Ah, yes. Holding pattern baseball on a Friday night. Cubs fans crawling out from every underpass and sewer grate in the greater central Arizona area to converge upon Peoria (the other Peoria, they might say, if they were actually from Illinois). Let’s do this!

Highlights

• Jay Bruce! Yeah, remember him? He is a Mariner and he checked in with his first ding dong of the spring. Jacked one into the dang jet stream for 2 runs.

He followed it up with a single, as well.

• Tito Polo made a nice catch!

Lowlights

• Well, Marco Gonzales had a bad night. He wasn’t terribly sharp from the get-go, giving up 2 runs in the first inning and ending up with double-take inducing line of 12 hits and 9 earned runs through 3.2 innings. Spring Training!

We’ll just scrap this one off the windshield and chuck it in the dumpster and pretend it didn’t happen. Deal? Deal.

• Kyle Seager apparently hurt his hand on this play, but the team is saying it’s not serious and he’ll just take a few days off.

• Football coaches and brothers, Rob and Rex Ryan, are Cubs fans (of course) and dropped by the booth for some goofy banter and name dropping.

• In the fifth inning, former Mariner Christian Bergman came in to pitch for the Cubs. He wanted nothing to with Domingo Santana and walked him in 6 pitches. Omar Narváez and J.P. Crawford followed with singles to load up the bags with no outs. Enter...Ichiro.

A short time later, Ichiro struck out on this pitch from, again, literally Christian Bergman.

Look. I want nothing more than one more shining moment for Ichiro Suzuki. I love him so much. At-bats like this one make me worry that such a moment may not even be possible anymore and that makes me really sad.

Anyways, onto the next one! The Mariners take on the Dodgers tomorrow in Glendale with prospect Erik Swanson getting the start.