Monday Morning Mariber is a collection of thoughts on the Mariners week that was, with a focus on the weekend games. As the Seattle forecast finally turns towards summer, the column turns up the heat in kind..

No Beginnings No Endings

After the Mariners lost 3-0 Saturday night, a game in which Jose Suarez and Jimmy Herget – both real baseball players I promise – combined to throw eight shutout innings, the tv broadcast came back from commercial to start the postgame show. The now-familiar unlicensed house music thumped away as a voice intoned with breathless thrill the two-innings of shutout relief from Justus Sheffield, a high definition, ground level replay of a 5-4-3 fielder’s choice, and the workmanlike appearance of Tommy Milone. 

The Mariners losing by shutout to an atrocious and reeling Angels team (the Mariners ninth shutout loss of the season. A day before they would mark their 10th) was briefly discussed before the house music slowly amplified again and ran to a quick slideshow of fans using the #WhereIROOT hashtag, and we were off to commercials. The team plays tomorrow! Here’s the promotional package! Here’s Jesse Winker’s favorite hunting bow, and by all means don’t you dare forget to #SeaUsRise. Wash, rinse, see you tomorrow. Just get that highlight package ready to go.

The ways in which I miss Dave Niehaus are more numerous than this column has time to write, or that you have time to read. One way is that Dave Niehaus was honest, and while he worked for the team he had the courage to say when things were bad, which they obviously often were. A bad play or a bad player was fair game for criticism on-air, and the frustration that came through allowed fans to feel that they had someone like them – someone who just wanted this silly team to win and quit putting us through all this nonsense year after year – in a platformed position willing to call a spade a spade. 

The Mariners, and baseball, and gilded society at large, have largely figured out that that kind of freedom is bad for business. Now we simply have The Seattle Mariners(™) playing in perpetuity, results be damned; a pulsing beat, a fan giveaway, a high-def highlight, a 3-0 loss. Next homestand has some great giveaways, so bring the family out to the ballpark.

There’s no end destination for any of this, at least as fans who consume this product with a desire to see better play. The team makes wild, obscene, incalculable profits at every turn. Winning would be fine, preferable to losing even. But this, what we all see in front of us day after day and year after year, is the Mariners’ final form. Success, such as it concerns the powers that be, has already been achieved.*

*Make sure you get your 2023 Season Ticket Deposit in now for preferred seating options for the 2023 Major League All-Star Game at T-Mobile Park. New concessions and attractions are coming soon to further enhance the fan experience.

Three Up

The Vibes are Indeed Good

I get a rap for being negative, and for the most part it is well earned, but let me just say few things give me more joy than being down on a new player and having him make me look like an absolute idiot. I had little to no desire to see Eugenio Suarez play for the Seattle Mariners before this season. His acquisition was a salary dump from a tanking team looking to shed salary. He hadn’t been an effective big leaguer since 2019, and his skillset reeked of early decline. Add in a segment of media and fans eager to anoint him as a refreshing alternative to “Clubhouse Cancer” Kyle Seager and I was ready to drag Geno all season.

But, nope, guess what? I’m stupid and Eugenio Suarez rocks. He’s never going to hit for great average but his at bats are far more complete than I expected, his power and bat speed are still very much playable, and his defense is shockingly competent for a fellow Dad Bodded individual. A relentlessly positive and optimistic personality can be super annoying, but when it comes with a 122 wRC+ and some dingers? Only a true hater can hate, and I can only hate hateable things. Eugenio Suarez is nothing but love. Good vibes only baby.

Get On Up(ton)(?)

Because this is the Mariners, first and foremost one of nature’s finest and most instinctive comedy machines, it is hilarious on dozens of levels that Justin Upton plays baseball for the 2022 Seattle Mariners. That he’s still collecting millions and millions of dollars in pay from the team he made his Seattle debut against is one, that he was called up after hitting .200/.278/.389 in Tacoma is another, and that such a line in the major leagues would represent a boon for the Mariners’ offense in its current state is yet another.

What is not funny is that in his first game as a Mariner Upton took a 94 MPH fastball from Michael Lorenzen off the helmet. The pitch leveled Upton like a knockout punch, leaving him on the ground for several minutes before finally being helped off the field. He did not return to the game. After seeing Kyle Lewis suffer some serious after effects from a similar occurrence last month, it was very fair to wonder when the next time Upton would play baseball. 

It is therefore, in a season rapidly becoming as lost and miserable as any of the seasons before it, extremely good and cool that Justin Upton returned to the lineup the next day, apparently suffering no lasting effects from the trauma. In Sunday’s game he even smacked a double, not that that’s the important part. 

Along with an excellent major league career Justin Upton and his agent have done a masterful job ensuring that he earns a good salary. Per B-Ref he has made over $200 million dollars. There is no realistic reason he or his children or his children’s children should ever have to work another day in their lives. For Upton to grind through the minor leagues to get back to MLB shows a love of the game, and I’m just happy that wasn’t cut short with a fastball to the dome.

The Mariners Have Drafted and Developed a Very Good Starting Pitcher. They Did It!

There are a lot of reasons the Jerry Dipoto Era has been largely disappointing as a Mariners fan. One of those has been an inability to identify/acquire/develop top flight starting pitching talent. Since 2016, Dipoto’s first year, the team has had one starting pitcher put up a season of four or more fWAR. That was 2017 James Paxton, a holdover from the Jack Zduriencik Era.

So it is with great pride and much joy that I announce that Logan Gilbert sure as hell looks like the next guy in line to achieve that level of success. I don’t know if he’ll run into his innings limit  before he gets there but 42% of the way through the season Gilbert is ahead of that pace. 

With outstanding primary and secondary stuff, length that allows him to release the ball about four feet from home plate, and a seemingly ever-increasing confidence level Logan is easily the best Mariners starting pitcher since James Paxton, and most likely will end up the best one since Felix. The only things keeping him from being a Cy Young contender is an ability to go 7+ innings, and translating his stuff into more strikeouts. Those abilities may very well come, and even if they don’t, he’s already very very good. Along with Julio Rodriguez he is *the* bright light for this franchise looking forward. What a treat.

Three Down

I Don’t Know Who Won the Trade, But I Do Know Who Lost (Guess What It’s You)

It’s tiresome and boorish to re-litigate the trade that brought Abraham Toro to Seattle. It’s not his fault he was acquired through extremely controversial means, hours after Dylan Moore delivered perhaps the signature victory of the Dipoto Era, driving the clubhouse into extreme animus against management, leading to an eventual fallout that means now two of the Mariners 10 or so best players of all-time have no interest in coming back to Seattle anytime in the near future.

It is also not his fault that the Mariners spent spring training loudly and publicly hyping him as their fourth or fifth attempt to re-create prime Ben Zobrist. Abe Toro seems like a perfectly good dude. He shows up and plays hard, grinds out at-bats, and has pretty good contact skills.

He is not, tragically both for him and for the team, particularly good at baseball. After being given every opportunity to work his way into a league average line Toro’s 201 PA this season have him sitting at .166/.214/.310. His talent level is almost assuredly higher than that, as a .164 BABIP is not going to hold, but we are talking about a player with over 700 big league plate appearances and a career wRC+ of 75. I don’t know what the plan is here, and I never have. 

If Death is Simply Part of Living, then Sergio Romo is Fully Alive

It sucks watching a career end, but it feels like that’s what’s happening with Sergio Romo. He’s had a sterling, phenomenal, memorable career. He’s got three World Series rings, 14 years in the bigs, and did it all barely breaking 90 MPH on his best days. His 2022 form is a dinger machine, and the hourglass is almost out of sand. These are the moments you want to skip over so you can hurry up and get to the part where we appreciate the player’s entire career.

You’ve had a hell of a time, Sergio. Sorry it’s ending this way, but I suppose that’s how it usually goes.

The State of the Mariners is Strong

It is the seventh season of Jerry Dipoto’s time as the General Manager/President of Baseball Operations in Seattle. In that time:

-The team has never made the playoffs, even as that playoff field has expanded twice (they will not make the playoffs this year)

-As mentioned previously at least two of the Mariners greatest players of all-time have made it clear they have no intention to come back to T-Mobile Park while Jerry is here

-The team’s record is 467-471

-They have been mired in litigation from Director of High Performance Dr. Lorena Martin, an incident that saw explosive allegations leveled at the organization in general, and Dipoto and Scott Servias specifically

-Every major acquisition from this past offseason has been varying shades of whelming to flat out awful

-He has failed to, even once, exceed or even match the major league talent level he inherited when he took the job

The Dipoto Discourse is poisonous, and overwrought. I’m very aware firing him would not solve the fundamental issue that this team is owned and operated by a group of craven bloodsucking leaches for whom having to field a baseball team is merely a regrettable budget line in an otherwise incredibly profitable business, however he’s also just clearly not a good enough executive to overcome those issues. I’ve long held, outside of his incredibly agitating public persona, he is simply an average executive in a role that requires an excellent one. 

The body of work is undeniable at this point. The Mariners are never going to win a World Series with Jerry Dipoto at the helm. That should be the only real consideration. I know it’s not. But that’s another problem entirely.

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

*****

We’re all playing the waiting game at this point. The season feels like it’s circling the drain and, with an off day today, even inaction feels like action from the team. They’re either complacent or reactive, and there’s no good solution. That’s what happens when you’re 29-39.

Oh well. We’ve done this before and we’ll do it again and make it fun, because you all are the best. Have a great week, and don’t let the Mariners get you down. 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.