Mariners Blog

Geoff Baker covers the Mariners for The Seattle Times. He provides daily coverage of the team throughout spring training, and during the season.

April 1, 2011 at 6:21 PM

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Eric Wedge says Mariners could see David Aardsma sooner rather than later

Posted by Geoff Baker

Mariners manager Eric Wedge held court with the media within the past hour and one of the things he said was that David Aardsma continues to progress. Aardsma has been throwiong bullpen sessions the past little while and is on the trip here.

"He's OK, he's coming along,'' Wedge said. "When you get to this point with the baseball activity portion of it, you start to get a little bit excited. So, we've just got to make sure to keep him online, not do too much and I think we'll see him sooner, rather than later.''

For now, Brandon League will close.

Many of you have asked about why Ryan Langerhans is starting ahead of Michael Saunders in center field. I tried to get into that a bit with Wedge.

"We're just going to roll with it,'' Wedge said. "We're just going to be open minded with it. We'll just take it day-to-day right now. I wanted to get Langer in there. He's had a real good spring. He's more of a veteran guy. Been around a little bit more. And then we'll see where we're at. I wanted to get into this, so we'll have something to work off of. I think that's as important as anything and right now we don't have anything. Tomorrow we'll have something. And then, we'll just keep piling up information and utilizing him (Saunders) the way we think he'll help us win ballgames.''

The news on Franklin Gutierrez is coming in small doses. Wedge said Gutierrez, taking an antibiotic to try to ease his stomach symptoms, is feeling somewhat better but "there's still the physical issues in regards to strength and the baseball issues. That's why he's still down in Arizona. We're not out of the woods yet.''

Wedge said the team still doesn't know what is causing the stomach problems. As far as a timetable for his return, the team has him doing limited baseball activity.

"I don't think it's going to take a great deal of time in the baseball side of things as long as we keep him active in that area,'' he said.

But for now, Gutierrez's strength and conditioning remains a key issue. He's not as strong as he was when he came to camp in February.

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