Well, things stopped getting worse
A random assortment of words as the M's hit the road
It is Friday, it’s a beautiful day out in our fine city and your Seattle Mariners did not lose their most recent game. Series? Yes. Game? No.
That was almost real bad. When Nick Kurtz took a slider down but over the heart of the plate up and out like a prime Tiger Woods stinger, you start thinking about the whole year. You start catastrophizing when you probably shouldn’t.
Because that’s baseball. And it’s baseball, too, when the heart of the order follows a back-breaking double play with, not a blast, but three straight singles to walk off the game and the homestand.
There’s a week left in April and the Mariners have won two of their eight series.
That’d sound like a disaster were you to tell someone in mid-March but, sitting here now, it could be worse. It could be better—a lot better—like not already being five-and-a-half games behind the #1 seed in the American League. They’re three back of the #2 seed, too.
It’s downright bizarre to talk about Postseason seeding in April but for a team with as grand of aspirations as the Mariners, this is the stuff that matters. Not now, no. But later it will—or could.
The Mariners are 15 percent of the way through their season and, unfortunately, this part does count just the same as the final 15 percent.
Right now though, the Mariners can do some work in starting to position themselves better for the bigger small stretches ahead.
Their next six series are:
at St. Louis
at Minnesota
vs. Kansas City
vs. Atlanta
at Chicago White Sox
at Houston
Even after the second leg of the Vedder Cup, it’s White Sox again, Royals again and then the Diamondbacks to finish out the month.
Some of these teams are playing better than their preseason projections, with Atlanta in particular looking good early but, counting them with the Pads, that’s two sure-fire playoff teams in a month’s worth of games.
Time to make some hay.
To this point, it hasn’t mattered a whole lot who the Mariners are playing but hopefully this stretch enables them to find positive vibes and the consistent play that should come with it.
Their best hitters, in Cal and Julio, are looking more like themselves—the former in particular.
And I can tell you right now, if the starting rotation pitches the way it has thus far, the M’s will be back-to-back AL West champs. Now are they that good? Ehhh, we’ll see.
But if they’re close, if they’re a true top five rotation in the sport, the bats will do enough to at least take a division that’s looking about as meh as expected.
Injuries can always change things, though a certain number should be expected. And maybe we should’ve been more mindful of the health status of the team’s biggest offseason acquisition.
A story by MLB.com’s Daniel Kramer shared an update on Brendan Donovan:
It also appears there will be some legitimate long-term monitoring of this issue.
Donovan again cited the sports hernia surgery that he underwent last October as the likeliest cause for what’s going on, and added that this new snag was independent of the discomfort he experienced on the other groin in Anaheim three weekends ago.
And therein lies a bigger-picture scope, as Donovan -- who only played 130-plus games once in his four years in St. Louis -- suggested that treatment could last throughout the season. He isn’t expected to be activated on the Mariners’ upcoming road trip, as he’ll remain in Seattle to rehab.
In my initial post on the trade that brought in Donovan, I mentioned the surgery and how we’ve seen Mariners players undergo it in semi-recent years—Robinson Canó before 2016 and Mitch Haniger before 2020.
I mentioned then that Canó had his best season in a Mariners uniform in 2016. I did not mention that Mitch Haniger did not play at all in 2020.
From a pre-2021 piece in the Times by Ryan Divish:
He had surgery to repair a tear to the sports hernia by Dr. William C. Meyers, a specialist in sports hernias, of the Vincera Institute in Philadelphia. But it became clear that the surgery didn’t fix the issues in his lower back and sciatic pain.
“You recover from that surgery fast, you feel relief,” he said. “Three days into my rehab, I couldn’t do a wall sit. I was like, ‘My leg is (expletive) killing me. You need to MRI my back.’”
A full MRI of his back revealed a herniated disc that looked “like a piece of sashimi.” He underwent an immediate microdiscectomy.
The COVID-shortened season likely played a factor in him missing it completely with rehab, but it’s something to be aware of with regards to Donovan, a player who’s already battled injuries quite a bit earlier in his career.
Because without him and with Leo Rivas starting every day, the Mariners don’t have enough talent—not for what they and we want them to do.
Will Colt Emerson—once wrist pain and an unsightly strikeout rate subside—be enough to help them out should Donovan continue to need time down? We’ll see.
It’s a lot to ask of a 20 year old, but when you build the entire operation around drafting and developing, them’s the breaks.
Plus, that’s what the money is for.
Get after it in St. Louis, boys.
Go M’s.