Landing secondary pitches Woo's mission in first big league spring

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. -- This early in spring, Mariners right-hander Bryan Woo probably doesn’t need to sweat the results. Though Friday marked the 24-year-old’s first start in a big league Spring Training game, he entered it with 18 impressive Major League starts under his belt. As it stands, the Mariners are counting on him to be their No. 5 starter.

Still, Woo isn’t letting himself get too comfortable.

“Anything could happen. Guys could come out and have a great spring and I could be down,” Woo said after exiting a 10-9 loss to the Rockies at Salt River Fields. “You really don’t know. I try to control what I can control, which is working on what I’m working on every day and continuing to focus on getting better.”

What he’s been asked to control is his secondary pitches. Gifted with a riding fastball that manager Scott Servais called “a special pitch,” Woo was able to survive in the Majors last year despite a faster-than-expected call-up and a relative lack of experience in the Minors. Due to injuries, the righty tallied only 101 Minor League innings and had reached only Double-A Arkansas before the team summoned him to the big leagues last June.

It certainly worked out, with Woo recording a 4.21 ERA in 87 2/3 innings and striking out more than a batter per frame, but now he finds himself in the odd position of holding a big league job while still needing to learn the finer points of pitching. Other members of Seattle’s vaunted rotation may be fine-tuning pitch shapes, but Woo has a simpler task: land his secondary stuff for strikes.

As his start against the Rockies showed, that remains a work in progress. Woo struck out three but allowed six hits and four runs in just 1 2/3 innings. (His first inning dragged on long enough that Servais pulled Woo for a reliever and then reinserted him to begin the second.) The righty mostly filled up the zone, but also unleashed a couple of uncompetitive first-pitch sliders and made the same mistake twice to Rockies slugger Ryan McMahon, who hit cutters for a home run and a double.

“The development of his secondary pitches will really dictate what kind of season he’s going to have, understanding it’s not all going to be there,” Servais said before the game. “It’s a continual growth thing for him.”

Brash avoids serious injury

After a couple days of silence that seemed to portend bad news about injured reliever Matt Brash, the Mariners provided a much happier update Friday. The right-hander won’t need surgery on the troublesome elbow that has kept him out since Feb. 20, nor will he be down much longer. After visits with team doctors and Dr. Keith Meister, the hard-throwing 25-year-old is set to restart his throwing program as early as Tuesday.

“Any time guys have arm issues, oftentimes people go to the worst-case scenario,” Servais said. “I don’t think we’re out of the woods yet by any means, but the initial report on where we’re going to go with this is positive.”

Brash was a breakout bullpen star in 2023, with a 3.06 ERA and lots of leverage duty following the trade of closer Paul Sewald. With Brash now, too, delayed to be ready by Opening Day, the Mariners will still need short-term solutions for the back of their bullpen for at least the first two weeks of the season, but they hope to have the righty back not long after that.

The Mariners already were going to be cautious with Brash, who led the Majors with 78 appearances out of the 'pen last year. Now they’ll be even more so. The righty first experienced elbow tightness on Feb. 20, after which Seattle shut him down. Physicians determined that the problem was only elbow inflammation -- the state of Brash’s ulnar collateral ligament is “consistent with what he’s been previously,” per general manager Justin Hollander -- and the prescription was two weeks of rest.

That puts Brash in line to pick up a ball Tuesday, and Hollander said a two-week throwing program will follow. Brash will still need a full Spring Training workload before the Mariners will clear him to play in a regular-season game, and Seattle won’t be shy about hitting the brakes if Brash pushes to beat that timeline.

“Opening Day is one of those arbitrary days on the calendar,” said Hollander. “We don't want to rush it.”