Monday Morning Mariber is a weekly collection of thoughts on the Mariners week that was, with a focus on the weekend games. Much like the Mariners it is feeling pretty low at the moment, but has nowhere to go but onward into whatever awaits beyond.

This is What We Have

My job is in real estate, which leads to a lot of personal interactions. The skills required by the job are some combination of counselor, therapist, business strategist, salesman, tightrope walker, smooth talker, friend, and “got through one semester of law school” legal “expert”.

The profession is all-consuming and is the lens through which I experience 95% of my IRL personal interactions, which is deeply unhealthy. As social creatures we aren’t supposed to funnel all our conversations and meetings through an economic lens that, at its base level, asks you to weigh your words and thoughts almost entirely around a mindset of “I have to be nice to this person, because I need money.” For anyone seeking to engage the world with a modicum of authenticity and honesty (which I am doing), the whole thing has a way of splintering your brain into tiny shards.

This is, of course, merely one person’s story. It happens to be mine so I’m fairly invested in it, but the way our world is built practically every human being in existence is constantly weighing the balance point between holding close the things they truly value (time, family, home, peace) with the obligations required to have hands to hold things in the first place. It’s deeply imperfect, often impossibly cruel and unfair and, I personally believe, we are all at some level longing for something better. 

All this incongruity and having to fit your humanity into the world of 2022 like me trying to fit into a t-shirt after the holidays leaves you raw, and susceptible to moments of incredible emotional fallout. We recently spent about six months uploading every family photo to the cloud and now occasionally a picture will pop up, a reminder of a moment in time; a touch point to trace back and then forward, charting all the moments and choices, successes and failures from that time to now. Almost unfailingly I have to put the phone down and weep silently for about 5-10 minutes. At 40 you are the sum of your choices and I have made good ones and bad ones. Mostly I’ve made a lot of them, and now this is what I have, for good and ill.

I thought about all this when trying to think about how to write about a 17-25 Seattle Mariners team; one that is 6-15 in May, a half game out of last place, and teetering on the precipice of yet another lost season. The Mariners are just a bit older than I am. Like me they’ve had some real good moments, and some real bad ones. Mostly we’ve both had moments in the meaty middle between those extremes. 

We are both the sum of all of our choices and also the external forces battering away at us constantly, like seaside buildings slowly formed and eroded by salt spray and howling winds. We are neither as good as we could be, nor as bad as perhaps we should be. We’re neither young nor old. On good days it’s easy to feel like better days are ahead, while on bad ones it feels like the past is simply too heavy, too all-consuming to escape. Either way we simply have to keep going, because this is what we have, and this is what we know. This is who we are. 

Three Up

Julio Rodriguez’s Excellence is Already Boring

Ho-hum, as the Mariners’ resident godchild scooted through a miserable week for the team with a perfectly fine .268/.268/.429 line. Since bottoming out with a three strike out game on April 16th Rodriguez’s line is a .304/.351/.432. He’s doing it while playing centerfield regularly for the first time, leading the team in steals, and flashing so many tools he’s often confused for an ACC lacrosse team. It is absolutely to his credit that this all feels extremely boring at this point, and that this level of production (which has him somewhere between a 3.5-4 win player in his rookie season) is more or less what I assume his current true talent level is. 

He’s going to get so much better, too. There is so much power in his bat, and refinement to his overall game as he smooths out the rough edges of being 21 and turns into one of the American League’s very best players sooner than later. The Mariners should give him a couple hundred million dollars, and they should do it yesterday.

Adam Frazier is As Advertised

Look, I forgot Adam Frazier was on this team all winter, and just now when I looked up his stats I typed “Adam Kennedy” into the search bar. The man weighs about 160 lb after soaking in the water for an hour and stands approximately 1.05 Altuves tall. He lists his offseason activities as grilling and bow hunting. He’s the Milford Man of the Mariners. He’s also arguably the best offseason acquisition on the team at this point, as he slaps around the ball to a 114 wRC+ and shows the actual reality of defensive versatility the Mariners try to graft onto practically everyone else.

He’s 30 and a free agent next year, which hypothetically makes him trade bait if the season goes down in flames. I sure would like to see the team extend him though. Put him in a full utility role after, and follow me here, acquiring an elite middle-infielder through free agency, and you have a really nifty player in his ideal role. 

(Bull)Penn Murfee 

If you’ve been watching this team recently 1) I am sorry and 2) you’ve probably noticed that “The bullpen was good last year, ergo the bullpen will be good this year” hasn’t worked out particularly well thus far. As a man who watched a lot of both the 2014 and 2015 Mariners to me this is very shocking, and I may never recover from said shock.

A cool thing about a former Bullpen of Death turning into a Bullpen of (my) Death is that it allows for new blood, and no position group is more capable of churning out a random fun story than the bullpen. Enter Nominative Determinism All-Star Penn Murfee, a 2018 33rd round pick out of Randy Winn/Steve Nash University aka Santa Clara.

Funky, sidarm-ish whiplash inducing delivery? Sure! Hides the ball well from RHH? You bet! Popping off in his MLB debut with 17 K and a 0.68 ERA in 13.1 IP? Oh hell yeah! There’s every chance that Murfee craters tomorrow and is back in Tacoma by the break, but we just spent all last year saying similar things about some weirdo named Paul Sewald, and now he’s the team’ best reliever and arguably the team’s finest all around mensch. Relievers are weird, unpredictable, and I love them. 

Three Down

J.P. Crawford May Not Be a Number 3 Hitter

I know it’s a surprise that a man with a rolling 15-game wRC+ that looks like a standard Red River Shootout Win Expectancy Chart hasn’t backed up a bonkers offensive April but Crawford has seen his bat absolutely crater in May, with a .209/.270/.299 line in almost 80 PA. The aforementioned April and baseball’s absurd offensive environment still has him with a 146 wRC+, but he is absolutely not a bat you want to pencil into the spot theoretically used for one of your best offensive players. Does that mean they should move him? I dunno man it should be Jesse Winker’s spot but his bat is fluctuating between various shades of Austin Jackson at the moment so who can tell?

What I can say is that, regardless of recent offensive struggles, J.P. remains one of the Mariners best, and certainly most important players. There was a flicker of hope, however, that his bat was taking the kind of leap that really would make the Mariners look smart for not signing any of the gobs of elite middle-infielders this past offseason, and I think it’s probably likely that was a mirage. J.P. Crawford: Good not great. Same as it ever was.

Tough Scenes for the Skipper

The Duality of Baseball Manager: One year you get a career year from Drew Steckenrider and you’re a genius, the next you get a normal year from Drew Steckenrider and you’re an idiot. Servais is doing essentially all the same things he has done ever since Seattle started its rebuild in keeping the clubhouse functioning, allowing the player leadership to fall naturally into place with minimal interference, and providing 1-2 amusingly forced-seeming tirades a year when the job calls for it.

He almost certainly didn’t deserve as much acclaim as he got last year, and he almost certainly is getting too much blame now. I will say though if you’re gonna make the case managers have minimal impact on games it’s PROBABLY NOT FOR THE BEST that you brought your hot shot rookie pitcher out for a sixth inning in Fenway Park only to try and do a takesies backsies when baseball has a very specific “no takesies backsies” rule in place for exactly this circumstance. Now, was that entirely Servais’ doing or perhaps did word come down from a booming, hair gel-adjacent voice from on high to get George Kirby outta there? Speaking of……./smooth jazz cover of Mackelmore’s THRIFT SHOP swells……by God you know whose music that is!!!

We All Agree There is an Emperor, You Decide How Clothed He Is

The spin is already there. “The Mariners are targeting 2023”. “Jerry knew that last year’s team over-achieved which is why he held back this year.” “The team won 90 games last year when they weren’t even trying (this is, of course, a good thing?) you can’t just hold a bad 40 games against Jerry.” And ever and on.

Nothing I write here will change anyone’s opinion of Jerry Dipoto as a person or a baseball executive. Like most discourse in modern society the lines are drawn, the camps are formed, and there’s precious little interest in the middle ground beyond a place to store corpses. All I know is the man is in his 7th season as the general manager here, and still has yet to build a roster better than the one he almost entirely inherited his first season in Seattle. 

You can absolutely place blame on ownership, and I will follow you there. John Stanton and his cronies are an embarrassment to this region, and should sell the team immediately to a local buyer with the will and capability to do what is necessary to turn this franchise into one of the best in the league. That said, you cannot give Jerry Dipoto all the credit when things go right and none of the blame when things go wrong. That is not how this works. 

The roster isn’t good enough. It wasn’t good enough at any point, and they didn’t try hard enough to change that. He’s the one in charge of the team. It’s his job. Perhaps a bright future does truly await this franchise but I find it hard to believe it’s one bright enough to make the past seven years worth it. The future is a sucker’s bet. Win now, and accept nothing less. If you don’t, at least blame the people in charge, at the VERY LEAST don’t get mad when people get frustrated by the current situation. It sucks. Let people be mad. Being mad means people care, and all these rich white dudes should wake up so grateful every damn day we do.

The Weekly “Mariners Tweet that Made Me Laugh Most Embarrassingly in Front of My Family” Award

It’s ride or die time this week for the Mariners. Fangraphs already has the team’s playoff odds at, ahem, 6.9%. A series loss to an absolutely-not-trying-even-a-little-bit Oakland A’s team before Houston rolls into town could very well put the season on ice before Memorial Day. That’s bad! I certainly hope that doesn’t happen. You and I and we all deserve something a little more beautiful this summer than the fancy ballpark we built to enrich billionaires being a fun hangout for corporate team building exercises. So let’s get off the mat and have a great homestand huh? 

“Not a historical disaster” on three!

Have a great week y’all. Goms.

You can follow Nathan on Twitter at @nathan_h_b. Additionally he appears on the Ian Furness show on Mollywhop Mondays on KJR 93.3 FM every Monday at 1:10 PM with Chris Crawford and Kevin Shockey. Please be nice, he is doing his best.