The Mariners have gone 2-4 on this road trip so far, and have seen their lead in the A.L. West become eliminated. Now we’re a game behind the red-hot Astros, and it’s starting to feel like that cartoon dog inside the burning house meme.

We lost to a Bullpen Day on Monday, 6-3. Bryan Woo stunk up the joint at first, eventually going 5 innings and giving up 5 runs. The offense consisted of solo homers by Julio and Mike Ford, and a meaningless RBI single by J.P. Crawford in the ninth. Disaster times.

We followed that up with one of your more brutal losses of the season, 7-6. This was a game we – at one point – led 5-1, and at another later point still led 6-3. Then, Justin Topa gave up a 3-run bomb in the bottom of the 8th to tie it, followed by Andres Munoz VERY predictably blowing it in the bottom of the 9th.

We managed to get a relatively good start out of Bryce Miller (5 innings, 1 run), but then turned the game over to Dominic Leone, who gave up 2 homers in 2/3 of an inning. Between Leone and Weaver, I don’t know what the hell we’re doing. These guys are useless bums and you can’t magically turn around a player’s fortunes in the middle of a fucking pennant chase!

While Leone’s underwhelming performance was expected, Justin Topa has been pretty phenomenal this season. Nevertheless, you could tell right away he didn’t have it, and was a 3-run home run just waiting to happen. Munoz, I still don’t understand how he got August Reliever of the Month. You’re telling me there weren’t ANY relievers who didn’t blow two games and lose a third in the month of August? So far, his September is so bad I’m hoping it convinces the MLB to rescind the award and retroactively give it to literally anyone else.

It’s too bad, because the offense did more than enough to win this one. Teoscar continued his hot run he’s been on, with a first inning 2-run home run. Julio broke things wide open with a 3-run dinger in the fifth, and then he backed it up with another homer in the seventh. It’s a little concerning that we scored so many of our runs this series off of the long ball, but the Reds do play in a bandbox, so what do you expect?

We were at least able to salvage an 8-4 victory yesterday, though even that wasn’t particularly easy. Logan Gilbert was rolling until he wasn’t, finishing with 5.1 innings of 3-run ball. Even though we scored 7 runs in the first four innings, winning this game was all that mattered, so we went right to the top-end of our bullpen. Brash got us out of the sixth, Speier and Topa bridged the gap, and Munoz closed it out for the not-save (giving up a solo homer in the process, of course). You shouldn’t have to use those guys in a game where you lead by 4-5 runs, but that’s what happens when you blow so many fucking winnable games on this road trip. You have to buckle down and still struggle to keep it all together.

Ford had a 2-run homer, J.P. had a 3-run bomb, Cal added a solo homer, and Ty France had his first good hitting day in (seemingly) months. I am, nevertheless, done with France. He should be gone after this season. Fresh start somewhere else or whatever. But, he’s clearly a guy already on the decline, and it’s only going to get worse.

This was also the first great Suarez game we’ve seen in quite some time. Really need one of those two guys to get things going down the stretch if we want to get over the hump.

Now, we’ve got a 4-game set in Tampa, one of the best teams in all of baseball. Just what a slumping ballclub needs: a fucking freight train coming right for ’em.