Mariners spring training with your grandson, priceless

Spring is in the air and a young man’s fancy turns to ... baseball. Maybe not, but since it’s not summer yet we’ll talk about baseball anyway.

I was talking to Rick Graser the other day. Graser, who was drafted 214th overall in 1978 by the Seattle Mariners, lives in Moses Lake. He and the family took a run down to Arizona to the Mariners spring training at the Peoria Sports Complex to see the Seattle Boys of Summer up close and personal. It’s the thrill of a lifetime for every fan, but to experience spring training with your grandson is a right of passage like no other.

Rick still has a few connections and his grandson got to meet M’s pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre Jr. and spend about 20 minutes. Stottlemyre’s a Prosser guy, spent a little time with the Royals during his career. His coaching career took him through Yakima where he was the Bears’ Single A pitching coach for the 2002 season, before landing the job with the Mariners in 2015. Word has it Stottlemyre is headed this way to do a little salmon fishing in the fall, should the Mariners not make the World Series.

Spring Training with your grandson … priceless. For everything else, there’s MasterCard.

As for Baseball in the Basin, the area teams are in the thick of things coming out of Spring Break. Moses Lake is looking to turn things around in the 4A Columbia Basin Big Nine standings. The Chiefs (3-5, 3-3 CBBN) did get one on the road during the break to get on the board and completed a season sweep of Eastmont on Friday. Kameron Huberdeau had an RBI and Austin Valdez had a solid pitching performance.

Over in the Central Washington Athletic Conference, first-year head coach Sonny Garza has the Othello Huskies right in the middle of things. Ellensburg rolled into town with just the one loss in the conference for Saturday’s CWAC twin bill at Husky Field. The Bulldogs played like the team that handed Selah its only CWAC loss, sweeping the Huskies. But Othello doesn’t have much time to wallow with a big rematch game at East Valley today.

Ephrata is looking to find that early success that gave them a 5-0 start. The Tigers rebounded from a 10-run defeat to Selah to collect a 10-run game of their own in a non-league shellacking of North Mason to get back on track. They still have some work to do if they want to stay in the CWAC top four.

Quincy did take a game from Othello early for a flicker of potential with two quality seniors in Doug Tobin and Cody Kehl, who are headed to Wenatchee Valley and Edmonds community colleges, respectively.

The Royal Knights are sitting in third place in the SCAC East standings, coming off a split with Warden. Soap Lake is second in Central Washington 2B.

Rodney Harwood is a sports writer for the Columbia Basin Herald and can be reached at rharwood@columbiabasinherald.com