Seattle general manager isn’t defensive about Mariners’ slow start

Reporting from Seattle — 

The sky was gray and depressing, a chill wind blew off Elliott Bay and a steady drizzle had begun to fall.

In other words, it was a typical spring day in Seattle.

But in Jack Zduriencik’s Safeco Field office, everything was sunshine and rainbows.

Never mind that the Seattle Mariners, the club Zduriencik had so carefully reconstructed, had lost eight of its last 10 to fall four games below .500, a freefall that would continue into the weekend. Or that hours earlier Zduriencik had lost his cleanup hitter, the mercurial Milton Bradley, for who knows how long to who knows what kind of personal problems.

“We could easily be in first place,” Zduriencik says with both conviction and a smile, two things he displays often.

“We could easily be a little bit closer. But we are where we are right now. Everyone goes through stretches like this. Ours happens to be at the beginning of the year.”

He certainly has a point there. It’s tough to imagine a team playing worse than the Mariners have lately, getting swept in back-to-back series by the Rangers and Rays, who outscored Seattle, 32-9.

So why is this man smiling?

Those close to Zduriencik say he’s not so much an eternal optimist as he is a pragmatic realist. And a realistic assessment of what he’s trying to do in Seattle — win primarily by catching the ball rather than hitting it — says it should work.

It did last season, Zduriencik’s first as a general manager, when a team that had lost 101 games the year before won 85, a 24-game improvement despite scoring the fewest runs and having the lowest team batting average in the American League.

A month into his second season, though, storm clouds have begun to gather. Expected to compete with the Angels for the division title, the Mariners began Friday buried in the division cellar.

A team built on defense, Seattle started Friday having committed more errors than all but two AL rivals. And once again the offense is anemic — only one club in the majors has scored fewer runs than Seattle, whose 10 home runs are two fewer than Paul Konerko has hit all by himself for the Chicago White Sox.

Still, Zduriencik (zur-EN-sik) sees not black clouds but silver linings.

“We’re [3½ games] out and we don’t think we’ve played very good baseball,” he said. “The thing that is our strength, we haven’t exactly executed.”

A former high school football coach, Zduriencik came to Seattle after a 25-year baseball apprenticeship in the scouting and player development departments of four teams, including the Dodgers. So while other teams in the “Moneyball” era have tried to revolutionize the game by gutting their scouting staffs and replacing them with Ivy League stat geeks, Zduriencik has brought a scout’s eye and intuition to his new job.

There’s precedent for Zduriencik’s defensive approach right here in Seattle. In 2001, when the Mariners won a record 116 games, they led the majors in defensive efficiency, meaning they turned more batted balls into outs than any other team. And two years ago the Tampa Bay Rays went from worst to first in the same category and wound up in the World Series.

Of course that 2001 Seattle team also led the league in hitting while this year’s edition entered the weekend second-to-last in the majors with a .230 average. But Zduriencik says he’s simply working within the framework he was given — mainly a declining payroll and one of the largest ballparks in the majors. Under those circumstances it didn’t make a lot of sense to him to spend big on offense.

So six weeks after being hired, he engineered a three-team, 12-player deal that brought center fielder Franklin Gutierrez to Seattle. Eight months later he picked up shortstop Jack Wilson in a trade with Pittsburgh.

The Fielding Bible named Gutierrez and Wilson the best defensive players in baseball at their positions last year.

Then in January he added Casey Kotchman — considered an outstanding defensive first baseman — to a lineup that already included nine-time Gold Glove winner Ichiro Suzuki in right field.

“The defensive thing,” Zduriencik says “obviously played well to our ballpark.”

And when the Mariners let Adrian Beltre and Russell Branyan, who combined for 76 homers the previous two seasons, leave as free agents over the winter it cleared up the money to sign the speedy Chone Figgins, who has only 31 homers in his career.

Complement those moves with a pitching staff that led the league with a 3.87 ERA in 2009 before trading for Cy Young Award winner Cliff Lee and . . . well, the Mariners shouldn’t be in last place.

So what happened?

For starters, Figgins is hitting more than 80 points below his career average. Gutierrez, Jose Lopez and Ken Griffey Jr. have combined for four home runs after hitting 62 last season and Bradley was batting .214 with twice as many strikeouts as RBIs before being placed on the restricted list because of undisclosed personal issues.

“It’s certainly nice to be able to realize that we can do some things defensively. [But] you still have to hit the baseball,” Zduriencik says.

So check back in a few months, he asks with equal parts optimism and pragmatism. By then, he promises, both the weather and his team will have heated up.

kevin.baxter@latimes.com