THE CHEAP SEATS with STEVE CAMERON: Pals Lewis, Dunn among key pieces in Mariners’ rebuild

The rookie pitcher.

The rookie outfielder.

Justin Dunn and Kyle Lewis are best friends. They spent an entire season together a year ago at Double-A Arkansas.

They’re both bright kids, too, and as anxious to think and talk baseball as they are to play it.

Well, almost.

Dunn and Lewis are among the talented crop of youngsters that the Mariners hope will lift them into the universe of pennant contenders sometime in the next year or two.

Dunn figures to be part of a six-man starting rotation as manager Scott Servais lets his pitchers go hard without pushing them for too many innings — given the short lead-up time to this very, very strange dash through late summer.

Lewis, who lit up everyone last year when he hit a major league-record six home runs in his first 10 games, will be starting in center field when Seattle opens its truncated 60-game season on July 24 in Houston.

GIVEN that Dunn and Lewis are pals in addition to critical pieces for the start-from-scratch Mariners, they had a lot of fun when facing each other in the team’s six-inning intrasquad game last Friday at T-Mobile Park.

Lewis won the battle, crashing a long home run that rattled around the stands in deep left field.

The 6-4, 210-pound Lewis is a strong young man — he also homered to right later in the game off a breaking ball from lefty Nick Margevicius — but he looked particularly comfortable bashing Dunn’s fastball, which was almost shoulder high and riding slightly inside at 94 miles per hour.

It was a pitch that most hitters generally can’t barrel up, unless…

Perhaps they know exactly what they were going to see.

“Me and Kyle had a lot of days to talk about sequencing hitters and stuff,” Dunn said.

“I literally think I’ve asked him about that sequence a thousand times, so I’m going to say that he knew what was coming.”

Lewis, who seemed to anticipate both pitch and location on the home run, didn’t deny that he was guessing along with Dunn — and got the pitch he wanted.

“We’ve been playing ‘MLB The Show’ long enough, trying to see what each other is going to throw,” Lewis said.

“He went with two sliders, and then fastball in. We’ve been talking about that a lot, so it was kind of cool to go back and forth.

“We’ll be able to talk about that later on, too.”

The next hitter Dunn faces with that pitch sequence may not be as fortunate.

THE SHORT season does not work in the Mariners’ favor, since so many key players are rookies or — in the case of starters Kendall Graveman and Taijuan Walker — guys coming off years missed because of surgery.

And consider…

Rookie first baseman Evan White has never experienced a big league at-bat.

White, who drove in a run with a single on Friday and made two of his trademark excellent defensive plays, is a player who figured to improve as the season wore on, and he learned on the job.

Ditto for outfielder Jake Fraley, second baseman Shed Long, and, yes, even Lewis.

The Mariners’ newest power threat, Lewis needs to work on pitch selection and making contact — after striking out 29 times in 71 at-bats last September, although he added 10 homers to the mix.

Servais also was anxious to see how lefthander Yusei Kikuchi has improved after working on simplifying his delivery — following an inconsistent first season in the United States.

Then there are the two rookie starters, Dunn and Justus Sheffield (who threw two scoreless innings and looked sharp on Friday).

In a six-man rotation over just 60 games, nobody in the group will get as many innings as the Mariners had hoped.

This is an exciting, talented young team that really, really needed a full season to take on the full load of its learning curve.

“It is what it is,” Servais said. “Our problems are nothing compared to what people everywhere are dealing with over this virus.

“We’ll just go play baseball and, hopefully, the guys will all learn as they go.”

Servais at least can be certain that Lewis is working on that mental approach.

Now he expects Dunn to figure out his own piece of the puzzle.

The skipper is enjoying it.

Email: scameron@cdapress.com

Steve Cameron’s “Cheap Seats” columns appear in The Press on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. “Moments, Memories and Madness,” his reminiscences from several decades as a sports journalist, runs each Sunday.

Steve also writes Zags Tracker, a commentary on Gonzaga basketball, once per month during the offseason.