Here’s everything you need to know about the Mariners returning for Spring Training 2.0
At long last, nearly three months after Major League Baseball suspended spring training, canceled Opening Day and shut down operations as the COVID-19 pandemic swept the nation, a return to the baseball field is just days away.
The league implemented its 60-game season Tuesday after months of failed negotiations with the MLB Players’ Association, with players confirming they would report to spring — or summer — training camps by July 1.
For the Seattle Mariners, that means a return to their familiar summer home at T-Mobile Park next week, more than 100 days after vacating their spring facility in Peoria, Ariz. in March, and instructing players to return to their offseason homes.
Finally being able to bring the players back to the ballpark “is creating a new energy, and we’re looking forward to it,” Mariners general manager Jerry Dipoto said during a Zoom call with reporters Wednesday.
Dipoto outlined during the call what a return to group workouts and regular season games will look like for the Mariners, how health and safety protocols will be implemented in a county that has reported nearly 9,500 COVID-19 cases since January, and how Seattle’s rebuilding plan will be impacted by a significantly shortened season.
Here are the answers to the most prominent questions surrounding a return to baseball in Seattle:
When will the Mariners begin Spring Training 2.0 and where will it be?
Players are expected to report to Seattle by July 1, but Dipoto anticipates players will start arriving this weekend to undergo testing. The earliest players could be allowed inside the ballpark is Monday or Tuesday. The club’s first group workout is planned for June 3.
All workouts during the spring training period will take place at T-Mobile Park. When the team eventually breaks out into its major league roster and taxi squad, the taxi squad will hold workouts at Cheney Stadium in Tacoma, the club’s Triple-A facility which has been mostly empty since March.
When does the regular season start and who do the Mariners play?
MLB announced Tuesday it plans to play season openers on July 23-24 and wrap up the 60-game regular season by Sept. 27.
Seattle’s schedule is not set yet, Dipoto said, and awaits approval from the league and the Players Association. What the Mariners do know at this point is they will play a total of 40 games against their American League West rivals — Houston, Los Angeles Angels, Oakland and Texas — and 20 games against the five NL West teams — Arizona, Colorado, Los Angeles Dodgers, San Diego and San Francisco.
“The goal here in operating solely in the West is just to minimize travel and try to promote safety to the extend that we can by not moving the players around as frequently as the normal schedule requires,” Dipoto said.
Should the Mariners qualify for the postseason, it will be the same as usual — five teams from each league (three divisional champions and two Wild Card winners). The division series’ in each league will still be best-of-five, the championship series best-of-seven and the World Series best-of-seven.
Will all of Seattle’s players report to camp?
Though players do have an option to opt out of the season due to the pandemic — high-risk players can opt out while maintaining salary and service time, while others can opt out while forfeiting salary and service time — Dipoto expects all of the 60 players the Mariners invite to camp to report.
He said about 25-30 of the players on the club’s 40-man roster have indicated they will arrive in Seattle in the next week.
What will the roster look like?
Clubs must submit their 60-man eligible player lists — including the 40-man roster and 20 extra players for their taxi squad — by noon Pacific on Sunday.
When the regular season starts, clubs can have 30 players on their active roster for a two-week period. Their active roster will then be pared down to 28 players for another two-week period. After that, clubs will pare their active rosters down to 26 players, and will carry that many players for the rest of the regular season.
The Mariners currently have 39 players on their 40-man roster, and had 32 players from the 40-man roster and an additional 13 non-roster invitees still in major league camp when spring training initially shut down in March.
Here is what The News Tribune’s Opening Day roster projection looked like in March before camps shut down, back when active rosters were set at 26 players.
The league-wide transaction freeze ends at 9 a.m. Friday, but Dipoto doesn’t expect much movement at the outset.
“Most teams are building out their 60-man combination roster and taxi squad,” Dipoto said. “We’re in that mode. … I don’t think you’re going to see a wild bonanza of free agents because most of them are already signed and are in camps, and teams are going to go into spring training with those players.
“When that starts again in mass form I’m not quite sure, but I wouldn’t expect that it’s going to happen right out of the chute.”
How will the Mariners use the extra active roster spots to start the season?
Probably to carry additional pitchers, Dipoto said, to protect the health of their starters as they continue to build their innings back up.
Possibly also to carry extra utility players, so the taxi squad can focus on continuing to develop young talent.
“One of the first things we did was sit down and (figure out) how much of our 60-player pool can we contribute toward purely developmental players? For us, where we are in our evolution, we want to be as competitive as we can be for these 60 games, but we remain fixated on the idea that this roster rebuild is at a really sensitive stage,” Dipoto said. “We need to make sure that the young players are getting their reps, and that’s going to be most of what our taxi unit looks like.
“Especially with the backup roster players, the pitchers, catchers and middle infielders, we feel confident that we don’t need a breadth of bodies. With players like Sam Haggerty and Dylan Moore and even the versatility of a Dee Gordon, guys like Tim Lopes, etc., even Patrick Wisdom, Jose Marmolejos, who’s in our mix, they play so many different positions that they give us great advantage, and that allows us to carry more of these young players who aren’t likely to see the major leagues this year.”
How will the Mariners fill up the taxi squad?
With prospects, mostly. Some of Seattle’s most coveted young players — like outfielders Jarred Kelenic and Julio Rodriguez, and top pitching prospects Logan Gilbert and George Kirby — likely end up on the taxi squad and spend some time in Tacoma.
“We have inning goals in mind for them, we have plate appearance goals,” Dipoto said of the players the Mariners eventually decide to add to the taxi squad. “We do plan on playing in-house games in Tacoma with our taxi squad to replicate game situations and innings for those guys.
“How that affects our development in 2021 and beyond remains to be seen. I don’t know what this will do in forecasting the future, but we have young, athletic players who are otherwise healthy. Just giving them as many reps as we can is the best we can do.”
How will this season change the timeline of Seattle’s rebuild?
It’s tough to say how much player development will have been impacted until baseball returns to some sort of normalcy.
“What I do know is that our players, just by virtue of where we are in our organizational evolution, are younger than most teams, and up through the big leagues,” Dipoto said. “We have a young major league roster. They are otherwise healthy and, while other teams have a group of aging players who might be making the turn in their career toward the back end, we actually have a group of players who are still on the precipice getting ready to start on the front end.
“While we might not be able to make up for the developmental time that we’re losing — there’s just no way to go back and replicate 500 plate appearances or 150 innings — what we can plan on is, while everybody else is getting a year older or a year closer to the back side of their career, our guys are still young and part of what we’re doing moving forward.
“If that slows us down by three or six months than it slows us down a little, but we don’t think it inhibits our growth. Eventually, our players are still going to hit the ground running and achieve whatever ceiling they were able to achieve — it just might take a little bit longer. But, the fact that they’re still as talented as they ever were, still as healthy as they were when this all started, benefits us, and in the grand scheme of things, that puts us in a slightly better position than many other teams that were going through this.”
What about the 2020 season? Could the Mariners be a contender?
Honestly, no one really knows in a 60-game season, but here are the early odds for World Series favorites.
The Mariners are among the least likely to win a title, but they were also among the least likely to open the season 13-2 last year, and they did that.
“We are entering into this really viewing it as a 17-month process,” Dipoto said. “How are we going to build our pitcher innings over the next 17 months? What does 2020 plus 2021 look like for the Mariners? We are viewing this as almost the beginning of an on-boarding for the next 17 months and messaging it to the players like that — we have your best interests in mind, we are going to preserve your health and well being above all other things, and along the way we’re going to compete our butts off and try to win as many of these 60 games as we can win.
“And, who knows what can happen in a season like (this), when it’s 60 games. Anybody can get hot and make a run, and I guess to that extent we have as good a shot as anybody, but we’re also highly focused on the big picture and it will stay that way, and our first and foremost message is going to be about the well being of the player.”
Are Seattle’s major leaguers ready to come back?
In addition to the regular virtual check-ins the Mariners coaches have made with the about 200 players in the organization — including the major leaguers — Dipoto has also seen plenty of home workouts posted to players’ Instagram pages.
So, yes.
“They’re all throwing live, they’re taking swings and they all look physically great,” he said. “They do virtual check-ins with us where we get to look at them. While publicly this has been a downtime because we’re not playing, we haven’t really had a day off.
“We’ve been grinding through since the day we walked out in Peoria, and that hasn’t changed at all.”
Will the pitchers have enough time to ramp up during the spring training period?
Dipoto said he expects Seattle’s starters — the club will start with a six-man rotation — will enter camp next week “in a similar place to where we would have been in spring training when they’re having their first two-inning outing.”
“Over the next three weeks, the goal is to build them up to three, four or five innings,” he said.
Seattle’s projected big league starters — Marco Gonzales, Yusei Kikuchi, Justus Sheffield, Kendall Graveman, Taijuan Walker and Justin Dunn — have all been throwing live bullpen sessions.
Dunn and Kikuchi have been working out at the Peoria facility, which has been open for voluntary workouts since late May, for about a month, throwing live BP and working up to about 40-60 pitches.
Gonzales has been “very diligent” in his bullpen program at home in Seattle, Dipoto said, as have Graveman and Sheffield with their programs.
Walker had the least amount of time to build up during the first round of spring training, but did pitch in one Cactus League game just before camps were shut down.
“We are going to run a six-man pitching rotation where our starters are only throwing once a week,” Dipoto said. “In the early going, we’re also going to allow for a piggyback-type setup, where starters who aren’t quite as built up as others have a second starter throwing on that day with them.”
Is everyone healthy?
From a baseball perspective, Dipoto didn’t report any new significant injuries since camps were shut down.
But, there is still no timetable for outfielder Mitch Haniger’s return as he continues to slowly rehab after injuries last season led to multiple surgeries.
“They’re not small issues,” Dipoto said. “That’s still a little bit of a moving target. Like we said from the start, we didn’t have an estimated time of arrival for Mitch. … We’re going to be slow and careful.”
Reliever Austin Adams, who has been on the 60-day injured list since February following knee surgery last fall, is ready to go, though, Dipoto said.
“He’s in the same place as the rest of the guys,” Dipoto said. “He’s been throwing max bullpens and facing live hitters down in the Tampa area, and he’s ready.”
From a health perspective, Dipoto said Wednesday the Mariners have had “more than one” player test positive for COVID-19 since March. He told 710 ESPN Seattle radio Thursday morning that it was also “less than five.”
“We’re not yet sure with testing coming this weekend how much that will affect our 40-man roster, but with the cases popping up especially in some of the hotspots around the country we have had a few players test positive,” Dipoto said.
Those players have been asymptomatic, he said, and feel fine, but he reiterated the club is aware they have tested positive, and will follow proper testing protocols In Seattle before any players — or other team personnel — are allowed into the ballpark.
How will the Mariners approach COVID-19 testing?
Dipoto said the Mariners have set up an intake program at T-Mobile Park, where players will be tested when they arrive and then self-quarantine before camp begins.
MLB.com has a more detailed rundown on how testing will work across the league.
King County is only in Phase 2. How are so many people allowed at T-Mobile Park?
Gov. Jay Inslee gave the go-ahead for professional sports to resume in the state earlier this month, regardless of what phase the county they play or practice in is currently in.
The “Professional Sports & Other Sporting Activities Phase 2 and 3 COVID-19 Requirements” document from the governor’s office says “all professional sporting activities, including back office operations of up to 50 people, unless a county’s then-current phase permits a greater number of people, full team practices, and spectator-less games and competitions, can resume on June 5, 2020, regardless of phase” if the team’s can meet these conditions:
▪ The organization must follow league-wide and team-specific “return to play” safety plans.
▪ The league-wide plan is approved by its players’ association or union.
▪ The team must report in advance to its county health department the dates when full team practices and preaseason games (without fans) will occur.
Dipoto said the Mariners are still waiting on official approval from the county and state to open T-Mobile Park, but doesn’t believe their timetable of opening the facility next week will be impacted.
Seattle’s home games will also be hosted at T-Mobile Park barring an outbreak in the city, but fans will not be able to attend until the county reaches Phase 4 of the state’s reopening plan.
How will the Mariners’ team workouts be set up?
Dipoto expects baseball activity to continue throughout the day each day when the three-week spring training period begins.
“The idea of a normal 6-7 week spring training run being carved down to just short of three weeks doesn’t allow us a lot of time to be creative or slow play this,” Dipoto said. “We do have to get the group together and get them going.”
There is no specific rule on group size for workouts, Dipoto said, but the Mariners plan to break players into groups of eight, 10 or 12, or even into smaller groups of about four in some cases, such as pitchers throwing sides or doing gym work.
Workouts will be as individualized and spread out as possible, Dipoto said.
Will the ballpark look different?
Dipoto said he would participate in a walk-through of the ballpark Wednesday as the club assesses how to best use the space for its group of 60 players as well as necessary staff.
T-Mobile Park does have the retractable roof, making it possible for the Mariners to use all of their outside spaces regardless of the weather.
The Mariners plan to “engage all of the different spaces” at the ballpark to promote social distancing, Dipoto said, including using both the home and visitors clubhouses, training and workout rooms. Alterations — including removing the couches and pool table — will be made to the clubhouses, and players’ lockers will be appropriately spaced out.
The team also won’t gather for meals, will eliminate the buffet-style setup it has used in the past, and offer pre-packaged meals for players and coaches at a grab-and-go station.
Meetings will take place in large spaces — such as the Ellis Pavilion or in the stands — to keep players and other team personnel spaced out.
What happens to the minor leaguers who don’t make the taxi squad?
It’s likely a lost season, but the Mariners will continue to look for developmental opportunities.
“Right now our expectation is that there will be no traditional minor league season,” Dipoto said. “So, you know, we are hopeful that we’re going to be able to do something as we get into the fall months, but this is something that is evolving in different ways, every day, so we don’t have answers to that.”
The Mariners have looked at the potential for small regional gatherings, where a group of players moves to a location to work with a specific positional coach.
“We’re not going to be able to replicate minor league innings and at bats, the way we will in this taxi situation, for obvious reasons,” Dipoto said. “There’s just nowhere to do it. … Right now the mass minor league pool players are going to continue to operate virtually. We’ve gotten a lot done, as far as player education and engagement, the guys have been great about how diligent they’ve been in the weight room, and frankly throwing their bullpens and going through swing maintenance, but we’re not going to have the ability to have a pitcher see 400 hitters this year, we’re not going to have the ability for a position player to get 500 plate appearances. It’s not possible. So we’re going to do the best we can.”
The Mariners have announced they will still pay their minor leaguers through the end of the season.
This story was originally published June 24, 2020 at 2:31 PM.
