SEATTLE (AP) -Erik Bedard knows he will be the center of attention when he returns to Baltimore this weekend and starts at Camden Yards on Sunday.
“Obviously. You are here asking me about it, aren’t you?” said Bedard, who was acquired by the Mariners for five players from the Orioles just before spring training.
“Yeah, I’m pitching there. But even if I wasn’t pitching there, it’s not a big deal.”
Bedard tries his best to avoid all the hoopla.
“If I don’t want to deal with it, I won’t deal with it. It will happen that I won’t even talk to you guys,” Bedard said before this season of huge expectations for the Mariners.
“If I don’t feel like it, I won’t do it.”
He will throw strikes. He broke Baltimore’s single-season record with 221 strikeouts in 2007. And he will go home to Navan, Ontario, outside Ottawa, every winter to train.
He misses his Orioles pals, especially starters Jeremy Guthrie and Adam Loewen, and outfielder Nick Markakis. It’s about the only subject on which Bedard gives more than a one-sentence answer. Barely more.
“Yeah, well, I’ve been there my whole career,” Bedard said. “Guthrie, Loewen, Markakis … I text pretty much everybody. Talk to everybody.”
He said upon arriving in Seattle that he might have stayed in Baltimore, through the losing and rebuilding. That is, if the Orioles had made any effort to keep him.
“Oh, if they had put in a serious offer maybe I would have considered it,” Bedard said.
Orioles president of baseball operations Andy MacPhail said in February that Bedard never wanted to stay long term.
Seattle gave Bedard a $7 million deal for this season – the midway point between what he had been asking for in arbitration with Baltimore and what the Orioles were going to offer. The Mariners want to sign Bedard to a long-term deal so he won’t leave as a free agent following the 2009 season.
Until then, Seattle is learning what Baltimore already knows: you get splendid pitching and little else from Bedard.
The way he talked about his second spring start in Peoria, Ariz., last month is already Northwest baseball lore.
His ground rules for the session: “You’ve got four questions.”
Why four?
“That’s one,” Bedard said.
He then made himself available for 78 seconds. After answering four questions, he marched into the clubhouse training room.
When asked after Monday’s opener how he would rate his debut – three hits and an unearned run in five innings – Bedard offered two letters: “OK.”
Then again, English is his second language. The 28-year-old learned it upon walking on to the baseball team at Norwalk, Conn., Community College.
“When I got to community college, I didn’t have anyone to speak French to,” he said.
Said Sam Perlozzo: “Erik has grown up tremendously the last couple of years. You all haven’t seen it here yet.”
He would know more than anyone else in Seattle. The Mariners’ new third base coach was Bedard’s manager for almost two years, until Baltimore fired him last June.
“He just doesn’t like talking about himself,” Perlozzo said. “And that’s not such a bad thing.
“He doesn’t need people smothering all over him. I kid around with him, laugh. The thing about Erik, you’ve got to have patience to get to know him.”
Bedard especially despises being asked about Seattle’s expectations – that the new ace will lead the Mariners into the playoffs for the first time since 2001.
“I don’t have expectations,” he said. “Everybody else has expectations. I don’t.”
That may be the crux of why Bedard acts they way he does.
Orioles fans put high expectations upon him when he entered the rotation in 2004, 19 months after ligament-replacement surgery in his elbow.
Bedard, the Orioles’ sixth-round draft choice in 1999, went 6-10 in ’04, then 6-8 in ’05. Some expectations soured into criticism.
“We knew he had a great arm,” Perlozzo said. “But we all fall into pitfalls of putting too quick a timetable on someone becoming great. That happens. The media see guys’ potential and expect the world. They pump them up a bit.”
When asked why he doesn’t like to talk, Bedard said, “I have my reasons.”
He rebounded to go 28-16 with ERAs of 3.76 and 3.16 in the past two seasons on bad Orioles teams. And that’s really all the Mariners care about.
To get Bedard, they traded their top left-handed setup reliever, George Sherrill. They also traded starting right fielder Adam Jones and three prospects.
So they want wins and strikeouts from Bedard, not public relations.
Mariners manager John McLaren recalled slugger George Bell, whom he had while coaching in Toronto from 1986-90. Bell disdained talking publicly, did his talking with home runs instead. That suited McLaren and the Blue Jays just fine – Bell was the 1987 AL MVP.
It’s much the same for the Mariners with Bedard.
“From my end of it,” McLaren said, “he’s great.”
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