As predicted (as soon as we got the hell out of Boston), the Mariners finished their East Coast road trip 5-5.  If you’d offered that to me going in, I gladly would’ve taken it.  Of course, I would’ve assumed that it would go differently; for our peace of mind, it couldn’t have gone any worse.

The Mariners went 4-0 against the terrible, awful, wretched, last-place-in-the-entirety-of-Major-League-Baseball Baltimore Orioles, and a combined 1-5 against the Red Sox and Yankees (you know, the teams we’re destined to face in this year’s playoffs).  So, that’s neat, I guess; and by “neat” I mean fucking whatever who cares?

We got another quality start out of Felix (6 innings, 3 runs) on Monday and the bullpen was able to close out a 5-3 win.  We had a tremendous start out of Paxton (7 innings, 2 runs, 10 strikeouts) on Tuesday in a come-from-behind 3-2 win.  We won a back-and-forth affair on Wednesday, where Colome blew a 5-4 lead by giving up a 3-run homer in the bottom of the 8th, only for Seager to jack a game-tying 2-run homer in the top of the 9th to send it to extras, where we won in the 11th on a sac fly by Span.  And finally, for good measure, we won again in extras on Thursday, scoring two runs in the 10th to win it 4-2.

The Mariners return home (and never have to go any further east than the state of Texas the rest of the regular season) with a record of 51-31, on pace for 100+ wins, but still 3.5 games behind the Astros for the A.L. West.  The Angels have sufficiently fallen apart with a bevy of injuries; somewhere, someone is playing the world’s smallest violin just for them.  The A’s have overtaken them as our primary threat for the second wild card; they’re just 7 games behind us (at a whopping – for them – 6 games over .500).

There’s 15 games between now and the All Star Break.  3 against the Royals this weekend, 6 against the Angels, and 6 against the Rockies.  The Royals should be push-overs; we’re hopefully playing the Angels at the right time (aka: at their most injury-depleted); and the Rockies are the great unknown (but a record of 9-16 in the month of June thus far has seen them spiralling).  We should be able to coast into the break in great shape, at which point we’ll likely spend most of the second half scoreboard-watching and hoping for the worst out of the Astros.