It’s been a rough past 15 hours for the Mariners.
Tuesday night Seattle rallied from a 4-0 deficit, then broke a tie in the eighth against the Texas Rangers, only for all their hard work to be torn down by Roughned Odor’s walk-off homer against the previously impervious Edwin Diaz.
Then Wednesday afternoon the Rangers put Seattle ace Felix Hernandez to the sword in a 14-1 rout.
The Mariners have now lost five straight and eight of their past nine, and their once promising playoff chances are now on life support. According to FanGraphs, Seattle’s playoff odds were 45.2 percent as recently as Aug. 22. But after Wednesday’s defeat they’re sure to be below 5 percent.
The problem isn’t just that the Mariners now find themselves 4.5 games behind Baltimore for the second AL Wild Card spot, with the Orioles yet to play Wednesday. It’s also that the Mariners allowed a bunch of teams (Houston, Kansas City, New York) to pass them in the race. Seattle will end the day in seventh place in the Wild Card standings, and it’s hard to expect all the teams ahead of them to help out by going into funks.
All season long Mariners fans were looking forward to meaningful baseball in September, something that’s been all too rare. But with September beginning Thursday, Seattle is going to have to come up with something special to avoid another September of playing out the string.
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