Seattle Mariners Spring Training Schedule Springy, Basebally

On the Monday after Thanksgiving, the Seattle Mariners have revealed their 2013 spring-training schedule. Sure enough, the Mariners will want to be on it. Please stop watching it. Please stop filling your head with filth. Please. People say it's just entertainment ... do some research on the effects of television and your brain, and I promise you you'll have a decision to make when it comes to the television and especially with what you watch on television sorry, I was reading the wrong tab. Sure enough, the Mariners will continue to conduct their spring trainings in Arizona, and their spring trainings will continue to be built around baseball games and baseball workouts. No surprises here -- unless you count where the Mariners will go to take on the Rangers and Royals! Haha! Don't bother killing me because you can't kill me any deader than I already am.

Greg Johns wrote this up at Mariners.com. That's also where you can find the schedule's various details. Maybe you're alarmed that we're already talking about spring training, since the Mariners' offseason has hardly gotten started. They haven't even added a bat! Where did the time go! Relax, spring training starts in February, not in the morning. There's still plenty of time for the Mariners to not make the moves that you'd really like them to make. In that way the Mariners' offseasons really are a lot like a family Christmas. "Thank you for the socks, I just threw out socks." Below, you will not find the entire 2013 spring-training schedule, but I have noted for your convenience certain highlights and key dates:

February 12
Pitchers and catchers officially report to camp. They look at each other and acknowledge that they are at least temporarily teammates. They bond over the shared experience of a full-body physical examination. Mariners fans the world over celebrate that nothing is happening, still.

February 13
Video is captured of pitchers throwing low-intensity bullpens to catchers. Several Mariners fans respond as if they have never before seen video of pitchers throwing to catchers. We all look the pitchers over to make sure that none of them have completely and literally forgotten how to throw a baseball over the course of the winter.

February 16
The Mariners hold their first official full-squad workout. Beat writers tweet at a frenetic pace about practice.

February 22
The Mariners begin inter-squad spring-training baseball with the annual charity game against the Padres. Most are excited to have a competitive baseball game to follow along with that isn't between the Mariners and other Mariners. An opportunity is presented for us to make our best annual charity game jokes. We regret that we didn't spend longer coming up with them. We're all such procrastinators.

February 27
The new-baseball smell is mostly gone. We begin to enjoy spring-training games ironically.

March 5
We identify a roster-spot competition and talk about it at length as if it is important, and as if decisions made in spring training are permanent, lasting through the season entire. This will be for a bench spot or for a bullpen spot. We will already know who is most likely to win the competition, even though the team says everyone gets the same shot.

March 7
We become sick of spring training.

March 10
Daylight savings happens, pushing Mariners games from 12:05pm Pacific to 1:05pm Pacific, and we're reminded that either Arizona is crazy and stupid or all the rest of us are crazy and stupid. Somebody somewhere, unaware, tunes in an hour early and dutifully waits, never having it dawn on him that he's throwing away a Sunday afternoon hour so that he doesn't miss the first pitch of a spring-training baseball game.

March 15
The Mariners play a night game against a WBC team from the Asia qualifier. Interest is heightened because at least this is a new and unfamiliar opponent. The Mariners win and we declare them champions of the Asia qualifier. Or the Mariners lose and some suggest the Mariners' place in the AL West should be taken by the team from the Asia qualifier.

March 16
First opportunity for Talking Stick jokes.

March 20
Having completely forgotten that, a year before, Munenori Kawasaki led major-league baseball in spring-training batting average, we talk about what it might mean that Robert Andino is batting .412. The discussion feels critically important.

March 30
The Mariners play their last spring-training game of 2013, in Salt Lake City, Utah. We all express our thankfulness that it's finally fucking over, and we vow to handle spring training 2014 differently, and better, so that it doesn't drive us so helplessly insane.