Starting the NWL Season

The Everett AquaSox start tonight and the Everett Herald has the stuff to get you ready.

From last Friday.

The bulk of Everett's 2008 team arrived in town Thursday afternoon and evening. After getting some administrative chores out of the way Thursday, the Sox are ready to experience their new home for the first time today.

"Yeah, we're ready to go," said first-year Everett manager Jose Moreno, whose team takes the field for practice for the first time at 10 a.m. today at Everett Memorial Stadium. "We have a real good team. The players are very young, but they can be a great team. If we put everything together we'll get the results."

Who is on the squad?

The most prominent name heading this way is pitcher Brett Lorin. The 6-foot-7, 245-pound right-hander from Long Beach State University was Seattle's fifth-round pick.

Others assigned to Everett include seventh rounder Nate Tenbrink (infielder, Kansas State), eighth rounder Bobby LaFromboise (pitcher, New Mexico), 13th rounder Ryan Royster (outfielder, UC Davis), 16th rounder Bennett Billingsley (infielder, Lenoir CC in North Carolina), 18th rounder Travis Howell (catcher, Long Beach State) and 24th rounder Henry Contreras (catcher, Cal St.-Los Angeles).

From Saturday.

"Everybody's happy to be out of the desert right now," outfielder Tyson Gillies said. "One-hundred-and-10 degrees in Arizona gets old after a while. But I'm really happy to be here. It feels nice, the team seems great, so it should be fun."

Friday's practice was an much a feeling-out process as it was a workout. All 11 of the pitchers present threw in the bullpen for pitching coach Jack Uhey, and infield work consisted solely of bunt defense as the coaches worked to mold together players from Peoria with players straight out of college.

A few about players:

Johnny DuRocher trying to leave the pigskin behind for a baseball

Johnny DuRocher is still known as the football guy.

He may have switched sports, now a baseball pitcher suiting up for the Everett AquaSox. And he may be more than a year-and-a-half removed from his football days, when he had his career as a quarterback at the University of Washington cut short by frightening circumstance.

Dream comes full circle

The past few weeks have been quite eventful for Ben Billingsley.

Back on May 29 he was helping Lenoir Community College in Kinston play for a national championship in the NJCAA Division 2 World Series in Tennessee. The Lancers made it to the title game, but fell to LSU-Eunice.

A week later, the left-handed hitting shortstop was selected in the 16th round by the Seattle Mariners in the Major League Baseball First-Year Player Draft. And on Monday he wasted no time making it official, signing a minor-league deal with the club.

“Everything’s happening pretty fast right now,” Billingsley said in a phone interview Wednesday.

On Thursday, he left for Everett, Wash. to begin his career as an Everett AquaSox — a short-season A team just outside of Seattle. The season starts Tuesday.

Today's story has a bit of a focus on the big league club.

"We feel very bad because Bill Bavasi is a great guy," AquaSox manager Jose Moreno said. "For the last two or three years he's done a real good job. He took care of the Latin American programs, that's something I felt real good about. Hopefully he'll get a new job in a different place.

"But we try to stay away from that because we're in the minor leagues," Moreno added. "We need to keep focused and we have a job to do, trying to develop these kids."

That development begins in earnest tonight, and when the game begins a familiar face will take the ball on the mound for the Sox. Right-hander Doug Salinas, who spent all of last season with the Sox, will get the start.