It never fails. Just when I was getting used to the month of February, the calendar stealthily switches over to the month of March. Instead pf pink roses and ruddy-cheeked cherubs, everywhere I look I am met by visions of shamrocks, leperchauns, and all things green. That can only mean one thing: Spring Training is offically underway and I can now put forth full attention to baseball. Oh yeah, and there is some holiday having to do with being Irish in a couple of weeks, but that's irrelevant to the subject matter at hand.

I tend to try not to pay attention when pitchers and catchers meet in the middle of Feburary. It's more of an overt tease than anything else. If I pay attention, I would get excited, and then have to suffer through six weeks of palbale tension waiting for the season to start. Four weeks seems managable to suffer through. All I have to do is pretend to be a college basketball fan for a month and before I know it baseball season will be here soon, right? (And for the record I'm picking Georgetown. As if I have a clue what I'm talking about.)

So here it is, the third day of March, which means there is exactly four solid weeks until the 2007 baseball season begins in earnest. Every team in baseball's invitees have reported (including Manny for Boston, yet not a certain Bernie Williams for the Yankees), squads have been split, and young fringe rookies are given the chance to strike out Sammy Sosa as many times necessary. Games are under way, and while they may not exactly be meaningful in the strictest of sense, they do have a final score, stats are being compiled, and managers are giving certain questionable players a skewed view. (As I write this, the Mariners have completed a 1-0 shut-out loss at the hands of Clay Hensley and the Padres, with a first-inning home-run by Termell Sledge off Jarrod Washburn all the runs necessary for the victory.)

But enough of me rhapsodizing melodically about the endless optimism that is spring training. (Yes, yes, I know currently the Tampa Bay Devil Rays are on the same footing as the New York Yankees- hasn't everyone heard that cliche enough?) It's time to focus attention on more important subjects. Namely, how the Seattle Mariners are going to do this year.

I'm going to go out on a limb and state, with cautious optimism, that the Mariners will be a good team this year. I think this collection of players is the strongest one amassed during the Bavasi-Lincoln era, and will erase the trauma of losing 276 games over the past three years' from Mariners fans' collective consciousness. (And if they don't, Bavasi should be given his walking papers at the season's conclusion.)

Do I think the Mariners will win the division? No. I'm optimistic, not naive. This season, I think Seattle will challenge strongly for both the division title as well as the Wild Card, but ultimately will fall a couple of games short in both, and the playoff drought will continue for another year.

Why do I have such cautious high hopes for the Mariners' 2007 season. I think the offense as its' currently compiled is dynamite with the potential to score lots of runs. Today's 1-0 loss notwithstanding (I doubt Rey Ordonez, Gookie Dawkins, and Tony Torcato will play much of a role in the Mariners' everyday line-up) I will confidently state that the Seattle mariners own the best offense in the American League West. For an illustrated example of how I reached this conclusion, I compared the M's offense to that of the other teams in the division and drew up the chart below, with the last column being the player at that position from the divison I would prefer having on my team:

Labels: 2007 Mariners forecast, spring training