Assist From A-Rod Helps Mariners' Rob Johnson in Rehab

TUCSON, Ariz. -- It was a year and a week ago Monday that Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez underwent hip surgery.

It was estimated he'd miss nine weeks but he was back in the lineup after eight. He would miss the first 28 games of the season but would miss just 10 games the rest of the year.

All of which made him the first person Seattle trainer Rick Griffin reached out to when Mariners catcher Rob Johnson started to question his ability to come back from a similar set of problems.

Griffin called Rodriguez, a former Mariner, for some words of wisdom about the rehab process. Johnson had it worse than Rodriguez in that Johnson had needed surgery on both hips. But he had it better than Rodriguez in that he had most of the offseason to recover and go through rehab after last fall's surgery.

"I didn't talk to A-Rod myself, but what Rick was told was that I should expect seven good days for every two bad days,'' Johnson said Monday before his first Cactus League start of the spring, in which he handed Cliff Lee against the Arizona Diamondbacks. "When you feel good, you feel real good.''

Johnson says he's feeling real good now. A hard-nosed Montanan, he'd tend to say everything was fine even if his glove was on fire with his hand in it, but his manager, Don Wakamatsu, sees huge differences in Johnson from last year, when he played in pain most of the time.

"He's moving around better behind the plate than he did last year,'' Wakamatsu said. "More than that, you can see a difference in his swing. He's able to do things he couldn't before.''

It would be recklessly perverse to expect Johnson, who's just starting the second year of his big-league career, to duplicate what Rodriguez did after his hip surgery -- hit 30 homers, drive in 100 runs and contribute to a World Series title in the Bronx.

But if Johnson can do what he did last year and direct Seattle pitchers to the best ERA in the American League and do it in less pain, the surgery will be deemed a major success by the Mariners.

Monday was just the first step, which is a good thing, because the results weren't particularly good. Lee, who came to the club in an offseason trade with the Phillies and Johnson were paired in a game for the first time. Lee allowed four runs on six hits in 2 2/3 innings and was ultimately ejected from the game when his 46th pitch came in near the head of Arizona's Chris Snyder.

Lee, the 2008 Cy Young Award winner with the Indians, liked what he saw from Johnson.

"He's got a good arm, and I like the way he receives the ball,'' Lee said of Johnson. "He threw out one guy [stealing] second base that wasn't called and picked a guy off first base that wasn't called, either.''

Still, there will be days when the calls go the other way. Meanwhile, the Mariners will get Johnson back in game shape. The plan is that Johnson will catch every other day for a week or so, then gradually break him into starting back-to-back games. He's the nominal Seattle starter behind the plate with the departure of Kenji Johjima to Japan, and both he and the Mariners expect he'll be ready to go come the opener.

For seven out of nine days, anyway.