Mariners Moose Tracks, 3/7/17: Martin’s Birthday, David Ross, and Justin Smoak

Good morning folks! Yesterday was a pretty exciting day in Mariners camp. They won a game, celebrated a birthday, and much more. Let’s get to what you may have missed from the world of baseball.

In Mariners news...

• Chris Egan at King 5 did a feature on our favourite Canadian outfielder.

• In case you missed it, the Mariners helped Leonys Martin celebrate his birthday in a pretty cool way. Here’s a series of tweets that illustrates the story.

• If you’re looking for more mariachi goodness in article form, Shannon Drayer wrote all about the celebration and more cool clubhouse notes in her latest piece.
• Here’s a full video of Leonys’ initial surprise.

• Kate Preusser (hey! I know her!) made her Fangraphs debut yesterday in a beautiful piece on Mariners’ fireballer Thyago Vieira.

Around the league...

• The World Baseball Classic is a platform for Latino baseball to thrive on the big screen, writes ESPN’s Pedro Gomez.
• Statcast is including catch probability and hit probability to its large pool of new statistics.
• Perhaps there were signs that David Price’s injury was coming, writes Eno Sarris at Fangraphs.
• Travis Sawchik wonders if the hype train on Gary Sanchez is moving a little too fast. I had the hot take last year that I didn’t think he was going to end up being particularly good, but it’s looking like I’m probably going to be wrong there.
• The odds don’t like David Ross’ chances of winning Dancing With the Stars. I didn’t know they did odds on such a thing but I suppose they do odds on just about everything.
• Jeff Sullivan at Fangraphs thinks Justin Smoak might be ready to take the next step in his career.

Anders’ picks...

• The Washington Post has hired a cast of female reporters to cover D.C.’s professional sports teams. Pretty awesome!