It’s Opening Day! It’s been a long time coming. March Madness somewhat mitigated my Super Bowl sadness, but it’s nice to have some sports going on that I can truly be excited about. I know the whole point of this blog is doing stuff no one else does, but today I’m going to break my rule and do a Mariners season preview, mostly so I can look back in October and have concrete evidence to how wrong I was about everything.
The Mariners are a trendy World Series pick for experts both local and national, and that absolutely scares the crap out of me. Maybe it’s my built in inferiority complex as a Mariners fan or maybe it’s the similarity to the preseason hype from 2008 and 2010, seasons that ended with 101 losses. They won 88 games in 2007. Y’all remember that? At least this year we didn’t make the equivalent of an Erik Bedard trade, but still. Regardless of why I feel this way, I can’t shake to notion that the more people think the M’s will be good, the worse they’ll actually be.
They’re better than they have been for a while, but the Mariners are not a team without question marks. We’re betting that the bullpen will be close to as good as they were last year, that Logan Morrison can put together a full, productive season, and either Brad Miller or Chris Taylor will figure it out at shortstop. We’re hoping that Dustin Ackley can play somewhat decent ball in left field or Rickie Weeks rediscovers his form from 2007 and that Taijuan Walker and James Paxton, a duo with only about 150 major league innings between them, will start and be effective in near half our games. We’re praying that riding the Fernando Rodney Experience will lead to another 48 saves and those three blown ones won’t balloon to ten. Every team has question marks like this, and very rarely does everything work out or completely fold. In all likelihood, some of these question marks won’t be a problem, and some will cost the Mariners wins. But with every World Series pick, the feeling that everything bad that can happen will seems to fill the pit of my stomach.
There are also plenty of reasons for optimism. The addition of Nelson Cruz means that we’ll actually have a living, breathing baseball player as a designated hitter. He won’t be as good as he was last year, but he’ll sure as shit be better than last year’s glorious platoon of Corey Hart and Kendrys Morales. Kyle Seager is only getting better and will build off of last year’s success, particularly if he gets off to a better start than last year. Robinson Cano will actually get pitches to hit with Cruz looming behind him and might be able to up his power totals a little bit. Maybe even hit 20 home runs. Crazier things have happened. Felix and Kuma might be the most reliable starting duo in baseball. Taijuan Walker actually has legit secondary pitches to go with his mid-90s fastball now, and if his Spring Training performance was any indication, he’ll be an extremely tough at-bat for the American League. And don’t forget Rodney holding it down at the back end of the bullpen, scaring us just enough to make it interesting.
The last two points are really what are most encouraging to me: the starting pitching and bullpen. As you’d expect, there’s been a lot of discussion about how many games the M’s will win this year, but I don’t think it matters at all, as long as they can find a way to sneak into the playoffs. The Royals showed us last year that a mediocre offensive team can do special things with pretty good starting pitching and an awesome bullpen. There are so many off days in the playoffs, everybody can stay fresh. Tom Wilhelmsen and Rodney can make games awfully short. Throw in a cameo from Danny Farquhar and Charlie Furbush, and all the starters need to do is go about five innings a game. Felix goes seven on the regular. He’s not going to have a problem. If Iwakuma, Paxton, and Walker pitch like they’re capable of, they won’t either. Once they make the playoffs, I’m not too worried. It’s just getting there. Six months and 162 games is a long time, and a lot can happen between now and then. Guys will get hurt. Guys will struggle for a few weeks at a time. This is baseball. You can look good on paper all you want, but at the end of the day, you have to go out there and do the damn thing.
Despite the feeling in my gut, I’m going to be optimistic and predict a three-win improvement from last year. That’d be a record of 90-72. Having more legitimate threats in the middle of the order and similar pitching to last year will be enough to get our boys in the playoffs. I think they’ll lose in the ALCS. Again. But this time it’s a reason for optimism, not the sign of a group whose window is closing. I think they’re still a year away. Think of this as the 2012 Seahawks. They’ll get close enough to taste it and come back and wreck shop in 2016.
Photo: Joe Nicholson/USA Today