Mariners Notebook

On Mickey Lopez’s one-week anniversary as a major leaguer, he was just as awe-struck by his surroundings Monday as he’d been the day the Mariners called him up.

“I’ve made a point to take this all in really slow,” said Lopez, a 30-year-old middle infielder who played 10 seasons in the minor leagues. “I’m really enjoying each day. Once you get here, you realize it is worth the wait.”

Lopez has waited a long time for this.

He was a high school teammate of Alex Rodriguez at Wesminster Christian in Miami and was drafted by the Brewers in the 13th round in 1995. He toiled in such minor-league cities as Helena (Mont.), Beloit (Ill.), El Paso (Texas), Louisville (Ky.), Indianapolis and Reading (Penn.) before the Mariners signed him as a free agent before the 2003 season and assigned him to the Tacoma Rainiers.

Lopez played one of his best seasons at Tacoma in 2003 – batting .275 with 20 steals and just nine errors – and was named the Rainiers’ MVP. Even that wasn’t enough to earn a callup to the Mariners when rosters expanded in September.

He returned to the Rainiers for 2004 and played even better offensively, hitting .286 with 10 home runs and 41 RBI in 109 games.

After the Rainiers played their final game last Monday, manager Dan Rohn called two of the organization’s top prospects, third baseman Greg Dobbs and outfielder Jeremy Reed, into his office and told them they’d be playing for the Mariners the rest of the month.

“When they called in the two prospects and didn’t call me, I thought, ‘Well, it’s never going to happen. This is it,’” Lopez said. “I’d had a pretty decent year, but it just didn’t work out.”

In the Cheney Stadium clubhouse, Lopez was gathering more than his belongings. The thoughts racing through his mind included one of prominence, that his life-after-baseball career as a coach probably wasn’t far away.

“I thought to myself that I’ll play one more year,” he said. “I started to walk out.”

Rohn intercepted Lopez and delivered the words he’d been waiting a decade to hear: he was going to Seattle.

In the week since he came to the Mariners, it didn’t matter that Lopez had gotten just three at-bats and no starts. Just being with the Mariners – where the facilities and travel are first-class – were all Lopez could have wanted.

“This has changed my whole life,” he said. “It has completed my whole baseball career. When you’re a little kid you dream of this, but when you never get there, it hurts. For me to get here finally, it completes the whole puzzle. I can go on to the next thing whenever I’m done with baseball and feel like I have really accomplished something.”

Numbers game: The Mariners’ clubhouse at Safeco Field is one of the more spacious in the majors, but it has been a crowded place since the minor league callups arrived last week. Thirty-seven lockers are occupied – 38 counting a space devoted to Jay Buhner, who occasionally stops by – a Safeco record.

On the farm: The Class A Inland Empire 66ers, the only Mariners minor league team to reach the postseason, split the first two games of their best-of-five California League playoff series against Lancaster.

Lancaster beat the 66ers 6-4 Sunday despite home runs by first baseman Matt Hagen and center fielder Gary Harris. Entering Monday’s game against Lancaster, 66ers outfielder Wladimir Balentien led all hitters in the postseason with a .462 average. Left-handed pitcher Ryan Rowland-Smith had allowed just two hits with four strikeouts in 42/3 innings of relief.

Surgery day: Bucky Jacobsen, whose season is finished because of cartilage damage in his right knee, will undergo arthroscopic surgery to repair the damage on Thursday. He is expected to be at full strength by spring training.

Kirby Arnold, Herald Writer