God that 13-2 start was fucking stupid …

Ever since, the M’s have gone 7-21, which is much more in line with where we saw this team heading into the season. The over/under on wins was right around 73.5 to 74.5; at 13-2, it seemed idiotic to count on the under winning the day. Now, it’s not so crazy.

The A’s are one of those teams where you’ll see their unimpressive record, focus on other things, and then a couple months later you find they’ve ripped off an impossible number of wins. Maybe not every single year, but even more than just once in a lifetime is annoying as a Mariners fan, to the point where I have Sports PTSD because of them.

Well, I would argue the M’s have the same power, just in the opposite direction. This franchise can rip off an impossible number of losses in a short period of time, and unlike the A’s, the Mariners ACTUALLY do this every single fucking year. It gets so bad, you wonder if they’ll ever see another winning month. Hell, sometimes you wonder if they’ll ever see another winning SERIES.

Now, in all reality, we’re talking about a season full of streaks. We started out red hot, we’re currently ice cold, but another hot streak is probably right around the corner (maybe as soon as this week). What this post is attempting to posit is that: maybe we just keep on losing?

From a talent perspective, I believe the Mariners are one of the five worst teams in all of baseball. Forget the farm system and all the minor league levels (for now, though I don’t see much immediate help on the horizon); I’m talking strictly from the product on the Major League field.

This defense is the absolute worst. The bullpen is – if not the absolute worst – among them and making a serious push for the bottom spot. And, while the hitting has a good amount of pop – and can put up some crooked numbers – it was always going to cool off, and it appears to have finally done so. What’s more, there was never going to be enough offense to compensate for all this team’s weaknesses.

Weaknesses which, apparently, are extending to the starting rotation.

I’ve largely given the rotation a passing mark on the Pass/Fail grading system, because while there’s no top-shelf talent, there’s a lot of 2’s and 3’s that’ll generally keep you in ballgames. With the hitting this team has shown, if you could cobble together a proper bullpen, you could see a team contending for a playoff spot with this rotation.

But, as the season has lurched forward, we’ve started seeing some cracks in the armor of that argument. Two out of his last three starts has seen Marco Gonzales bury this team early in those games; that’s ostensibly your ACE of the staff! A semi-lukewarm start from King Felix has gone down in flames (culminating with a stint on the IL this week). Mike Leake has had some real duds mixed in there, as we all expected. Wade LeBlanc was the first of our starters to hit the IL; while he appears to be on the mend, we’ll see what that translates to when he finally makes it back. In his absense, Erik Swanson has started to struggle as teams write the book on him. The minor league starting depth behind Swanson figures to be markedly worse.

If we run into some more starting pitching injuries – as well as injuries to our everyday players, which is only a matter of time – how bad can this team’s record get? We already know the bullpen is a disaster; any hope for that to change is going to depend on the players in the organization magically improving. We also know that a number of these veterans are going to be shopped at the trade deadline, if not sooner. Their replacements should inspire no confidence.

The Mariners once had the very best record in all of baseball. Then, almost exactly a month later, we’re now talking about the team with the 11th-worst record in baseball and falling HARD. And, if that doesn’t move the needle for you, the Mariners also at one point had baseball’s best run differential. Now … it’s the 11th-worst.

The point is, outside of that hot start, this is a Bottom 10 baseball team. I would argue, based on what our minds tell us, combined with the eye test of what we’re seeing from this team on the field, the 2019 Mariners are closer to the team that’s gone 7-21 as opposed to the team that started 13-2.

While I’m dreading all the bad baseball we’re all going to be subjected to over the next few months, I’m not-so-secretly relishing the end result, which figures to be a Top 10 pick in next year’s draft.