Missing the playoffs would be catastrophic

but losing a very weak AL West (again) is bad enough on its own.

I don’t like writing only when something bad happens. I don’t like writing infrequently in general.

I had a whole lede written on the last homestand, on how I’d gotten better at tracking home run balls to left field, especially upper-tank shots, because I’d been in the building for so many lately.

And I related it to how, when you play golf at Chambers Bay as someone who isn’t very good at playing golf, your play out of the sand improves dramatically because you get a lot of practice.

Not very fitting now. And yet there it is anyway.

Appropriate then still for the current moribund and misfit moment? You decide!

Things are bad though, dude. This is bad. I do not care for this at all.

I said it in the last post, that things are never as bad as they seem at their worst nor as good as they seem at their best but here we are the Wednesday after Labor Day, less than three weeks removed from the M’s being 14-over and subsequently tied atop the AL West, worrying if they’ll make the playoffs at all.

That’s bad. It could even be worse than it seems depending how this next month shakes out.

This is awful.

We’re checking Texas Rangers scores now. The Rangers. They were multiple games under .500 barely more than a week ago.

The Rangers!

There’s a level of “This cannot be happening” to all of this. Maybe it’s just me—and others have learned from past experience such that this doesn’t sting and shock.

I worked night-in and night-out for a Mariners team that reached 24 games above .500 and missed the playoffs. I was obsessed with and immersed in the 2018 M’s and I still think there’s just no way the 2025 club blows this to the level they aren’t playing in October at all.

A good chunk of it is wishful thinking, for sure. Maybe if I deny reality enough, ignore recent history, then perhaps I can manifest this Mariners team past the purgatory they’ve found themselves in.

How are we not past stuff like this by now? How are the Mariners not better than this yet?

Everything they’ve wanted to come true has come true—especially the things outside their control.

This whole contention window was precipitated not on the Mariners going and taking the American League West but the Astros falling back towards them.

Houston has obliged, winning 90 and 88 in the seasons following sweeping the Mariners out of the 2022 ALDS—and looking, at best, in that realm of quality this year.

The 2025 Mariners are supposed to be chasing down the Tigers and Jays for a bye, if not having already caught them and pressing on.

They should already have a shovelful of dirt between them and the Astros, en route to throwing on a few more before the last homestand.

Nah, here they are, dicking around with this—a playoff spot that’s in only its fourth year of existence and one specifically intended to reward second-tier organizations like the Mariners.

All of this, from the expanded Postseason to a weakened division (and league) to only needing to put a complete roster on the field for a couple months, has worked out exactly how the Mariners wanted.

And they’re still blowing it.

One of the more miserable parts of all this is how, when things get really bad, like right in the moment they give up a big hit to likely lose a series, everyone jumps to their go-to issue, their own foundational prior.

I do it. All the time.

One of the reasons it’s so prevalent is that there are so many things and people to blame.

To flip Buffalo Springfield, nobody’s wrong if everybody’s right.

Yeah, ownership should’ve done a lot more before now—and having one big-swing trade deadline doesn’t excuse the organization from rolling out a substandard roster the first half of this season and every year since…hell, a long time.

I don’t know what the front office was thinking, banking on Caleb Ferguson to be enough of a solidifying force to a bullpen built mostly of weak links. And then that leads to riding Matt Brash and Andres Muñoz harder than I ride my 2019 RadWagon. I’ve got two busted back wheel rims to match their previously-torn UCLs.

You have good players playing poorly on both sides of the ball. At some point, it’s on them. Teams will have their players-gotta-play-better losses. Every team does, even the great ones. But this group of guys has had way too many of those on these road trips since the break.

Finally, while detractors harp on Dan Wilson’s in-game management because that’s all they (we) can see, it’s a small part of being a manager. In the past, I’ve said the top job of a skipper is being “caretaker of the vibes” and right now the vibes are rancid. Someone’s gotta pull up on the stick and banking on a rookie manager like Dan Wilson to do it probably ain’t it.

It’s bad.

I saw my first “If the Astros go .500 the rest of the way, the Mariners would have to go x-y to pass them” the other day. I can’t look at that stuff. It’s not how baseball works.

But what’s hitting home lately is how it’s looking more and more likely it’s WC3 or the West. It’s definitely not going to be WC1. The Mariners aren’t catching both New York and Boston.

So it’s the West…or two out of three on the road. Probably two out of three on the road in Houston.

Could the Mariners get through? Sure. They’ve done it before.

But if they do, you’re likely looking at counting on some big-time innings—perhaps multiple starts—from Luis Castillo in the ALDS.

There’s probably more than a few of you thinking “Man, if we get to the ALDS, that’d be a miracle. I’d love to have a problem like that.” And I get it.

I’d probably sign up for that right now.

But we should be past this by now. Well past it.

There’s still time to clear the bar, though. They’ll have to, as has been the case so many times before, paper over years of inadequate sowing with one sun-hot run of reaping—but it is all right there in front of them.

Missing the playoffs completely may kill this fan base once and for all. At the very least, it’d be the most gruesome death our psyche has experienced yet.

But losing this tepid American League West, again, would be plenty awful on its own.

So, hey, an idea Mariners—let’s not do either?