Mariners banking on deep rotation, strong defense

With left-hander Erik Bedard anchoring their rotation, the Mariners just might be the team to beat in the AL West this season. AP

PEORIA, Ariz. -- Everybody in baseball gives lip service to pitching and defense. It's one of the oldest clichés in the big ol', dog-eared, clichéd book of baseball clichés. You know how it goes:

Question: How do you win in baseball?

Answer: Pitching and defense.

Yeah, that one is right up there with taking it one day at a time, not worrying about things you can't control and ignoring Jose Canseco. Good ideas, all of them, and largely worth following. But none is that easy to actually pull off on a consistent basis. Sometimes, they're almost impossible.

Which brings us to the Mariners. Every team talks about pitching and defense, yet most end up bringing in a couple of beefy, slow guys with big bats, big holes in their swings and gloves made of steel. They forget about the pitching. As for the defense ... well, that's almost always third in line.

I bring up the Mariners because the Mariners are not one of those teams.

After a bold offseason that remade their rotation, the Mariners aren't just flapping their lips about pitching and defense anymore. They're living it. They're banking on it. And they will be, without much doubt, better for it. They won 88 games last season, remember, and after their team-altering offseason they are good enough, right now, to beat the Angels and win the American League West. They know it, too.

"Yes. Of course. We got everything we need. All the pieces are here. Right now," says Raul Ibanez, the veteran left fielder. "It's incredible how optimistic we are. It's the most optimistic club I've been around. Just from the get-go, it feels like we should be winning."

Now, Ibanez wasn't going all Namath on us there. He didn't mean he feels like the M's should be winning the West. He just meant winning, period. Clearly, though, he and the rest of his teammates have high expectations for this season, based on what they did last season and what the Seattle front office did in the past few months.

The optimism all starts with the trade for Erik Bedard, the former Orioles' lefty who does for the Mariners what Johan Santana does for the Mets -- gives the M's a true ace, pushes everyone else in the rotation down a spot (so Miguel Batista, for instance, a 16-game winner last season, is now a No. 5), eats up a lot of innings (thereby saving wear and tear on the bullpen) and scares the bejesus out of opponents.

The addition of Bedard, alone, addresses the team's most egregious weakness last year: the Mariners, simply, didn't have enough good starting pitching. According to Baseball Prospectus, in the 68 games last year that Felix Hernandez, Jarrod Washburn and Batista did not start, the pitchers that the Mariners ran out there (mostly Jeff Weaver and Horacio Ramirez, both now out of work) won only one more game than a bunch of league-average pitchers would have won.

When you add to that the signing of a slightly better than league-average kind of pitcher, righty Carlos Silva (13-14, 4.31 ERA and more than 200 innings pitched last season for the Twins), the Mariners are infinitely more solid in their rotation than they were last September.

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