SEATTLE — As strange as it might sound, it was a recent victory that highlighted why the Seattle Mariners’ 2015 season has been so disappointing so far.
Baseball folks like to say you can’t judge a team until Memorial Day weekend, so I suppose it’s time to start passing some judgment about the Mariners, who came into the season not just as a team people were calling a playoff contender, but a trendy pick to make it to the first World Series in franchise history.
And the season is still relatively young. The Mariners have played just over a quarter of the season, so there’s plenty of time to overcome their 20-22 start that had them seven games back of the Houston Astros — the Astros! — as of Saturday, but so far it’s impossible to call this season anything but a disappointment.
Which brings us back to Friday’s victory in Toronto, a game that was a positive in the standings for Seattle, but also a sign of just how much has gone wrong this season. On their way to a 4-3 victory over the Blue Jays, the Mariners got another great performance out of Felix Hernandez, who improved to 7-1 and lowered his ERA to 2.19, and Nelson Cruz hit his league-leading 17th home run.
Think about that for a second: The Mariners’ ace, a likely Hall of Famer if his career doesn’t fall off a cliff, is off to the best start of his career, and their big offseason acquisition is producing at a rate far exceeding anyone’s expectations. And still, the Mariners are under .500 a quarter of the way through the season.
Had you told people before the season that the Mariners would be getting triple-crown numbers out of Cruz, dominance from Hernandez, and very solid work out of J.A. Happ, who most considered to be the weak link in the rotations, they’d tell you the Mariners would be in first place; instead they have a losing record and are well back of Houston, the biggest surprise in baseball.
“There’s no excuse,” general manager Jack Zduriencik said during an interview on 710 ESPN Seattle. “We’ve got to perform better than we’re performing. We haven’t performed to the level that we want to, and someway, somehow we have to figure out a way to get this thing done.”
There have been many culprits for the Mariners’ struggles, from bad base running to sloppy defense to poor situational hitting. The Mariners, thanks in large part to Cruz, rank a very respectable 10th in baseball in slugging percentage (.405), but they’re near the bottom in scoring thanks to an on-base percentage of just .298, which ranks 27th out of 30 teams.
Plenty of hitters are underachieving, from proven stars like Robinson Cano to young players who hoped to turn a corner and haven’t like Mike Zunino and Dustin Ackley.
The rotation outside of Felix and Happ has been inconsistent, though it’s showing signs of improvement, and the bullpen has regressed significantly after being the best in baseball last season. It probably wasn’t realistic to expect the bullpen to match its league-best 2.60 ERA from last season, but right now that group is more than a full run worse at 3.68.
Anyone who expected the Mariners to be a playoff team knew the team had flaws, but what’s happening now is simply that too many of the question marks have become negatives so far this year.
“Overall we haven’t hit on all cylinders, that’s the obvious,” Zduriencik said. “I think there have been flashes of some things that have been very good, and then there’s been times we’ve been pretty inconsistent. If I was to say anything right now, we’ve been inconsistent in our overall play.”
There are positive signs. The starting pitching, Taijuan Walker’s last outing notwithstanding, has been better of late, and while there are no guarantees about many of the Mariners’ struggling hitters, it’s hard to imagine that All-Stars like Cano and Kyle Seager won’t come around soon. And most importantly, there are a ton of games left. The Mariners did themselves no favors with a slow start, but there is plenty of time to overcome the deficit in the AL West and still live up to all those preseason expectations.
“We will be better,” manager Lloyd McClendon told reporters in Baltimore at the start of their current road trip. “One thing we’ve got to do is stay the course. The record is not where we want it to be, but this is not the end of the world. I understand that people who root for us, and are close to us feel bad about it; I feel bad about it. Nobody’s losing more sleep than me, but the fact is we’ve got to stay the course, we have to stay positive and we have to continue to do the things we need to do to get ourselves out if this. I see signs of it. … All those things are starting to come together, and we’re going to get on a run, and it’ll be a good one.
“Listen, nobody wants to lose contact (with first place), but the worst thing you can do right now is start looking at the standings. We’ve got to win ballgames. This is what I’ve always said, and I’ll live by it: today is the biggest game of the year, because it’s the only one we’ve got. That’s the way we have to play baseball. We have to focus on today; not tomorrow, we have to focus on today, win today’s game and not get caught up in the standings in May. That’s a dangerous thing.”
And McClendon is right, standings in May might not mean much come September, but even so, it’s hard not to look at the numbers Cruz is putting up, to see Hernandez so dominant, to see Happ exceeding expectations and not wonder how the Mariners have a losing record this far into the season.
Herald Columnist John Boyle: jboyle@heraldnet.com
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