Meet the guy who patches up the banged up Mariners

Some of the Mariners’ recent struggles can be attributed to a rash of injuries that have hit some key players.

So what does it take to get the guys back in action, or keep them from getting dinged up in the first place?

Remember that old TV series the Six Million Dollar Man?

Longtime Mariners head trainer Rick Griffin is like that guy who created the expensive Steve Austin, except he’s got far more than just one six million dollar man.

“Basically, our main focus and main job is to prevent injuries and to build programs for the pitchers and the players that allow them to stay healthy,” Griffin said.

Sometimes that’s easier said than done, especially when you’ve got a guy like Mariners Hall of Famer Jay Buhner constantly knocking on your door after all the times he knocked into walls.

Griffin even has an anatomical chart on the wall in the training room detailing all of Buhner’s injuries.

“I think there was 89 of them,” he said. “There was a few. This far exceeds any other player that’s ever been here, by far. But he always played.”

Buhner certainly can’t credit Griffin enough.

“If it wasn’t for Rick Griffin, I would venture to say that 90 percent of the guys that throw a uniform on and go out every day, wouldn’t be going out every day,” Buhner said. “I know he kept my butt out on the field many a time, and performed miracles.”

Griffin has been performing his miracles since taking over as the head trainer more than three decades ago. And a lot has changed since those days of Ben Gay and Ace Bandages.

Now, the training staff gets together regularly to go over all the advances in sports medicine.

“One of the biggest changes is the diagnostic ability and the advent of MRIs,” he said. “You can see so much more now and you know what the actual injuries are, whereas before, you guessed or you didn’t really know.”

And that’s nothing compared to some of the far out science that’s helping dramatically speed recovery and could help reduce injuries in the future.

“One of the things a lot of people may hear about are plasma injections &#8212 injections that decrease the healing times of certain types of soft tissue injuries &#8212 where you take a person’s own blood and you spin it down and you re-inject it,” he said. “The platelets in a person’s blood actually heal things quicker.”

“They’re talking about stem cell injections [too],” he noted.

Despite all that science, Griffin’s experience and intuition are often enough to give him a good idea of what’s going on.

“When [Austin] Jackson sprained his ankle running down to first base and hit the bag, that was ugly,” Griffin recalled. “I saw that. You knew immediately that was a bad injury.”

“When things happen like with [James] Paxton, you have a sense of what it is because I’ve seen everything that can happen,” he said.

But Buhner said sometimes Griffin’s greatest help isn’t what he does &#8212 it’s what he says.

“When I was young, reckless and abandoned he would grab me aside,” Buhner said.

Buhner recalled Griffin telling him: “Look dude, I’m tired of seeing you in here. I’m tired of you leaving body parts out on the field. We got to figure out a way to basically know when to say ‘when.’ There are going to be times in the game when you need to go hard and there’s other times in the game when you need to be a little bit smarter.”

Each player is different, though. The relationships Griffin develops with each one is key to keeping them healthy and motivated.

“He’s really good at knowing every person before game time, what their game-time routine is, making sure they get themselves ready, and get their ankles taped,” Buhner said. “There’s a million different things and he’s got it down to a fine art.”

Sometimes though, try as he might and with all that science and experience behind him, Griffin can’t prevent guys from getting injuries, especially the stupid ones.

“I saw a player one time strike out, walk over with his bat and hit a rubber garbage can,” Griffin recalled. “And he hit it so hard that the bat rebounded and hit him in the forehead. It almost knocked him out and he ended up getting nine or 10 stitches.”

We’re all dying to know who that is, but discretion is a big part of Griffin’s relationship with the players.

“I better not say, he’s still a friend,” Griffin said.

And 33 years later, Griffin says he plans on sticking around as long as possible to make far more friends, even if that six million dollar man becomes a 60 million dollar man.

“There’s a lot of challenges involved but it’s still fun when a guy gets hurt to build a program to get the guy better and then watch him go out and play and succeed,” Griffin said. “It can be a very rewarding thing to be a part of.”