Bedard looks to bounce back after 'painful' debut season in Seattle

Erik Bedard managed just 15 starts last season before going under the knife. AP

In December 2007, I was in rural Navan, Ontario, to eat breakfast with Erik Bedard at his favorite hometown joint. It was tiny place (maybe 25 by 40 feet) conveniently named the Navan Restaurant, and menu prices ranged from 98 cents for coffee to $7.79 for a dish called "The Hungry Man." Bedard nodded when the waitress asked him whether he'd like his usual, and she returned a short while later with a plate of two eggs sunny side up, split sausages, beans and tomatoes, hold the home fries. "I try to avoid fried foods," Bedard explained. "Bad stuff."

It was that sort of ability to control the plate that last winter made Bedard, despite his preference for things low-key and unpretentious, one of baseball's most hotly pursued prizes. When I dined with him he was still technically a Baltimore Oriole, but no one figured he'd be in Baltimore come spring. Not with the Orioles in rebuilding mode and with so many teams who viewed themselves as playoff contenders -- particularly those who would prove unable to land the Twins' Johan Santana, the king of last offseason's trade market -- willing to part with a bounty of prospects to land a left-handed ace with a filthy arsenal of pitches at his disposal.

Bedard had put together one of the more quietly dominant seasons in recent memory in 2007. Only three pitchers before him had ever produced a year in which they struck out more than his 10.93 batters per nine innings while walking fewer than his 3.88 per nine. On Feb. 8, after a protracted negotiation, Mariners GM Bill Bavasi sent five players -- outfielder Adam Jones, reliever George Sherrill and minor league pitchers Chris Tillman, Kameron Mickolio and Tony Butler -- to Baltimore in return for Bedard alone.

The trade appears to have worked out rather nicely for the Orioles. Last season Jones, who is now just 23, did little to dissuade those who believe that he could be one of the game's next great center fielders; Sherrill, pressed into the closer's role, saved 31 games and became an All-Star for the first time; and all three pitching prospects performed well, particularly Tillman, whom Baseball America now ranks as the organization's second-best farmhand.

So what about the Mariners, who were certain that Bedard and Felix Hernandez would give then a one-two rotation punch to rival any other?

"It was a long, painful year," says Bedard. "I couldn't help the team win, couldn't do anything. Couldn't even make an impact."

When Bedard made his 15th and last start of '08 on July 4, the Mariners were already well on their way to an American League-worst 61-101 record. He hadn't pitched poorly, exactly -- he went 6-4 with a 3.67 ERA -- but his strikeout rate was way down (to 8.00 per nine innings). And his arm had, for at least his four previous starts, felt awful -- sometimes sore, sometimes numb.

Later in July, he went on the disabled list for good, eventually discovering that the culprit was a cyst in his left shoulder that was pinching the nerves located there. A surgeon removed the cyst in September, but by then Bavasi was long gone (he had been fired in June) and whispers were flying that the Orioles might have pulled off one of the most lopsided trades in baseball history. As one incredulous general manager a few months ago observed to me, "It's amazing that the Mariners gave up more for Bedard than the Mets did for Santana."

The Mariners front office was angry that Bedard had not immediately informed them of the discomfort he was feeling in his arm. At one point team president Chuck Armstrong even indicated that there was a chance that the team would not tender him a contract for 2009. "It's like trying to invest in the stock market," Armstrong said to reporters in late September. "If you make a bad stock pick, you don't go back and ... well, some people do, but you have to teach yourself. You don't hold on to it hoping it's going to come back. If it's a bad one, you move on."

Bedard didn't help himself with his reluctance to curry favor with the local media, a trait for which he had become known in Baltimore. After he struck out 15 Texas Rangers in July 2007, the Washington Post timed his postgame interview session at 2 minutes and 11 seconds. A Baltimore scribe once wrote of his countenance when being questioned by reporters, "The expression on his face told us he'd rather eat a sewer sandwich. Or already had."

"I don't want more attention," says the reserved hurler. "The more attention you get, it just gets worse and worse. People bother you."

After the disaster that was the 2008 Mariners, though, a little jovial banter might have gone a long way.

Now, however, Bedard's throwing again -- without any pain, he reports -- and new Mariners GM Jack Zduriencik, who ended up signing Bedard to a one-year, $7.75 million contract on Jan. 20, says that he's firmly in the team's plans, at least for the time being.

"What happened before I got here is really of no concern of mine," Zduriencik says. "This is a new day for us, and we're looking forward to putting this team on the field. I'm anxious to see the Erik Bedard I saw on the field in Baltimore. My guess is that Erik's probably going to have a pretty good year."

Bedard will begin the year in Seattle, but he might not end it there. He'll be a free agent after the season and, should the Mariners again falter early, they'll likely be eager to deal him to a contender at the trading deadline in order to recoup at least some of the young talent that Bavasi sacrificed to acquire him. Such a deal will hinge on Bedard's ability to stay healthy in '09 -- and he has failed to reach the benchmark of 200 innings pitched in any of his five big league seasons. Also hanging in the balance is the value of the free-agent contract he'll command next winter: Another injury-addled season could cost him tens of millions of dollars in potential earnings. After all, even Carl Pavano reached 200 innings with the Marlins -- twice.

"I have to try to re-prove myself," Bedard says. "I'm not expecting to strike out as many as I did [in 2007]. Oh my god, that was a lot of strikeouts. I'm just looking to win games and have a good ERA, and to stay healthy."

If he does that, and the Mariners are able to either ride him to an unlikely playoff run or trade him in order to jump-start a rebuilding effort, talk will cease about how the trade that 12 months ago brought him to the Emerald City was one of baseball's most ill-conceived. And if he doesn't? Well, he'll always be welcome at the Navan Restaurant, but the wait staffs of Seattle won't be in any hurry to memorize his usual order.