Garner anxious to get started

By BRIAN GOLDEN
Valley Press Staff Writer

He can't wait until the setting is The Hangar, not Hanwha.

"I'm in big league camp right now, but I'm itching to get out of there and get my own team," the new manager of the Lancaster JetHawks was saying Sunday morning, as pitchers and catchers began reporting for minor league spring training. "I'm itching to start running things."

Garner, 33, will mark his ninth year in professional baseball as a coach or manager by making the jump from the Arizona Rookie League to the California League.

The third manager in the JetHawks' four-year history already has spent two years in Class AA with Port City (N.C.) of the Southern League, so he's confident about what he's getting into.

"I've been around a little bit," said the Los Angeles native. "I've been coaching in the minor leagues for eight years. Baseball is baseball to me. It's just going to be at a faster pace."

And a friendlier one.

Garner's parents live in Inglewood. The Crenshaw High graduate, who was the first-round pick of the Texas Rangers in 1985 out of Orange Coast College, also has a brother, James, who's lived in Lancaster since 1989.

"I know the area," Garner said. "I would come back and stay with him, not here during the offseason before I got married, and I was amazed how many guys from my old neighborhood I would meet who had moved to Lancaster.

"It's going to be good for me and my family."

During six years as a basestealing infielder in the Texas minor league system, Garner's teammates included 1998 major league most valuable players Sammy Sosa and Juan Gonzalez, as well as Kevin Brown, Robb Nen, Wilson Alvarez and Dean Palmer.

In two seasons with Seattle's Arizona Rookie League affiliate in Peoria, Garner's teams compiled a 61-50 record and successive second-place finishes.

"I was very aggressive as a player," the JetHawks manager said. "That's the way I want to make my team. I'm a fundamentals guy."

Garner knows he won't be certain about the composition of his roster until minor league camp breaks on the first weekend of April.

The opening Lancaster work group posted by the Mariners' minor league office does not include touted prospects Ryan Anderson, Gil Meche or Joel Pineiro.

It does include former JetHawk Jeff Farnsworth and Chris Mears, the Mariners' 1998 Minor League Pitcher of the Year who went 9-1 with a 2.74 ERA at Everett of the short-season Class A Northwest League.

Another familiar name is Craig Kuzmic, the 1998 Mariners draftee who hit Lancaster's only home run in its playoff series against the High Desert Mavericks.

Venezuelan Carlos Maldonado, a touted catching prospect, and infielder Claudio Liverzani, Seattle's first signee out of Italy, would maintain the JetHawks' international flavor.

"We can't really nail anything down right now," Garner said. "I'm just anxious to get started."