Yeah yeah yeah, we won the series 2-1 against the Angels.  Yeah yeah yeah, we won the homestand 5 games to 4.  But, I shouldn’t have to remind you that this is crunch time!  It’s no longer valuable to just win series.  That time has LONG gone!  Maybe if you’d just won every series since the All Star Break, things would be different.  You’d probably be in the driver’s seat right now!  But, you’re didn’t, and you’re not.  You’re still 3 games back of the second Wild Card, with 5 teams still standing in your way.

The time is for SWEEPING series, and the Mariners fucked another opportunity away.

While I don’t totally agree with the decision to stick with Erasmo Ramirez in the seventh inning, after he’d fought to get through six with a 1-run lead, he’s not the reason why we lost that game.  He’s the reason why it got tied up in the seventh, on a solo homer to make the game 2-2, but he still put in a quality start – his sixth in a row! – and kept his team in this thing.

I can’t even quibble with how the bullpen was used, because Nick Vincent was given a clean eighth inning to work in, and he proceeded to give up 3 runs to put the game out of reach.  I’d say with less than 5 innings under his belt in the month of September, and with 5 earned runs given up, Nick Vincent is officially in a slump.  Is this just one of those things?  Is he faltering from over-use?  Is the rest of the league figuring him out?  Is he secretly injured?  I don’t have a clue, but we can’t win if we can’t depend upon Vincent.  Not with David Phelps shelved for the year.

Hey, how is Steve Cishek doing over in Tampa?  Only 1 bad outing in 20 appearances, you say?  Huh.  How about that.  BOY WOULD THAT BE NICE TO HAVE IN OUR BULLPEN RIGHT NOW!!!

Of course, you could tell me we traded Cishek for Erasmo Ramirez, who has given us all these amazing quality starts of late; but I’ll tell you that Erasmo Ramirez could’ve been had for a song!  We could have BOTH of those guys right now if we really wanted to!

But, that’s neither here nor there, because it’s unreasonable to ask the bullpen to be perfect every fucking game, particularly when we’ve got this high-paid offense doing JACK SHIT.

I’ll tell you this much:  Yonder Alonso can go fuck off when the season’s over.  That guy’s a HUGE pile of dead weight!

It’s certainly disappointing that a mediocre pitcher like Parker Birdwell can hold our bats to 2 runs over 6 innings.  This game was ripe to be won, if only the offense had hit the way it’s capable of hitting.

Now, we’re off for a week in Texas.  4 games against the Rangers and only 3 games against the Astros (thank Christ).  Ideally, we’ll do better than 4-3 on this trip, but we’ll see.

Both Felix and Paxton are set to return this week!  That’s the good news!  The bad news is they will have made exactly zero minor league tune-up starts, so their pitch counts will be pretty low.

19 games and counting.  Just enough time to get right up on the edge of contention without actually managing to push through into the playoffs.  Feel the excitement.