Opponent: Tampa Bay Devil Rays
When: 1:05 p.m.
Where: Safeco Field
TV: FSN (cable)
Radio: KOMO (1000 AM)
Pitchers: Seattle left-hander Jamie Moyer (5-2, 5.28 earned run average) vs. right-hander Hideo Nomo (3-5, 6.52).
Identity crisis
For better or worse, baseball teams tend to assume an identity through a six-month season. So far, the Mariners continue to search for theirs, manager Mike Hargrove said.
Hargrove said his 1997 Cleveland Indians, who went to the World Series, didn’t come together as a hard-working, blue-collar team until August.
“We had some stars on that team, but it was a team that, to win each day, we had to grind it out,” Hargrove said.
This year’s Mariners?
“This team hasn’t found its identity yet,” Hargrove said. “That’s what we’re in the process of trying to find. It takes some teams a full year to find it, if they ever do.”
Hargrove said the major offseason changes may prevent the Mariners from finding themselves for awhile.
“Any time you have a team that goes through what this organization did in the last year in trying to turn things around, that’s one of the last things to come together,” Hargrove said. “Everybody has to find their slot. There’s nothing you can do to hurry the process. That doesn’t mean we don’t go out and play hard and don’t have expectations.”
Wrong approach: One day after the Mariners showed little patience at the plate in a series-opening loss to the Devil Rays, Hargrove continued to talk about his team’s occasional poor approach at the plate. The Mariners often didn’t work themselves into good ball-strike counts, even though Hargrove has harped about it and the team seemed to have turned a corner in previous games.
“It seemed like we left our brains back in the clubhouse,” he said. “We just weren’t smart hitters.”
To tell the truth: When rookie Mike Morse returned to the clubhouse after Friday night’s game, in which he got his first major league hit on a bloop single in the fifth inning, a baseball was waiting.
The M’s made sure to retrieve the ball and leave it for Morse after the game. What he saw waiting at his locker didn’t look anything like the ball he hit.
It had been “decorated” with all kinds of words and illustrations. Someone had drawn a smiley-face complete with a hairdo made of chewed bubblegum, and there were words that read, “First screaming line-drive major league hit,” and “First major league error,” plus “vs. Lou Piniella’s Royals.”
Morse treated that ball like it was a pair of ugly Christmas socks from his grandmother. He hid his disappointment and acted like he appreciated it.
“I thought it was really cool that someone put in the time to do that,” he said.
Unknown to Morse was that the real ball, unmarked since his hit, had been placed in a drawer at his locker. The fake ball had been doctored by pitchers Ryan Franklin and Gil Meche.
It’s common for veteran players to mess with rookies like that, although many don’t get sucked in as well as Morse was.
“That was a good one,” Franklin said. “But wait until we get his first home-run ball.”
Noteworthy: In a private gathering Saturday in a room near the Mariners’ clubhouse, members of Babe Ruth’s family presented Adrian Beltre with the Babe Ruth Award as last year’s major league home run champion. … Another makeshift bat rack, put together by Tampa Bay bench coach John McLaren for Ichiro Suzuki, was back on the Mariners’ bench Saturday. The label this time read “Johnny Pesky.” McLaren, the Mariners’ former bench coach, put together a similar project on Friday and labeled it “George Sisler.” … Mariners pitchers for their three interleague games this week at Florida, where they will get to bat, are Ryan Franklin on Tuesday, Gil Meche on Wednesday and Aaron Sele on Thursday.
Kirby Arnold, Herald Writer
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