Car talk from the Mariners’ Mike Carp

Published 5:45 pm Friday, September 9, 2011

We’ve all been there in our youth. The nice family car sits in the driveway and, wouldn’t you know it, the keys are on the counter and the family is gone for the day.

You’ve had your license for a couple of months, so you obviously know everything there is to know about driving. And that car is there for the taking. I mean, Mom and Dad wouldn’t have left it if they didn’t expect you to drive it, right?

A friend of mine did that with his parents’ car one Sunday afternoon many years ago, but he only drove the circle route around the block and he made darned sure to count the number of laps. Why? Because, hoping to erase the mileage off the odometer, he circled the block the same number of times in reverse before his parents got home.

The Mariners’ Mike Carp knows the feeling, but in reverse. He’s got a nice Mustang Cobra back home in California, and he lets his dad drive it every so often to keep the fluids flowing, etc. Being a Mustang guy myself, it warmed my cockles to know Carp let his father drive the car while he was off playing baseball.

“Next year I’m bringing it up here with me,” Carp said. “He’s put 5,000 miles on that car this summer. They’ve also got a nice black-on-black Mustang convertible. I don’t know why he doesn’t drive it.”

That amusing midlife-crisis moment aside, here are a few notes before tonight’s Mariners-Royals game on a spectacular September night at Safeco Field:

• Alex Liddi is back at third base tonight, making his second big-league start. It means Kyle Seager is sitting for the second time in the past three games.

“It’s tough, but I wanted to get (Liddi) in there as quickly as I could when he first came up,” manager Eric Wedge said. “And I wanted him to face the left-hander today. It’s never one person vs. another. It’s more how I look at both individually, if that makes sense.”

• Dwight Bernard, pitching coach with the Class AAA Tacoma Rainiers, has joined the Mariners’ staff for the rest of the season.

“Everything starts with pitching,” Wedge said. “He’s done a good job down there with a lot of those kids. It’s a good opportunity for him and (Mariners pitching coach Carl Willis) to spend some good time together.”

• All four of Ichiro Suzuki’s home runs this season have been leadoff homers. According to the Mariners’ baseball information department, no player has ever hit more than three leadoff homers in a season. Only two have done that, Cesar Tovar in 1975 with the Rangers and David Eckstein in 2007 with the Cardinals.