Plenty to ponder as Mariners get back to business

The All-Star break is over.

After four days off the Seattle Mariners get back to business Friday night when they play host to the Chicago White Sox, and the M’s are the American League’s surprise team. Seattle is 58-39 and occupies the league’s second wild-card playoff position, something few predicted when the season began. However, the Mariners lost four straight prior to the break, seeing their lead over the Oakland Athletics shrink to three games. So there was much to ponder during the team’s brief vacation.

Anyway, here’s my thoughts about the Mariners as they head into the second half of the season:

I’ve been around long enough where Seattle’s three-game lead in the wild-card race doesn’t make me even close to comfortable.

When I was growing up following the Mariners in the 1980s and 90s, the team seemed to fall into a pattern that mirrored my family’s vacations. Every year my extended family embarks on a camping excursion during the first weekend of August, and every year it seemed the Mariners were hanging around the fringes of the divisional race when we left. But that weekend Seattle always seemed to get swept, usually by the Minnesota Twins, and by the time we got home the Mariners were left playing out the string. So I’m never going to be a fervent believer until we’ve reached the second week of August with Seattle still in the hunt.

The Mariners were close to getting me there, though. When I first began thinking about this column Seattle was six games ahead of Oakland for the second wild-card spot, and Fangraphs.com had the Mariners’ playoff odds at 80.6 percent, so I was wavering on whether to discard history and declare Seattle’s 16-year playoff drought inevitably over.

All it took was a sweep at the hands of the Colorado Rockies heading into the All-Star break, which allowed the A’s to climb within three, to knock me back into my senses. Seattle’s still in the driver’s seat — Fangraphs currently has Seattle’s playoff odds at 65.9 percent compared to Oakland at 29.0 — but I’m all too familiar with the Mariners’ history of taking wrong turns.

I think the Mariners should give the second-base job back to Robinson Cano.

Cano is set to return from his 80-game suspension for testing positive for a banned substance on Aug. 14, and there’s been much discussion about what the Mariners should do with Cano when he regains his eligibility. With Dee Gordon settling in at second base, and with Cano ineligible for the postseason, there’s been suggestions about moving Cano to another position or even the bench to accommodate Gordon.

But with the A’s closing in I think Seattle has to get its best lineup on the field, and Cano is part of that. Gordon adjusted quickly enough to moving from center field to second base that I think he’ll be able to make the transition again should the Mariners make the postseason. And moving Gordon back to center may actually improve the outfield defense if it means Ben Gamel is no longer asked to take on that responsibility.

With the starting rotation ailing, Seattle is going to need all the offense it can get just to get into the playoffs. That means getting all the big bats into the lineup on a regular basis, and to make that happen it means Cano at second, regardless of whether that results in disruption when the postseason begins.

Seattle has to be smart with how it handles Marco Gonzales.

Gonzales has been an absolute savior for the Mariners’ starting rotation. No one was sure what Seattle was going to get out of Gonzales this season, considering he was coming off Tommy John surgery two years ago and had limited effectiveness last year in his first year back. But Gonzales has been better than the Mariners ever could have hoped. His 10 wins lead the team and his 3.41 ERA is the best among Seattle’s starters.

However, the Mariners have to be careful with Gonzales because they can’t be certain how much of a workload he can handle. Last year he threw just 86.1 innings. He’s never thrown more than 122 innings in a season during his professional career. He’s already up to 113.1 this year, and he’s still a player recovering from elbow surgery.

There’s going to be temptation to ride Gonzales as long as he’s pitching well, especially if injuries continue to hound Felix Hernandez and James Paxton. But the Mariners have to tiptoe that line between getting maximum use out of him and risking injury.

Which brings us to …

The Mariners must bolster their rotation.

This may be Seattle’s best chance at ending its playoff drought — the longest active one in American major professional sports — in a generation. The Mariners have a lot of players either in their 30s or late 20s manning key positions whose career arcs aren’t likely to reach any higher, and Seattle doesn’t have much in the way of obvious help on the way via the farm. This is the year the Mariners need to make their move.

And that move has to be in the rotation. The current disabled-list stints by Hernandez and Paxton illustrate just how precarious Seattle’s situation is in the rotation. The Mariners’ starters have eaten innings so far, but have not been reliably effective, and if any of the five goes down with a serious injury there’s nowhere else to turn.

It doesn’t have to be a marquee name, like how the Houston Astros picked up Justin Verlander last year. But whether it’s a name like J.A. Happ (Toronto) or Kyle Gibson (Minnesota) or Matt Harvey (Cincinnati) Seattle needs to bring in someone, because who knows when the Mariners are going to get another chance like this.

Follow Nick Patterson on Twitter at @NickHPatterson.