The Mariners still have 23 games left to play, but their season is over.
It’s not totally their fault. The team was better than it should have been, whatever that means. In baseball, the amount of runs a team scores versus the number of runs a team allows generally predicts the team’s record. The Mariners did better than that. They did more than they were supposed to, deserved to, maybe, but they still did it. That is worthy of celebration.
The Mariners are 5.5 games behind the Oakland A’s in the standings. The opposite was true at some point in July. The A’s are very good, all of a sudden. Somehow, they bumrushed the standings, blew straight by the M’s. The A’s tend to do that. “It’s always the A’s,” my dad said on Sunday.
Still, they are screwing up some of the things they can control. The team might be falling apart. Dee Gordon and Jean Segura—my favorite Mariners this season, natch—got into a fight in full view of the Mariners’ beat reporters. Manager Scott Servais said that this sort of thing happens all the time and Dee and Jean are buds. That may or may not be true, but damn, getting in a fight in front of reporters was not a great call.
Once more, the Mariners will miss the playoffs. For the seventeenth year in a row, the M’s won’t be playing in October.
The streak is alive, folks. We just have to wait ’til next year. Maybe Felix might get back on track.
But probably we’ll just make it to year 18.
