Monday Morning Mariber is a collection of thoughts on the Mariners week that was, with a focus on the weekend games. This morning the column returns from a midseason slumber to find that much has changed, and much has stayed the same.

It Will Never Be Easy

My wife broke her ankle over the weekend. She was doing a mud run, hit an incline, found a hole, tried to re-adjust and *SNAP*! Where once there was a fibula now there are, technically, fibulas (fibulai?). 

Outside of the obvious physical trauma, pain, discomfort, and inconvenience of crutching everywhere for six weeks this ratchets the difficulty sliders up immensely for our family. Had she broken her left foot she would have had to learn how to carefully hobble into the car, how to sit, and how to ensure she drove without bumping the ankle around too badly. However, she broke her right ankle, which means she cannot drive at all. 

Hooray?

I’m opening the first column here in over a month (sorry about that. Life happened real hot and heavy for a bit) with this little anecdote, and at the risk of alienating what few readers we have with personal sob stories, not to engender sympathy but because I was thinking a lot about suffering and hope this weekend while I watched the Mariners get swept by the Astros.

You see the present, if you’ll pardon some language, has a way of being a right son of a bitch most of the time. Maybe you’ve got some fun weekend plans. Perhaps this evening you’re grabbing drinks with a good friend. You can think about the past and let nostalgia work its insidious magic to make you believe, truly, things were better back then. But right now, here, this moment? There’s always some nonsense demanding whatever we have to give it in the moment. So we give it, even if we have nothing, and we tell ourselves it’ll be better soon enough.

So much of this era of Mariners fandom has been about the future. The horrors of the past are dead, and the struggles of the present merely temporary. In the future, the Mariners will be perfect. The pitchers will all be young, healthy, and throw 97. The prospects will all pan out. The outfield will be jammed by so many logs that conservationists will agitate for its protection. The past 20+ years will melt away in the golden sunshine of the promised land, where division titles flow within the rivers, and World Series appearances fall like mana from heaven.

It’s all a dream, and it’s never going to be reality. The Mariners may very well win a World Series. The odds say at some point they’ll win the AL West. But it’s always going to be a struggle. The perfect lineup is always going to be foiled by an injury at the worst time. That pitching prospect you’re convinced is the next Cy Young winner is going to wake up with a sore shoulder some day. Any and all success they achieve is going to come with immense struggle, and that very much includes getting swept at home by your rival while your new superstar nurses an injury right as the fanbase prepares to fully embrace the team only to get Lucy Football’d for the millionth time. 

We like to think of sports as an escape but the Mariners are a glaring reminder that sports are just more life. Whatever it all is and is going to be, there is no running away from it. If we’re immensely privileged maybe we get vacations (hello 14-game winning streak), but that can make the harshness of real life even more jarring when we return.

Rooting for this team is just living, and it’s never going to be easy. There is no Valhalla, no Eden. There is just here, with a 7:10 first pitch against the Rangers, and an injury-filled roster trying to break a three-game losing streak with its worst starter on the hill.

We get to make the choice everyday how to make that worth it.  

Three Up

A Lolli for our Very Best Boy

I give Jerry Dipoto a lot of crap here and on Twitter. This is partially because I find him intensely annoying on a personal level, and partially because there is a smallish but very vocal segment of this fanbase that has created a reality in which nothing good ever happened to this organization before Jerry showed up. But it’s unfair to bash someone when they screw up (and/or they annoy you by calling Jake Fraley a five-tool player) and not offer praise when it’s deserved.

Regardless of this past weekend’s disappointment the Mariners are 51-45, and comfortably in a Wild Card position. The roster that Jerry Dipoto has assembled has produced the team’s greatest position player since at least Ichiro, two very promising young starting pitchers, a 28-year old All-Star first basemen, an ample-cheeked colossus at catcher, and a stirring bounceback season from Eugenio Suarez at third base. 

The Mariners are actually good at player development now, which is something I’m not sure has ever been actually true in the franchise’s nearly 50-year history. While I don’t think there’s another class of prospects like this one coming anytime soon the farm is already showing signs of developing an excellent group of high-upside players in the low-minors. This is what good teams do, and while the Mariners are not truly a good team yet, they are showing the low-level symptoms of goodness they haven’t shown in a long while. 

I left this team and front office for dead when they were 10 games under .500, and they have rallied like crazy to put themselves back on schedule. That’s a credit to everyone involved, including our very, very, very smart President of Baseball Operations.

Behold, the Chosen One

I will absolutely not be engaging in “Did Julio Rodriguez let his team down by participating in the Home Run Derby and All-Star Game with a sore wrist?” discourse beyond simply stating that no he did not. For those of you who are doing this take heart – football training camp is right around the corner. Sorry you don’t have Russell Wilson’s contract situation to talk about anymore.

It beggars all attempts at hyperbole and exaggeration to quantify the impact Julio has had on this organization in a single half of a major league season. He is, clearly, already the team’s best player at any position. He is going to be somewhere between a 4.5-5.5 win player in his rookie season. He has skipped right past decades of prospect burnout and disappointment-fueled cynicism directly to comparisons to Ken Griffey Jr. and, while I think such comparisons do both players a disservice, I can actually understand why people do it.

He offers possibility and hope for the future, and endless enjoyment in the present. I know this from experience: When you have a player like Julio Rodriguez on your team no amount of Marinersing will be too much to bear. He is the reason to buy a ticket, the reason to watch, the reason to be a fan. Non-baseball fans have already figured this out. Julio is the truth. We are blessed.

How Great are Our Dumps

This is trite and simple but loogit a few arbitrary Cal Raleigh splits:

4/8-5/11: .065/.194/.161

5/12-7/25: .221/.290/.500

Our sweet apple-cheeked, dump truck-carrying backstop has spent about a third of a major league season hitting like Good Mike Zunino, while supplying quality defense. He needs help, and fast. Since that May 12 start date Raleigh has played in 52 of 65 games. The Mariners have no real backup catcher, and if they continue his usage rate anything like what it is at present he’s going to most likely grind to a fine powder by season’s end.

That said, and while Julio is obviously the capital R, John-tripping-on-shrooms-on-Patmos Revelation here, you can make an argument that no player has been more pivotal in saving the Mariners’ season than Cal Raleigh. What a delight.

Three Down

Jesse Winker is a Lost Boy

I had some hope a few weeks ago that Jesse Winker was finding the form he’s shown the majority of his major league career, but it’s unraveling fast. Everything is down but primarily it’s the slugging, which is down almost 40% from last year. Winker has just not shown the ability to square up the baseball with any kind of consistency all season. Throw in some BABIP misfortune, as-advertised below average defense in left, and now an ankle injury that forced him from Sunday’s game and it’s looking more and more like 2022 is going to be one to forget for arguably the Mariner’s premier offseason positional acquisition.

I’d probably put money on him bouncing back nicely in 2023 but, with it looking more and more likely that the Mariners and the postseason will be doing a high wire cha-cha for the third season in a row, his performance is going to really sting if they come up short.

I’m Not Bad, and that’s Ok

If I told you in early April that J.P. Crawford would have a 112 wRC+ and be on pace to be a 3-win shortstop again you’d probably be pretty happy. I imagine the Mariners would be too. If I told you from May 1st through most of July he’d hit .234/.304/.319 while looking juuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuust a half step slower at shortstop you’d probably be pretty bummed.

Both these things are true. Crawford remains an above average major leaguer that provides quality defense and ~average offense at a premium position. He’s clearly a leader on the team at this point, and his contract makes everything but truly poor play completely fine from the old “value” standpoint.

But he’s not a star, and in an offseason with so many stars available it’s still going to rankle me that the Mariners so eagerly hitched their wagon to a player with such a low ceiling. I expect he’ll find another hot streat with the bat before the season is out. But I also expect that will immediately be followed by a cold streat that almost entirely balances him back to average. This is who he is, which is fine. That the Mariners never seemed to dream bigger is not.

Servais Issues

Full stop: Scott Servais is cool. He’s grown into the role of big league manager much better than I would have thought. His players sure seem to appreciate him, and he sure seems to appreciate them. I’m going to carry my frustration with how he handled the Felix Hernandez relationship until my dying day, but that is increasingly a me problem more than a him problem. I’m really glad he’s here.

Additionally there’s plenty of reason to speculate on how much control Servais has over the tactical portions of the game. We’ve heard reports and rumors indicating that at least some decisions like lineups and pitcher substitutions are determined prior to the game by a combination of spreadsheet wizardry and the Great Eye of Jerry.

That said, as the season wears on we are getting larger and larger sample sizes and a few things are becoming clear. Primarily whatever this team thought it had with Abraham Toro is increasingly looking to be what it actually has in Dylan Moore, and the insistence on playing the former over the latter for so long has almost certainly cost this team in the win column.

There are always other examples – Matt Brash being left in for two innings of relief yesterday, not starting Carlos Santana against a LHP, Luis Torrens literally being on the roster, etc. but that’s the big one. Dylan Moore’s tools make him an actual asset in a utility role, and the Mariners squandered months with him barely playing in order to let Toro try to prove he is the player they thought they were trading for. I don’t know how much of that is Scott Servais, but I do know his job is to take the criticism for it, so it is here I shall store that criticism.

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

(It’s older than a week but we were on hiatus and it’s too good not to link to again)

*****

The Mariners have three against the Rangers and then are right back in Houston over the weekend for four. The difficult part of the season all but ends on August 10th against the Yankees. After that it’s mostly nothing but boundless opportunity against some of the very worst baseball teams in the league. The goal for the team this week is then the same as it is for all of us: To survive. 

Have a wonderful week, friends. You are greater than whatever stands before you.

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.