Hello friends, this is another #Laterecap (#Latercap? What do we like?) as your lovely blogueuse (thanks, Duolingo) is en route back to Seattle. Today was my last day in camp, and I’m sad to be leaving just as players are coming back from the WBC, but also so happy to have gotten to connect with many of the new faces brought in over the off-season and players I might not have talked to as much otherwise. Look for those stories over the coming weeks. For right now, I’m tucked up in the peacock blue-paneled Victorian-style library in the historic Grand Canyon Hotel in Williams, Arizona. Bless ample wifi, charming family-run historic hotels, and the ability to take a birds-eye view of today’s 7-4 loss in Mesa against the Cubs and put it in its proper size.
I was sad about leaving camp without seeing one final Emerson Hancock start, and very torn about disrupting my travel plans just to see it (which would have then led into sticking around for Kade Anderson’s start tomorrow, and so on…). Hancock has been sterling this spring, and with Bryce Miller questionable to start the season, the fifth starter job seems his for the taking. With the caveat that I was listening to this game while driving through the red rocks of Sedona and being shot full of positive energy from the vortex, today seemed like another notch in Hancock’s Bulldog-red belt. The sweeper continued to be a weapon, getting weak-contact outs, called strikes, and whiffs, including an inning-ending strikeout on the sweeper to Chas McCormick, and he was also able to use the changeup for outs.
The one tricky part is the fastball velocity: Hancock opened sitting around 95, ending the first on a strikeout looking to Ian Happ on 95.5 perfectly located. In the second, he undressed Dansby Swanson on three pitches, getting him swinging three times through the four-seamer. But as the outing went on, he dropped from 95-96 to 93-94 in his final inning of work, the fourth. That is the danger zone for Hancock, as we’ve noted in the past, and it means his secondaries have to be perfectly crisp in order to balance out that more hittable fastball. But, it is spring training, and this is an actual starter’s workload for Hancock rather than the piggyback situations he’s been pitching in behind Anderson, so some of this might be a mid-spring recalibration into a starter’s mindset.
(If you’re looking at Hancock’s line, take out one run from the third inning, which opened with a sun double to Michael Arroyo playing in a tough left field in Mesa. The other run definitely belongs to Hancock, who left a sweeper somewhere Ian Happ could get after it for a two-RBI double hit at 103 mph.)
The Mariners got their first – and only, for most of the game – run in the third after Leo Rivas singled and stole second, moved to third on a Brendan Donovan ground ball single, and scored on a Cole Young RBI groundout. Which is fine but man. Young had a four-seam fastball right in the heart of the plate, something he’s been really working on this spring, and you’d love to see him do more with it than hit a 100 mph groundout, although to be fair to Cole, he also had a hard-hit single in the first, torching an Eduwrd Cabrera changeup at 106.4 mph for another ground ball base hit.
Things got, as they often have this spring, out of hand after Hancock departed the game in the fifth. Casey Legumina gave up a run but not much else, and Alex Hoppe pitched a mostly-clean sixth, walking Dansby Swanson but since he’d just been hit in the leg by a comebacker from Happ (and still made the play!), we’ll let it slide. Plus, Hoppe then came out to strike out his next two hitters, getting Owen Ayers hacking after a cutter that was headed for the center of the Earth, Magic Schoolbus-style, and flummoxing Dylan Carlson on a slider for another swinging strike three. Look for a deeper dive on Hoppe, who I think is one of the most interesting arms in camp, in the coming weeks.
Unfortunately that was the end of the fun pitcher contingent, as lefty Josh Simpson really struggled, giving up three runs and leaving Peyton Alford a mess to clean up (Alford let in one of his inherited runners, making it 7-1. But hey, a scoreless Troy Taylor inning in the eighth! He did hit a batter but that’s all that happened so we’ll call this progress.
The Mariners did get some back as the kids made noise, with Colin Davis reminding everyone there’s more than one player named Davis in this camp. His three-run shot made the game a respectable 7-4, but unfortunately that’s as close as the Mariners could get.
Today en route from Phoenix to Williams I went through Sedona and the Grand Canyon, which resulted in a camera roll full of silly pictures where I’m trying to put myself into scale with first the enormous rock formations and later the massive chasm behind me. It’s an impossible task; they don’t call it the Just Fine Canyon. When I studied abroad in Rome, I had a professor tell us “Rome makes you feel small, which is your proper size.” The Grand Canyon also has this effect, watching people scrambling along the canyon rim like so many ants clinging to the edge of a picnic paper plate. Humbling spring training outings also can make you feel small, but like the ant, like the tourist in Rome or in the Grand Canyon, no less important, I think; just appropriately-sized, waiting for something else to come into frame.
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