You do more before 9AM than we do all day.

The Mariners are finally showing some signs of life.  The passion that has been missing from the field, the clubhouse, and the front office finally showed up yesterday.  Too bad it was all in the spirit of finger-pointing and venting, I guess.  Bavasi made the players face the media, under threat of, I don’t know, going to their rooms without supper?  McLaren went off on a tirade that sounds like he’s got one foot out the door.  The players sound like they’re ready to be gone.  Good times, Mariner-land, good times.

There have been countless words written lately on what is wrong with the Mariners, and even more (yes, more than countless.  My blog, my rules) written on whose fault it all is.  So, I won’t bore you with that.  You follow the team, you know the story, you blame who you want to blame, we all go home happy.  What I will say is this.  This team isn’t even INTERESTING when they lose, any more.  Back in the halcyon days of the 80’s and early 90’s, the M’s at least found ways to make 90-loss seasons entertaining - they were so inept it just made you laugh.

Nowadays, though, they’re not even comical - they’re just painful to watch.  To their credit, they don’t go out and get beat up every night - they manage to put on somewhat of a show sometimes, and even eke out the occasional win (they really should change their name to the Blind Squirrels) - but they do lose much, much more often than a $115 million payroll would suggest they should.

This is the point in the narrative when most people who write this stuff say “and here’s what I would do”, followed by a long list of suggested moves that absolutely will solve every single problem.  But, as you all no doubt know, I am not a GM, nor am I a particularly savvy baseball analyst - I’m just the dope in the back of the class making fart noises with my armpits as the serious learnin’ stuff goes on in the front.  So, I have nothing to say as far as what the M’s should do.

All I know is that the team I love is broken right now, and it’s not going to be an easy fix to put it back together again - this year is done, next year’s in danger unless the front office (current or new occupants) have a stellar winter, and the M’s are in danger of - hell, who am I kidding, they ARE - reprising those 1980’s and early 90’s teams, and once again becoming a league laughingstock.  Only it’s not so funny this time around.

So, to all the fans of the Giants, Pirates, Royals, and Orioles - I hope you’ve got room in your collective bitter, cynical, and depressed clubhouse for one more team, because the Mariners are right there with you, and by the looks of things they’ll be there for a while.  As new members of the League Bottomfeeders Support Group, we’ll bring the beer.

The Mariners are bad.  This is not a question.  The question in my mind, though, was about disappointment.  Leave aside for a moment the fact that I didn’t expect the M’s to be playoff-caliber good this year (close, but not there), and the question is, is this Mariner team the most disappointing Mariner team I can remember?

This question is a good jumping-off point for rattling off some numbers.  Which I would do, except I kept stumbling across this thought, which blocked me - the M’s history isn’t filled with disappointing teams, because none of the lousy Mariner teams (1978, 1980, 1983 - and that’s just to name the 100-loss teams) were expected to be any good in the first place.  This is not a team that has a lot of shocking letdowns - they’re generally a bad team, and when they’re playing well (95, 97, 01) it’s generally not a surprise.

So, the question, then, is this - are the 2008 Mariners the most disappointing Mariner team, or the only disappointing M’s team?  Well, I would also argue that the 1998 M’s were a pretty solid disappointment - the ‘97 team went 90-72 and claimed the wild card, and the ‘98 M’s, trying to build on that finish, promptly went out and finished 76-85.

Some people consider 2002 and 2003 to be disappointments, also - but that was a letdown of a different kind.  Both of those teams went 93-69, but both missed the playoffs.  I may be alone in this, but I don’t consider those to be huge disappointments - any time a team as historically dire as the Mariners can win 93 games in a season, it has to be considered a good season, regardless of whether they make the postseason or not.

So, back to the question - the 2008 Mariners.  How disappointing are they?  Well, even though I didn’t think that Erik Bedard would make a playoff-push type difference, I still thought the Mariners would be a solid team, somewhere in the 80-85 win range.  So, viewed through that lens, yeah, this is a pretty damn disappointing team.  They can’t hit, they can’t pitch, and their defense is, uh, creative to say the least.  The worst part is, they’re not any closer to turning it around than they were two two weeks ago, when it would have helped.  Now, it’s too late.  It’s not even like the light at the end of the tunnel can be mistaken for a train - there IS no light.  The tunnel just keeps going on and on and on, circling back around itself and looping in large bends like an intestine, until…well, you get the metaphor.

Even in a good year, any given team will have one game where they just stink up the joint.  Where nothing goes right.  The Mariners have had several of those games this year - hell, they’ve had several of those games this WEEK.  They can’t even be bothered to lose in interesting ways - they get slaughtered by good teams, they get murdered by bad teams, all the while showing all the energy of a hydroelectric dam in an Arizona wash.

So, it’s off to New York now, so that the anemic Yankees can get a little healthier on the festering carcass of the Mariners’ season; hell, it worked for the Tigers!  I just hope that the M’s give me something interesting to hang on to for the rest of the season, or it’s gonna be a long summer.

So this was a Big Seattle Weekend for me and the Mrs.  We went up there and had three nights of polar-opposite entertainment (yes, my world has three poles in it.  Everyone else’s has two, and mine has three.  That’s just how awesome my world is.):  One night of pop culture, one night of high culture, and one night of Mariners baseball.  And the Mariners game we saw encapsulated everything that, to me, is great about baseball:

- A beautiful night.  Saturday daytime was hot as a bastard (seriously.  90 degrees, in May, in the NW?  C’mon.  That’s just dumb.), but Saturday night was about perfect for sitting outside with a beer or three and watching the game.
- A masterful pitching performance.  Well, really, two - both Bedard and Randy Wolf were on their games, and it showed.  Bedard came out on top, with 10 K’s and only one walk, but Wolf was dealing pretty well himself.  Which led to…
- A fast game.  2:30 or so.  I love baseball, and I love watching games, but sometimes a fast-paced game is a nice change, and this one definitely had that fast pace to it, thanks to the great pitching and the not-great hitting.
- A Mariners win.  The most rare of sightings, I wasn’t quite sure what it was when it happened; my wife had to show me the numbers on the scoreboard and explain to me that not only was four greater than two, but that it was the Mariners who had the four, and thus it was the Mariners that won the game.  This was a revelation to me, and I wasn’t quite sure how to process it.  I have since been told by several people that winning is, in fact, the desired state and when it happens it’s a good thing; I wasn’t sure, it’d been a while.

So, yeah, all in all, a fine weekend was had. If you transported a person here from some distant land, or other planet or something, dropped them off at Safeco Field on Saturday, and said “This is what baseball is all about, go enjoy it”, that person/being would walk away from the experience thinking “Oh my (whatever deity), this is quite possibly the most amazing sport in the history of all civilization - why doesn’t everyone everywhere always do this, all the time?”  It was that good.

I know the facts - neither team is any good, Mariner hitters couldn’t hit the ground if they fell out of a car, there’s nothing to play for, blah blah blah.  But for one night, in the warmth of a beautiful Seattle evening, I got to watch my favorite team play my favorite sport, against a team that I also have some regard for because of my Portland Beavers season-ticket-holding; there’s really no way to have a bad time on a night like that.  On a beautiful spring night, you suspend your disgust, you sit back in your seat, and you just soak up the baseballing goodness.  There’s plenty of time for cold-eyed reality today, and for the rest of the season; Saturday was all about why I came to like baseball in the first place.

But, because I don’t have a laptop, I missed some news - Jeff Clement was sent back to Tacoma, I guess so that Jose “24-for-116″ Vidro can be the regular DH.  Huh?  Vidro’s got an OBP of .286, and they want this guy to hit in the DH spot every day?  Shudder.  This team boggles my mind sometimes.  Like the lineup they ran out on Saturday night - they DH’d Johjima, so that meant Jamie Burke and his .194 average could get in the game.  Presumably Johjima was given the night off from his catching duties, but what that meant was that the lineup sported both Burke and the Mendoza Line-toeing Johjima.  How this team ever wins a game is beyond me.  But win on Saturday they did, and now it’s off to Detroit to see if this baby two-game win streak can turn into something more deserving of the name “win streak”.

There are people in the baseball-following world that thought the M’s were an Erik Bedard away from contending for the postseason this year.  I was not one of those people, but I did think, once the deal was finally done, Bedard would be a great asset to the team and that the M’s had 80-84 wins in them.  Whether that 84-win high end was playoff-worthy, now, that’s another story.

So, here we are, mid-May, and the M’s are…holy crap I haven’t looked at the standings in a while.  15-25.  That’s a “winning” percentage of .375.  If the M’s have any hope of making the playoffs, you gotta figure that 84 wins is the minimum required to even be in that conversation.  I’ll round that up to 85 because it makes the math easier.  So, to get to 85 wins, the Mariners have to win 70 more games, out of a remaining 122, which is a 70-52 record, or a .573 winning percentage.

Or, to put it another, bleaker way - the Mariners, today, are 9 games back of the A’s, and 8.5 games back of the Anaheim Angels Of Orange County Which Is Not Los Angeles No Matter How Many T-Shirts You Sell.  So, to catch the AAOOCWINLANMHMTSYS, the M’s will have to outplay them by AT LEAST 9 games over the rest of the season - and that assumes the Angels will play .500 ball the rest of the way, which is a dangerously stupid assumption because they’re a good team.  And even that only gets them to second place - they’d still have to catch the A’s.

Now, in this wacky, crazy, upside-down world of sports, anything’s possible.  Just ask the 1995 M’s.  Just ask last year’s Rockies.  But, I’m not in the schmoopy nostalgia business - I’m here to tell your kids there’s no Santa Claus, that the Easter Bunny’s just a rabbit, and that the Tooth Fairy’s actually your dad (which will probably lead to a longer, much more awkward discussion of why your dad’s prancing around the house dressed in a tutu and smelling of whiskey, but that’s for another day).

From what you’ve seen of this Mariner team, do you realistically think they can win 57% of their remaining games?  I don’t.  Last night being the notable exception, this team has real difficulty scoring runs.  They’re averaging about 4.1 runs/game, which puts them fourth from bottom in the AL.  Four runs a game won’t win you a whole lot of games.  The other difference this year is that, so far, the M’s are 1-9 in one-run games;  they were 27-20 last year in one-run games.  That’s not really a stat that a team can do anything about, a lot of it’s down to luck, but it’s still a troubling reversal from last season.

So, what does this all mean?  The team’s playoff hopes are all but dead, and it’s still mid-May?  It means you can, once again, enjoy baseball for the individual performances, and not worry so much about where the team’s going.  You know where the team’s going - nowhere in October - so stop gnashing your teeth about it, and stop sitting there thinking “if they string 10 wins together, they’re right back in this thing!”.  If you do that, and if you start watching Wlad Balentien and Jeff Clement do their thing, and start appreciating Adrian Beltre for the stellar defender and rock-solid bat he is rather than comparing his stat line to 2004 and deciding he sucks and is overpaid (hint: he really doesn’t/isn’t), you’ll be a much happier Mariner fan.

It’s depressing that it comes to this in May, rather than in mid-September, but this is our lot; with the exception of a few years there, these are the Mariners, this is who they are, this is what they do.  Does this mean I’ll stop being a fan, stop watching the games, and stop getting excited for baseball season?  Hell no.  It just means that I know what the M’s are capable of providing, and I made my peace with it years ago - and you should too.