The NFL season gets underway this weekend.
While the Major League Baseball season is still technically underway, the moment football kicks off typically means that the Seattle Mariners’ season is all but over.
This year appears to be no different.
Following a successful trade deadline, the Mariners went on a hot streak, winning 11 straight games from July 31 to August 12. In that span, they tied the Astros for first place in the American League West and sat as many as six games up and in possession of the first wild card spot.
Following a 1-0 win over the Orioles in Baltimore on August 12, the Mariners appeared to remember that they are the Seattle Mariners and that Mariners fans are not allowed to have good things.
They would proceed to go 1-7 over the remainder of a three-city road trip, before rebounding slightly to go 4-2 in a Sox game home stand before embarking on another dumpster fire of a road trip. The Mariners are currently 1-5 in the midst of a nine-game swing, with three more games against Atlanta this weekend. They hit their lowest point this season when, after being drubbed by the Tampa Bay Rays 10-2 on Monday, blowing a lead and losing 5-4 Tuesday, they fell behind 8-0 After two innings, they were being one-hit before scrapping across some late runs in a non-competitive 9-4 loss on Wednesday to finish off a three-game sweep at the hands of a team that plays its games in a glorified little league stadium.
ESPN wrote that Jeff Passan, who proclaimed the team an October threat to watch out for, declared himself a “bubonic plague” for seemingly causing the team to go into a tailspin by noticing how well they were playing in early August. As noted after the trade deadline, on paper, the Mariners should be among the most fearsome teams in the league, with a stacked lineup, a solid front four in the starting rotation, and two of the best high-leverage relievers in baseball.
Instead, since August 12, absolutely none of it has worked. Hitters can’t hit, the rotation big four of Logan Gilbert, George Kirby, Brian Woo and Luis Castillo resemble something that the Colorado Rockies would run out, and Matt Brash and Andres Munos have been giving up runs left and right.
Unlike previous Mariners teams, it’s tough to pinpoint exactly where things are going wrong. Even if they didn’t address all their needs in the offseason, the team shrewdly evaluated where it needed the most help at the trade deadline and moved aggressively to address those needs. After playing with a patchwork rotation and outfield platoon for most of the season, the team is essentially at full strength and added some key depth with the September 1 roster expansions in the form of top prospect Harry Ford and utility player Leo Rivas. The team has also not hesitated to cut bait on players who were not performing. First basemen Donovan Solano and Rowdy Tellez are gone, as is long-tenured utility player Dylan Moore.
The team’s notoriously stingy ownership signed off on spending more money in the second half of the season, both in paying the contracts of Josh Naylor and Eugenio Suarez, but also in eating the funds owed to Telez, Solano, and Moore. While it wasn’t exactly on the Los Angeles Dodgers’ level of spending, for the Mariners, making those moves showed an unusual commitment to supporting a playoff push. On paper, the Mariners should be locking up the wildcard and competing for the division title. And yet, despite Cal Raleigh continuing to inch closer to the American League home run record, the Mariners may find themselves on the outside looking in on the playoffs by the end of the weekend. In true Mariners’ fashion, even when they do everything right, they manage to do nothing right.
The only thing keeping the Mariners in the race at all has been the fact that the Astros and the Rangers have not been playing particularly well either. However, over the last week, the Astros have been slowly pulling away- stretching their lead in the division to games- and the Rangers have been slowly gaining ground, sitting just 1.5 games behind the Mariners as of Wednesday.
After six games at home, the team heads out for another road trip, including three games in Houston. If the team can’t reverse its road woes, the final week of the season may not even be interesting at all. There’s still time for the team to reverse its slide. They could even catch the Astros, but to do that, they are going to need to do something they have not been able to do for the past month – win games on the road.
If they can do that, baseball will still be relevant in the Northwest well into October.
And if they can’t, well, at least football season is getting started.
