis Colts. KPLU sports commentator Art Thiel has covered several Super Bowls. He tells KPLU's Kirsten Kendrick there's something missing from this year's contest. Listen here.

    Don Wakamatsu has a new name for his boss, Seattle general manager Jack Zduriencik.

   “I’m going to start calling him ‘The Stork,’ ” Wakamatsu said Monday after the club announced the addition of free agent first baseman/DH Ryan Garko. “He just keeps delivering these babies.”

    Garko, at 29, isn’t exactly a baby, but you get the point. On Friday, the club added another right-handed hitter, outfielder Eric Byrnes. Over the course of the winter, third baseman Chone Figgins, left-handed starter Cliff Lee, left fielder Milton Bradley and first baseman Casey Kotchman all have joined the club.

    Of the 25 players who made up the opening-day roster last year, 15 are no longer with the team (right fielder Ichiro Suzuki began the season on the disabled list). One of the 10 remaining players, infielder Matt Tuiasosopo, is now an extreme long shot to make the roster, so nine players, or 36 percent, of...

    The Mariners, one of the teams that led the charge for adding pitching and defense this winter, went against the grain Friday by signing outfielder Eric Byrnes to a one-year deal.

    Byrnes was added for his potential offense, pure and simple. He’s not a great defensive player, thanks in part to injuries that have sidelined him for much of the past two seasons.

    He is, however, a right-handed hitter with some power, which is an asset the Mariners badly need. He has hit only 14 homers the past two years, but he had 21 in his breakout 2007 season, when he was healthy all year for the Diamondbacks, hit .286 and stole 50 bases as the catalyst for a Diamondbacks team that made it to the National League Championship Series.

    The 34-year-old probably will not be starting regularly for Seattle, but there’s a reasonable likelihood of his starting some in left field against left-handed pitchers, with manager Don Wakamatsu perhaps moving...

    The Seattle Mariners’ 2010 lineup is far from a sure thing.

    The only part of it that you can take to the bank is the part where Ichiro Suzuki leads off and where Chone Figgins bats second.

    It will be a change for Figgins, who batted leadoff during most of his career in Anaheim with the Angels.

    But what it means for the Mariners is that they have two men at the top of the lineup who are good at getting on base and scoring lots of runs.

     Ichiro led the AL in hits last year with 225 while hitting .352. Figgins hit just .298, but he led the league in walks with 101, giving him a slight edge on Ichiro in on-base percentage, .395 to .388.

    Seattle manager Don Wakamatsu, in town for a week as the club gears up for the start of spring training in three weeks, said he’s planning on sticking with Ichiro leading off – unless he hears differently from his right fielder.

  ...

Next month, Vancouver and Whistler, Canada will host athletes from more than eighty nations at the 2010 Winter Olympics. It so happens that Kenya and Peru's Winter Olympians are training here in Washington ahead of the Games.

KPLU's Tom Banse has their stories here.

    Don’t look for Cliff Lee to sign a contract extension any time in the near future.

    It’s not that Lee, the 2008 Cy Young Award winner picked up this winter by the Mariners to be the No. 2 man in the Seattle rotation, is unhappy to be on the West Coast.

    If anything, the news conference introducing Lee to the Seattle media showed that he is quite content to be a Mariner.

    But he doesn’t know his new teammates, he doesn’t really know the city, and he hasn’t thrown one pitch in a Seattle uniform.

    Now would be a dumb time for him to think about an extension. His contract calls for him to make $7 million this year, after which he can become a free agent. The Mariners would like to lock him up for a few years beyond 2010, but general manager Jack Zduriencik agreed Friday with Lee that now was not the time.

     “We’re hoping he rolls in here and he and his wife (Kristen)...

    Is it possible the Seattle Mariners have hired the best publicist money can buy?

    Just listening to Felix Hernandez talk about Seattle, how much he loves the city, the fans and Safeco Field, you’d think there’s no place else in baseball anyone should want to live or play.

    And for five years, at least, that exactly sums up Hernandez’s situation. His contract extension lasts that long and is worth $78 million. The Mariners have never paid a starting pitcher so much and have never paid a starter for so long, either.

    Before and during the negotiating process, however, Hernandez’s agents suggested the right-handed starter might want to wait a year or two for free agency and see just how insane the money might get when the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees got in the bidding.

    But the 19-game winner was having none of it.

    “I just wanted to be here,” Hernandez said....

    It has been a big offseason already for Seattle general manager Jack Zduriencik, who has picked up Cliff Lee to bolster the rotation and Chone Figgins to fire up the offense.

    Zduriencik may have topped himself Monday with reports that say right-handed ace Felix Hernandez has agreed to a multiple-year contract with the club.

    The 23-year-old Hernandez is rated with the best in the game after having gone 19-5 with a 2.49 ERA this past season with the Mariners.

    Hernandez, who still has two seasons left before free agency, would have been the subject of much trade speculation if the Mariners had not been able to get him signed to the team past 2011. Now that may not be a problem.

    Although no terms were announced, ESPN.com said Hernandez needed only to pass his standard physical for the matter of his future to become less speculative. Hernandez was one of five Mariners who were scheduled to exchange salary arbitration...

    It seems that the Mariners’ chances of getting a return engagement from Jarrod Washburn were improved by the news last week that Washburn had turned down a one-year, $5 million contract offer from the Twins.

    Now it turns out that although Washburn didn’t say yes to Minnesota, the 35-year-old left-handed starter didn’t turn them down flat, either.

    And word from ESPN.com that Washburn might be close to resigning with Seattle was something of an overstatement.

    Washburn told AOL FanHouse on Monday that he continues to weigh his options.

    “I don’t know where that came from,” Washburn said of the suggestion he was close to returning to Seattle. “There’s nothing close as far as I know.”

    Regarding the Twins, Washburn and his agent, Scott Boras, are biding their time.

    “We haven’t made a decision,” Washburn said....

 Art Thiel tells KPLU that the firing of Seattle Seahawks coach Jim Mora shows that Seattle's famed fan tolerance disappeared in a New York Minute. Hear his brief comments here.

     Just how concerned the Mariners are about the status of first baseman Russell Branyan’s health became strikingly evident Tuesday.

    The Mariners were poised Tuesday to trade infielder Bill Hall to the Boston Red Sox in exchange for first baseman Casey Kotchman. The deal will go through once the Red Sox complete a contract with former Mariner free agent Adrian Beltre.

    That move probably eliminates a return to Seattle for Branyan, who hit 31 homers for the Mariners a year ago. He missed the last month of the year with back problems, and he was still experiencing stiffness a few weeks ago, Mariner insiders say.

    Ultimately, general manager Jack Zduriencik

 seemed to believe he couldn’t risk having his primary first baseman a candidate for the disabled list from Day 1.

    Kotchman, a left-hander, won’t provide anywhere closer to the power that Branyan did. He hit just seven homers last year for Boston...

Who would have thought they'd see the day when the woes of a Seahawks team in disarray would be dumped more or less squarely on their quarterback, Matt Hasselbeck? But that's the top line for the Seattle Times and seattlepi.com in the wake of another trouncing of the once-proud Seattle team.

For pi.com, Greg Johns writes that many fans think the answer is to dump Hasselbeck. "But is it that easy?" Johns questions. And he cites the oh-so-multiple needs the team has.

At the Seattle Times, Steve Kelley weighs in with the perhaps Zen-inspired assessment that "Matt Hasselbeck isn't playing like Matt Hasselbeck." The readers' enlightenment on that subject comes after Kelley spends considerable time saying that Hasselbeck is playing like Hasselbeck used to play, in his early Seahawk years.

A quote Kelley has from coach Jim Mora uses the No. 1 athletic-speak cliche of 2009, with the leader of the Seahawks saying that at the end of the season, "we'll look at his body of work." The Seahawks might try to use their first...

 Former Seahawks coach Mike Holmgren rejected an offer to become the team's president to do what? Take a similar job with the Cleveland Browns? KPLU's Kirsten Kendrick and sports commentator Art Thiel talk about why the deal fell through. Listen here

    SEATTLE – The Mariners added one of baseball’s most enigmatic players Friday when they traded pitcher Carlos Silva to the Chicago Cubs for outfielder Milton Bradley.

    Things went so sour for Bradley with the Cubs last year that general manager Jim Hendry suspended him for the final 15 games of the season for detrimental conduct. And Hendry and manager Lou Piniella decided shortly thereafter they had no choice but to trade him, no matter what the cost.

    And the Mariners were desperate to rid themselves of Silva, who was a monumental bust in Seattle halfway through a four-year, $48 million contract.

    So each side looks at the deal as a win-win situation or, at the very least a no-lose situation.

    Texas manager Ron Washington, who managed Bradley two years ago when the outfielder was an American League All-Star and led the AL in on-base percentage, said the deal was a winner for the Mariners and their manager,...

     The Mariners took a huge step Wednesday toward being contenders in the American League West by completing a deal with Philadelphia for left-handed starter Cliff Lee.

    Lee, the 2008 Cy Young Award winner while pitching for Cleveland, comes to the Mariners in exchange for three minor leaguers, including 2007 first-round draft pick Phillippe Aumont. Outfielder Tyson Gillies and pitcher J.C. Ramirez also went to the Phillies in the deal.

    Although all three minor leaguers are thought to have reasonable chances to play in the big leagues, none had played above Double-A in the minor leagues. Aumont did get to Double-A West Tennessee this year and was 1-4 with a 5.09 ERA.

    In Lee, the Mariners are getting a lefty who was the Phillies’ dominant force in the 2009 postseason. Lee, acquired at the trade deadline from Cleveland, was good in the regular season for the Phillies (7-4, 3.39 ERA in a dozen starts, but was dazzling in the postseason, going...

     Tuesday’s Mariner news briefing at Safeco Field was devoted entirely to Chone Figgins, the Mariners’ new No. 2 hitter and possible third baseman.

    That’s not to say the subject of a possible acquisition of former Cy Young Award winner Cliff Lee wasn’t brought up once or twice or 756 times.

    The questions kept flying like batting practice homers, but Mariner general manager Jack Zduriencik made it clear he had no interest in bantering about Lee.

     “I’ve got no comment about anybody else,” Zduriencik said with both patience and prudence. “Today is all about Chone Figgins.”

    It was a nice bit of media control, but when word gets out that one of the best left-handed starting pitchers in the game is heading to a team that has pretensions of being a player come next October, partial control is all anyone can hope for.

    Figgins is an important addition for the Mariners. He adds to what Zduriencik called the...

     The Mariners are set to introduce infielder Chone Figgins to the Seattle media Tuesday.

    But there will be as many questions about Cliff Lee facing general manager Jack Zduriencik as about his new third baseman, who agreed to a new contract a week ago while the club was at the winter meetings in Indianapolis.

    Word leaked out Monday that the Mariners are working with Toronto and Philadelphia on a three-way trade that will see the Mariners land Lee, the left-hander who was the 2008 Cy Young Award winner.

    The deal hasn’t been completed, but the Phillies will land longtime Blue Jays ace Roy Halladay, himself a former Cy Young Award winner, and the Mariners will have to give up several young players, including 2007 first-round draft pick Phillippe Aumont.

    The Phillies got a 72-hour window to negotiate a new contract with Halladay, who is making a contract extension a necessity if he’s to agree to a trade. Multiple sources said...