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KIDS AT HEART
 They call him "Daddy Dan".     Seattle Mariners catcher Dan Wilson gets the nickname not from his own three preschool-aged children. It comes instead from some of the students at First Place School, a private, non-profit K-6 elementary facility in Seattle for homeless children where he and wife Annie are actively involved.     "Daddy Dan" has read The Nutcracker and Black Beauty to classes and has shared his enchantment with Curious George adventures. He has disguised himself as Santa Claus at Christmas time and dispensed hearty ho-ho-hos. He has been a soothing presence in the lives of children in transition, a reassuring rock of stability for young souls surrounded by uncertainty.     At SAFECO Field, no one refers to the gritty former all-Illinois prep hockey goaltender as "Daddy Dan." But the Mariners roster contains more than one young pitcher who, at least privately, look at the 30-year-old Wilson as a mentor.     "I just go out there and let him call his game. He's pretty much become a veteran catcher in the league, and he knows what he's doing back there," said right-hander Gil Meche, the 20-year-old starter from Scott, LA, who was Seattle's top draft pick in 1996 and received his first Major League call-up July 6.     "I'm not going to have any doubts whatever he puts down, I believe that's the pitch we need to go with," Meche said. "And that's what I do. I won't shake him off. Not anytime soon."     Wilson said he has been happily surprised by the emotional maturity of the rookie pitchers and downplayed any father figure role he might have.     "I think the younger guys we've gotten remarkably have great poise," he said. "Look at John Halama, Gil Meche, Freddy Garcia, Jordan Zimmerman. These guys, for not having a lot of time in the big leagues, have a pretty good sense of poise."     "I don't see fear in their eyes very often. I see aggressiveness and wanting to stay here, wanting to pitch well. That's something you can't teach somebody. So when they have that, that's a great sign. You can teach them a curveball, you can teach them a slider, but you can't teach them poise and aggressiveness."     Wilson said that their records have shown that. "They've come on and made an impact on this club right away. There's a lot of weight on them. But these guys really have risen to it and pitched very well, he said. They've helped this team out tremendously."     He was amused by the notion of himself as "Daddy Dan" to them.     "It is a little bit more of a mentoring relationship, I guess. It's a different type of a role. It's a different way of thinking of yourself, something that just kind of evolves. I feel young," he said.     Whether it's typical of catchers in general or peculiar to Dan Wilson, he holds himself accountable, at least in part, for a pitcher's performance.     "I feel responsible a lot for what happens out on the mound," he said. "One of our main priorities is to help a pitcher get through his outing. When things don't go well out there, I definitely have a sense of responsibility. It hurts when these guys don't do well, but it feels good when they do. It helps keep me communicating with the pitchers and learning from them what I can do to help them."     Helping others truly is a way of life for Wilson and wife Annie, who have known each other since they were third-graders in Barrington, IL and consider themselves in his words "compelled" to reach out to others, whether it be our Christian faith or whatever it is.     "Something my wife and I take very seriously is giving back. We do what we can. It's just a need we have to help whoever needs the help, and we're more than willing to do that," he said. "We realize these fans are pretty good to us. And there are a lot of ways for us to give back to them."     When Wilson came to Seattle from Cincinnati in November 1993, Joe Chard received a message from former Mariners catcher Scott Bradley: "Take care of this guy."     Chard, now the Mariners' director of corporate business, was director of community relations at the time. He coordinated the organization's outreach programs and matched Mariners with various local charities. He appreciated Bradley's advice but began to realize that Wilson was taking care of the team's public-service image nicely by himself.     "At first I thought I'd better take it easy and not overuse him. Then all of a sudden," Chard said, "I realized that this is what he wants to do. I get the impression he expects it of himself. He comes to me with ideas of events to do. Dan does as much as anybody you'll find in any walk of life for charity."     "He's amazing in the way he's been humble. You're not going to find a better human being, period."     Chard won't get any argument from the staff or students at First Place School or from the Weyerhaeuser Company, which sponsors the "Assists for Kids" program. Every time Wilson throws out a baserunner, the Weyerhaeuser Company Foundation donates $250 to the school, and Wilson matches it with $250 of his own.     Numbers are important to Wilson they're what helped him become a 1996 American League All-Star and gave him nearly every team single-season offensive record for catchers. The dollar figures have helped First Place School become so effective in not only nurturing the children who pass through its doors but also in providing social services for their parents.     But numbers aren't nearly as critical to Wilson as individuals.     "One thing we've vowed to do is stay a little more involved with the kids," he said on behalf of Annie, who taught at-risk and needy children when they lived in Minneapolis. "Sometimes you can get too far into the fundraising end or the administrative end and get away from the kids."     "Our goal is to get more into the classroom when we can and make that more of a priority. It's getting in with the kids and getting to know them on a personal basis," he said. "That's when you can have the most impact on someone, when you can work one-to-one with them."     No doubt the students will relish that. As Chard noticed, "Kids really respect him, because he's down-to-earth and communicates with them from the heart."     They clearly have an impact on the Wilsons, too.     "We get out of it more than we put into it, for sure," Wilson said. "The kids really have a lot of life, a lot of strength, a lot of endurance. They've gone through a lot of things that my wife and I have never gone through, things we've probably never envisioned ourselves going through, and they've already gone through it at 8 or 10 years old."     "The thing we've noticed the most is that First Place really becomes their home. They're in situations where they don't have a real solid home life. When they have holidays or snow days, they're disappointed they can't go to school. That's the complete opposite of the way we grew up," he said. "We were excited to miss school. But these kids are bummed. It's their only sense of normalcy."     The children's perspectives, Wilson discovered, can be wildly different from his and Annie's. One time she took a couple of boys they had gotten to know from First Place School to a Mariners game at the Kingdome. And in this particular game, the umpire ejected a player.     "After he got thrown out from the game, one of the kids turned to my wife and said, 'When do the police come and take him away?' I thought that was interesting, that maybe arguments where he lives, that's the final result: police do come and take people away," Wilson said.     "So that's a snapshot of maybe what their lives are like, he said. That's what life's all about, learning those lessons and keeping perspective. Those are valuable things for us to learn and remember."     He says they're lessons his own children will learn someday. He says Sofia, Josie and Elijah, who accompany their parents to the school on occasion, are still too young to develop relationships with the students. "But as our kids grow older and get to know some of the kids there, they'll hear those stories first-hand, and I think it'll be a very, very powerful influence in how they grow up."     The stories, tinged with trauma, ultimately will be ones of triumph, Wilson knows. "A lot of positive stories come out of there," he said. "They're doing a lot of great things over there, and we really appreciate all the stuff they've done."     Mariners players and fans say ditto to Wilson. This quiet man who to this day wonders aloud, "I'm not sure why Lou Piniella stuck with me" - this man is appreciated immensely.     What Mariners fans have come to expect from Wilson is durability and flexibility. That brief stint on the disabled list last year marked his only time-out in nearly seven Major League seasons. And he has been able to work with an eclectic assortment of pitchers over the years.     In Cincinnati, he tried to tame the offerings of sometimes-wild and always hard-throwing Rob Dibble. When he came to Seattle, he encountered the likes of Bill Risley, whom he once called "a madman on the field . . . a pitcher with a wrestler's mentality," and Norm Charlton, who "had the best closer mentality I've ever seen." He had to adjust from Bob Wells, who constantly sought information about hitters and pitches, to Bob Wolcott, "who was very intelligent" but often spoke and you weren't sure what he was talking about. He has shifted gears from the bulldog of Chris Bosio to tiny-but-talented Tim Davis, from the enthusiasm of Josias Manzanillo and Rusty Meacham to the fiery intensity of Dennis Martinez.     But maybe the most memorable of all has been Randy Johnson.     "We spent a lot of years together. He's certainly a guy who was a joy to catch and at the same time was quite a handful," Wilson said. "But he's a guy who was part of this tight family here. We had a lot of success, and to lose him last year was tough. To see him come back is almost tougher."     When Johnson returned to Seattle as an Arizona Diamondback, Wilson said he was happy to see Mariners fans give the 1995 Cy Young Award winner a warm welcome.     "I think he deserved that," the catcher said. "I'm glad to see he's comfortable in Arizona. We all would've liked to see him stay. Unfortunately, baseball has an ugly business side to it sometimes."     Wilson gets to see it from the inside out as the Mariners' player representative another testament to the respect he has from his teammates.     "I feel honored to represent them. It's something I enjoy doing. It's nice to keep my finger on the pulse of what's going on. It has a lot of bearing on how this game proceeds. Not that I'm going to be a big pusher or mover, but it's good to see what the other side of baseball's all about."     For now, he's content with the playing side of baseball, saying, "It's a privilege to be here during this time. I think Seattle has become a baseball town. And now, with SAFECO Field, I don't know how you can't become a baseball fan. It's a beautiful place to come and watch a ballgame."



An ever-ready M's battery
Johnson-Wilson duo unbeatable again in 5-3 win
Singularly and together, the Seattle battery of pitcher Randy Johnson and catcher Dan Wilson are making April a Mariner month to remember. While Johnson was improving his record to 3-0, Wilson gave another virtuoso performance at the plate and behind it last night as the Mariners extended their winning streak to six with a 5-3 victory over the California Angels at the Kingdome. The win boosted the Mariners' record to 10-4, the best 14-game mark in the 20-year history of the franchise, and kept them in first place in the American League West Division. In eight innings last night, Johnson scattered four hits, struck out nine and walked one in lowering his earned-run average to 2.48. It was the type of performance that has become typical for the 6-foot-10 left-hander. What is becoming more and more typical is the hitting of Wilson, who accounted for all of Seattle's runs with a run-scoring single in the fifth inning and a grand slam in the seventh. The homer boosted Wilson into a tie for the team lead with Ken Griffey Jr., and the runs batted in raised his total to a team-high 15 (second best in the American League). In the past six games, beginning with a three-homer performance in Detroit in Johnson's previous start, Wilson has gone 10 for 19 (.526) with five homers and 12 RBI. "It's kind of unexplainable," said Wilson, remnants of a postgame shaving-cream assault by Jay Buhner still on his face. "Everything just feels good right now. I'm getting pitches to hit and I'm getting the bat on the ball." It wasn't always that way. In 1994, Wilson's first year as a Mariner, he batted .216 in 91 games with three home runs and 27 RBI. But Wilson's offense began to improve last season, when he hit .278, with nine homers and 51 RBI, "a harbinger of things to come," Manager Lou Piniella said. Much of Wilson's improvement is attributable to hard work. The combination of offseason weight training the past two years and working with batting coach Lee Elia is paying obvious dividends. "Give him a lot of credit," Elia said. "He's created a lot of upper-body strength. He's worked at making his hands stronger." But, said Elia, no matter how well Wilson hits, his No. 1 asset is his catching. "The hitting is a bonus. What he does for us behind the plate, I don't think you can measure," Elia said. Johnson agrees. "We work extremely well together," Johnson said. "I would say that of all the catchers who have caught me, Dan Wilson is probably the one I enjoy and feel most comfortable with," Johnson said. The only obvious slip-up in the Johnson-Wilson alliance last night came in the seventh when the Angels' Rex Hudler hit a home run into the left-field seats that tied the score at 1-1. "Randy pitched very well," Wilson said. "He wasn't as dramatic as he has been in the past. But he had great stuff and he kept the hitters off stride. "He really buckled down when he had to in some situations. He gave up the one home run to Hudler, but other than that he looked very strong and in control." In only one inning, the fourth, did Johnson have to contend with more than one runner on base, and that took an unusual sequence to create. With two out and Tim Wallach on first with a single, it appeared Johnson had gotten out of the inning by striking out Hudler. But the ball bounced away from Wilson - a dropped third strike - and before the catcher could retrieve it Hudler was on first and Wallach was on third. Enter Griffey. The Seattle center fielder ended the Angel threat by robbing George Arias of a home run. He made a spectacular catch by timing his leap perfectly and extending his glove over - and behind - the fence. The M's took a 1-0 lead in the fifth off Angel starter Jim Abbott. Edgar Martinez led off with a double into the left-field corner, stole third and scored on Wilson's two-out single to center. In the seventh, Martinez led off by walking and went to third on Jay Buhner's looping double down the right-field line. After Ricky Jordan grounded out, Russ Davis loaded the bases with an infield single. Wilson then hit a 1-2 pitch over the left-field wall. "He (Abbott) threw me a change-up with the count one and one and I swung through it," Wilson said. "He came back with a cutter and I was able to get the bat on the ball."



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