Mariners GM Zduriencik on star power and 2015’s lofty expectations

Spring training is nearly here, and the Seattle Mariners have found themselves in an unfamiliar position as a team with expectations.

The combination of last year’s 87-win season, a few key offseason additions and the continued emergence of young players has several baseball experts picking the Mariners to not only contend for the AL West title but to be one of the best teams in the MLB.

So, what does the architect of the roster think about all these predictions?

“Expectations are hard to live up to. You know, we haven’t played a game yet,” said Mariners general manager Jack Zduriencik, who joined 710 ESPN Seattle’s “Danny, Dave and Moore” on Friday afternoon. “We’re just a ball club that is pretty good on paper, and now we have to perform on the field.”

It was a pretty modest take from Zduriencik, who in successive years has brought perennial All-Star Robinson Cano and 2014 MLB home run champ Nelson Cruz to town. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t understand where the lofty hopes for his team are coming from, though. With a roster that boasts Cano, Cruz, former Cy Young winner Felix Hernandez and rising third baseman Kyle Seager, the Mariners suddenly have enough star power to rival the best teams in baseball.

“A year ago we had four Major League All-Star players on our club. The most in baseball was Oakland, they had six. We were No. 2 in baseball,” he said. “We now have added Nelson Cruz. We have five Major League All-Stars from last year’s performance in addition to other players that we have brought in here. Our pitchers have grown and I think our bullpen is still intact, for the most part.”

Not only that, but Seattle is built for the long haul. With the 27-year-old Seager leading the way and young starting pitchers James Paxton and Taijuan Walker likely to be in the rotation in 2015, a youth movement is in full effect.

“We’re pretty young I think overall and we’ve added veteran players who are still relatively young,” Zduriencik said. “So I think it gives this club a real nice nucleus of some stars, it gives you a nice nucleus of veteran players, and it gives you a nucleus of young kids growing up. I think that’s a really nice combination for us at this point in time.”

Perhaps the most important aspect of it all is the expectations the players themselves have. The addition of Cano, who played on seven playoff teams with the Yankees and even won a World Series in 2009, seemed to give the Mariners clubhouse a boost in confidence last season, helping them to keep their postseason hopes alive into the final game of the regular season. Being that close to the postseason is something Zduriencik believes had a profound effect on the players.

“I think you can look at this and say the players at the end of last year, when that last game ended, there wasn’t a happy face in that locker room,” he said. “I think there was so much disappointment, the fact that we came a game short, and that was a long way coming from where we had been the previous few years.”