Last weekend I was down in Peoria for Spring Training and saw games on Sunday against the White Sox and on Monday a split squad game against the Dodgers.

The Mariners were destroyed by the White Sox thanks to a 9 run 2nd inning in which Garrett Olsen gave up 6 runs before finally being removed. Olsen did not look good, his control was all over the place and when he did manage to throw a strike it was up in the zone. The only bright spot from this game was Russell Branyan who smacked 2 homeruns and just missed a 3rd. Both homeruns were off Minor Leaguer Jeff Marquez. I was also not impressed with Mark Lowe who didn’t seem to throw anything that wasn’t right down the middle. The pitcher I was most impressed with was David Aardsma who has nasty stuff and he displayed good control of his pitches which is going to be the most important thing for him to be successful this year. The biggest embarrasment of this game was Mike Morse’s defense in RF which was pathetic. I counted 3 flyballs that Morse misplayed that resulted in hits. Any normal RF would have easily caught each of them. Betancourt also made one of his famous errors when Branyan tried to turn a double play and Yuni dropped the ball.

The next game against the Dodgers was an extra inning thriller. Bedard started the game and looked fine. He only pitched 1 inning and gave up 1 run. Branyan struck again with an opposite field bomb off Hiroki Kuroda. Since this was a split squad game a few minor leaguers got in on some action. Carlos Triunfel made an appearance grounding out to 2B in his only AB, Tyson Gillies hit the game tying double in the 8th inning and Mel Stocker who led off and is really small but incredibly fast hit the walk-off single in the 10th.

Other notables in these games were Shawn Kelley who got roughed up a bit before getting out of a jam but  displayed good stuff and he kept the ball down in the zone and Griffey looked terrible at the plate swinging late on everything. The prospect who impressed me the most was Tyson Gillies who showed blazing speed along with good defense and he played an all around good game against mostly major league pitching.

A little tip for anyone that wants to go down to Spring Training in the future is that all the Minor League camp players stay at the Hampton Inn and the Major League camp players stay at the La Quinta Inn so you get to see the players hanging out in the lobby every night.