Everyone who predicted the Mariners would finish near or at the top of the American League West this season based their reasoning on the strength of the starting pitching. Instead, the Mariners have the second-worst record in baseball and they say it’s eating at them.
“Everybody should be frustrated,” manager John McLaren said Tuesday. “No one in their right mind thought we’d be in the position we’re in, with the team we had and the talent we added. We won 88 games last year and we added No. 1 and No. 3 starters. Everybody can do their own math.”
The Mariners have two starters with ERAs of 6.00 or higher. MIguel Batista’s is near that, 5.90, and Tuesday night’s starter, Erik Bedard, the supposed ace of the staff, was trying to get his below 4.00. Felix Hernandez has a 3.29 ERA but a 3-5 record.
How can such a highly regarded team, especially the starting pitching, turn out so bad? McLaren may have revealed a clue Tuesday, not by anything he said, but by what he didn’t say during a moment of praise for Jarrod Washburn, who’s 2-7, 6.56.
“There are nights he doesn’t have his stuff, but he doesn’t back off,” McLaren said. “Last week in Detroit when the score was 9-1, he didn’t want to come out of the game. He said, ‘Let me stay out here and take this beating for the team.’”
It’s nice to hear of a pitcher wanting to stay in a game despite the season crumbling around him. Too often we’ve seen starters walk off the mound with a tight groin or a fatigued calf, only to see people with the team roll their eyes then next day when they’re asked how bad the injuries are.
I’m not saying these guys are using phantom injuries to talk their way out of difficult situations, but whatever happened to the notion of playing hurt? One Mariner told me this week that if the team’s record was 37-21 instead of 21-37, none of these guys would be asking out of a game.
Instead, the Mariners are losing and the starters are suffering an epidemic of soft tissue problems … perhaps with emphasis on “soft.”
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