Breaking down the Mariners’ Opening Day starting rotation

PEORIA, Ariz. – In Lloyd McClendon’s end of the season press conference last year he stated that he felt the team he had in 2014 was more suited for the playoffs than the regular season. Why? The pitching, of course. Since then upgrades have been made to the offense, upgrades that the Mariners hope will help get the team to October. Will the pitching turn in a like performance?

Right off the bat the rotation should be better. Felix Hernandez is at the top having been perhaps battle tested last September. I will let you in on something I have talked about with those around me but haven’t mentioned on air or in print – I’m not sure the Toronto start in his second-to-last appearance of last season was a bad thing. At the time it certainly was – he gave up eight runs (four earned) in 4 2/3 innings of a crucial 10-2 loss – but if this team makes it to the postseason and Felix turns in the performance many believe he will, I for one will look back at that game in Toronto as a stepping stone.

When people talk about wanting to see Felix in the postseason, wanting to see his competitiveness and emotion of being where he has so wanted to be for so long, in the back of my head has always been the question “What if he doesn’t come through?” Having been around Felix since he was 19 and knowing what this team and the city mean to him – remember how many times he told us he wouldn’t let us down in the press conference following the signing of his new contract – I couldn’t help but wonder if the emotion would get to him. If it did, it would be a sneaky emotion that he didn’t see coming. Well, now he has been there. That game in Toronto was as close to a playoff game as Felix has been in. He didn’t pass the test, but I can’t see him letting this one get away twice. I have no doubt he learned something about himself in that situation. I feel much better predicting that Felix will be there the next time around than I would had he not had a similar experience.

On the physical side of things Felix says that the leg weakness he suffered in his last spring training start is behind him. He believes a combination of his workout and dehydration contributed to the wobbliness that held him to throwing just 47 pitches in his final tune-up. McClendon said he is confident Felix will be able to throw 100 pitches on Opening Day, and Felix said time and again this spring that at the end of last season he still felt strong. He was ready to keep going and he had plenty of innings left. I believe him – I think a change he made in his offseason workouts has got him past the late season swoon we saw in previous years.

James Paxton will follow Felix in the rotation this season. After spending the entire offseason in Seattle working out with trainers at Safeco Field, he suffered an early spring setback when he took a tumble during an agility drill. His numbers have not been great this spring but he brushed that aside after his final Cactus League start, pointing out that spring is different and that he felt ready. I am not sure what to expect from Paxton out of the gates but I do know this – he is a huge preparation guy. Paxton spends hours with video and reports having a custom package of analysis sent to him before each start from the baseball operations department. Preparation is very different for him in the regular season, something you simply can’t do in spring training when you don’t know who you will face. Still, you better believe he watched the Angels very closely when they were in Peoria earlier this week.

We haven’t heard much about Hisashi Iwakuma this spring. He made just three Cactus League starts and got the rest of his work in on minor league fields. He has looked extremely sharp, almost from the get-go, but heading into the spring he was one of my biggest question marks. I wasn’t comfortable with the stretch he had near the end of last season. He didn’t have good answers for the media regarding his struggles, and in retrospect what he was saying was probably lost in translation. I think he understood what was going on and had he been 100 percent perhaps could have made the adjustment quicker.

The fact of the matter was he wasn’t 100 percent. Without a spring training and just one minor league tune-up before joining the M’s, last season was anything but normal for Kuma. McClendon said as much early in spring admitting that perhaps he didn’t have enough build up into the regular season. Everyone has liked what they have seen from Kuma this spring and the blister that he developed mid camp should not be an issue. It is something he has dealt with throughout his career and this blister is nowhere near as ugly as what it looked like in 2013. It should be something he gets past quickly.

It was announced Saturday that Taijuan Walker will pitch out of the fourth spot and J.A. Happ the fifth. McClendon said that he wanted to alternate righties and lefties in the rotation much as possible and while this would appear to go against that. With an early off day and a three-game series at the start, Kuma and Walker will not face different teams in the first week. This move also keeps Walker and Felix from going back-to-back against the same team, splitting them with the lefty.

Happ is the wildcard. He had an erratic spring but finished on a high note, interestingly enough in a game that he barely threw his changeup. He was able to spot the fastball, had a good slider and a curveball that was on that day. If Happ has three of his four pitches on any given day he should be OK.

Like Paxton he is a preparation guy that should be more comfortable against guys that he can actually prepare for. Many of the scouts I have talked to in Seattle believe that he will benefit greatly from Safeco Field. We shall see.

Those are the five, but we will see more. If not necessitated by injury,then by design. I have asked a number of times, both this year and last year, if the Mariners would go with a six-man rotation, and the answer has always been no. That doesn’t mean we won’t see it at times, though. We somewhat saw it last year with Erasmo Ramirez and James Paxton combining to make 27 starts and Taijuan Walker and Brandon Maurer starting a combined 12 games. They took advantage of off days and roster situations to get extra starters up when they could in the second half. With Paxton and Walker coming off seasons cut short by injury, a way to get them to the end of the season and hopefully beyond would be to use a sixth starter when they can. It won’t be hard to do.

It will be interesting to see what the pitching schedule for Roenis Elias will be in Tacoma and how that lines up with the big team’s roster. First thing is first however, as Elias needs to get back to last season’s form. Elias not making the rotation wasn’t just a case of Walker being better – McClendon pointed out that there were things Elias needed to work on. It shouldn’t take long, however, and perhaps will even be a good opportunity for Elias to work on some things away from the lights of the big leagues. It would appear he is on the right path. I ran into him Friday when I was watching Camp Day down on the back fields. He came up and said “hello” with a big smile – a confident smile. Everything is going well. It was good to see because no doubt the news that he was being sent down was tough.

There could be another option for a spot/sixth starter as well – a very interesting option. In an interview he did with “Danny Dave and Moore” last week in Peoria, general manager Jack Zduriencik said something that McClendon has not been willing to say – that there is a good possibility that we could see Danny Hultzen at the Major League level this year, and as soon as late June.

“We are going to be very cautious with him but there will come a point in time, probably after June, we will just say, if he’s ready, and he’s the best guy in Triple-A, he’s going to get the call,” Zduriencik said. “He knows that, (but) we are going to be cautious, we are going to limit his innings. There’s no way to get around it.”

While many have believed that at the most we could see Hultzen as a late season or September call-up, there is good reason to bring him up when ready regardless. After this year Hultzen will be out of options, as part of his original deal with the club was that he would be put on the 40-man roster upon signing. Each year he has been with the organization he has used an option and he is on his last one right now. Next year he must be put on the 25-man roster out of camp or the Mariners will most likely lose him. If he is healthy and pitching well they will want to get him some sort of big league experience this year. It will be tricky managing his innings but I would be very surprised if we don’t see him this year in Seattle if he is healthy.

McClendon handled the challenge of managing innings very well last year but we still saw some fatigue at the end of the season with a couple of starters. This year, McClendon should have better options when he wants to stretch things out to give the entire rotation a bit of a break or skip the start of an individual to conserve innings. While the big league roster may be just 25, there are ways to get a needed 26th, so to speak.

And it will be needed. It proved tough enough to get a staff to the end of last season, and this year they need to plan to get a staff beyond the regular season. They have the pieces in place. How it unfolds remains to be seen but I would expect to see something creative in regard to innings management this season.

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