Dead of winter now, but already spring is whispering in Eric Wedge’s ear. The sun has staged a jailbreak. The temperature has vaulted 40. And the calendar… .

Well. In Wedge’s office, where he presides as manager of the Seattle Mariners, the calendar is suddenly crowded.

“Mid-January we go to Japan for a press conference, because you know we open the season over there,” he said by phone last week. “Got a few players coming in a few days. Want to see where they’re at, make sure they’ve been doing what they should have in the offseason.”

He pauses. Chuckles faintly, a sort of my-how-time-flies sort of exclamation.

“So, up and running,” he says.

Up and running. And if that’s still a rather modest accomplishment as Year Two for Wedge in Seattle waits just offstage, it beats up and limping, which is where the Mariners were last year when Wedge arrived to take over a franchise that had bottomed out at 102 losses in 2010.

Last summer that went down to 95 losses (against 67 wins), and, yes, that was progress, given the nature of the Mariners’ grand plan. Instead of minor repairs, they chose to take it down to the bare wood. It’s not a process that will bear visible fruit in one summer or two or maybe even three, but it’s not intended to.

“Just build the foundation, that’s what we wanted to do (last year),” says Wedge, a Northrop graduate who’ll be back Super Bowl weekend to conduct his annual camp and attend the Fort Wayne Sports Corp.’s second annual Party in the Park at Parkview Field on Feb. 3. “You can’t put a Band-Aid over it. A lot of teams do that.

“What we have to do here is we have to build a foundation I can count on and the front office can count on and the fans can count on, and most importantly the players can count on. That takes time.”

In that vein, then, you won’t hear any woe-was-us from Wedge about the epic 17-game losing streak that wrecked the Mariners’ season last July. A team that began surprisingly strong – the M’s were 29-25 at the end of May, closing that month by winning 12 of their last 15 – was never the same after going 21 days without a “W,” playing 11 games under .500 the last two months of the season.

Which was, no lie, a good thing, according to Wedge.

“It was a tough thing to go through and something I wouldn’t wish on anybody,” he says of the 17-game skid. “But in the end, it’s gonna help us. One thing I wanted our kids to do was get tougher, and they had to get tougher, going through that. You have to go through that sort of thing … That’s when you really find out about people.”

And now?

Well, pitching shouldn’t be a problem. The Mariners, Wedge says, have scads of lively arms in the pipeline, kids with mid-90s gas, and the Mariners just added Japanese standout Hisashi Iwakuma to the pile. And of course Felix Hernandez is still around, the ace of aces.

It’s bats the M’s need, and Wedge’s hopes are modest there. If they can just improve enough offensively to get close to the middle of the pack in the American League this year, that’ll be sufficient for now, he figures.

“You know, if we’d have just cruised through the season, ended up 10 games under .500, I don’t know how much you get accomplished,” Wedge says, as the clock ticks and calendar reminds him that spring training is only six weeks or so away. “We took the road less traveled. But that was the way to go.”

And now, it’s almost time to go again.