Last week Jeff from Lookout Landing posted this excerpt from a Shannon Drayer blog entry:

Sojo is familiar with many young Mariners as he manages the Lara team that the M’s send players to in winter ball. Jose Lopez elects to play winter ball every year on his own and showed up at camp this year noticeably heavier. Lopez told me that he got bigger so he would have more power.

Being bigger, wanting to hit for power made me think that he was looking more like a first baseman than a middle infielder.

Jeff went on to basically say that he appreciates Lopez’s attempt to improve himself as a player, but adding bulk probably wasn’t the smartest idea with his defensive mobility already in question.

Which is fine, but I just wanted to step to Lopez’s defense for a second.

Moving Lopez to first base to start the 2009 season was only briefly a possibility this offseason, but Lopez seems to have taken it more seriously than he should have.

You may recall Lopez openly complaining about his move to first base multiple times towards the end of the season and into the offseason.  Well, apparently Lopez wanted to put that behind him because a paragraph later in the Drayer blog post Luis Sojo mentioned that Lopez was “more mature” and “working at first base.”  Drayer brought it up again in this audio clip, mentioning that Lopez came into camp expecting to play first base in an interview with manager Don Wakamatsu.

I would say that Lopez was simply trying to turn himself into a prototypical first baseman, rather than Bret Boone.  Still, as Jeff wrote, “More muscle isn’t going to make him any better at identifying different pitches.”

While the miscommunication may cost him a few steps on defense and ultimately hurt his all-around game, overall this shows that he is growing up and was more than willing to do what was best for the team.  We discussed his improving maturity back in January.

It’s nice to see, but it would have been better if he got the “you’ll be our starting second baseman” memo in time to use his new found determination to slim down rather than bulk up.