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The Mariners just pounded the Royals 7-0 to keep treading water in the AL West. Seems like the perfect time for a fake Q&A. As always, these are made up questions that no one has ever asked me.

Talk a little about the Mariners’ season so far.

That’s not a question.

Sorry. How has this season gone for the M’s?

That’s better. Not well. They quickly extinguished the World Series talk with a terrible start, and while they’ve been better at times, they’ve also been consistently inconsistent. Right now they’re six games under .500 and around 8 games back in the division.

What’s been the problem?

A little bit of everything. The pitching and defense were bad to start. The pitching has gotten good and the defense has been okay since, but the offense has been mostly bad all year. They’ve also been plagued by a lack of focus and general malaise that’s led to a lot of silly errors and a seeming lack of fight in certain games.

So what should they do? They probably need to switch out most of the team, right?

That’s the weird thing. There aren’t really that many holes now. Let’s break it down.

Cruz, Seager and Seth Smith have done exactly what was expected or more, as have J.A. Happ and Charlie Furbush on the pitching side. Austin Jackson and Logan Morrison started slow but have turned into solid bats since, although we’ll see if it lasts with Jackson. Brad Miller’s stats aren’t amazing, but he’s actually been one of the better shortstops in the league offensively, and his defense has been mostly solid. The starting rotation has been good to great, despite the occasional rough start. Felix has been spotty lately, but he should be fine going forward. The youngsters (ie Walker, Paxton, Elias, Montgomery) have had bad games, but have mostly been really good, especially since the middle of May or so. The bullpen has also stabilized. It’s not as good as last year’s incredible group, but it’s good enough.

That all sounds pretty good. So what’s the problem at this moment?

For the pitching, they could use another elite reliever or two, especially with Rodney out of the closer role. But that’s not a huge issue. The real problem is three black holes in the lineup and a worthless bench. Two of them, Zunino and Cano, aren’t going anywhere. Zunino is so valued defensively, and there is such a dearth of decent catchers, that the team will just live with a weak bat. If he could rebound just to last year’s numbers, that would be a huge addition. Cano seems to be turning things around a bit. His season-long slump is probably the largest contributor to the offensive issues.

The other hole is left field, where Dustin Ackley has been a complete failure. He had a great game tonight, so maybe he can build on that. Yeah, it’s probably not going to happen. The addition of Mark Trumbo has patched the problem slightly, but they could still use a good every day outfielder, or even a right-handed bat to platoon since Ruggiano and Weeks failed pretty miserably.

So what can they do? Is there help in the farm system?

Maybe, but not really.  Tacoma has some veterans who might help some. Guys like Franklin Gutierrez, Jesus Montero, and maybe even Stefen Romero are having solid seasons and might be able to help, but they all have issues too.  Guti is still Guti and is unable to play many games in a row. Scouts are still skeptical about Montero, and Romero was terrible in the bigs last year. Still, any one of them or a few others could come up and provide a boost for a month or more. There just aren’t any guarantees.

Trading Willie Bloomquist for Chris Taylor or even Ketel Marte (once he’s healthy) would be an immediate improvement, but they seem reluctant to move on from Willie. This squad could really use a top prospect promotion to provide some excitement and a short term boost, but there’s no one who fits that bill.

I though rebuilding the farm system was supposed to be Jack’s specialty?

It was, but most of the advanced talent has been promoted already. What’s left is young and/or struggling mightily. There’s still hope for the future but little help for the present.

Trades?

Hard to say. It’s a little early still, and the Mariners don’t have a lot of talent to trade. I’d be looking for a righty outfielder though, especially one who can get on base, along with a righty set up man and a backup catcher. No idea if they’ll find them, but that would be ideal.

People have started talking about firing McClendon and Zduriencik. Would that help?

That’s a very different question for each guy. With McClendon, who knows. I’m always skeptical of manager changes being the answer, but something’s clearly not clicking with this team. I like Lloyd, but sometimes a new voice is the difference. He’s indicated the team is struggling with expectations, which isn’t really mark on the good side of his ledger. In short, I’d be fine with it either way.

With Jack, it’s a little more complicated, simply because changing general managers means a much bigger shakeup. It’s become clear that he struggles with building a complete team. He has a poor record in picking non-elite free agent hitters. And for all of his scouting accolades, his offensive prospects have mostly struggled in the minors and especially when reaching Seattle. On the plus side, he’s improved the talent significantly and demonstrated an ability to build a cheap and effective pitching staff. I could go either way on this one too. I think the Mariners could do much better than Zduriencik, but I’m profoundly skeptical that they actually would. Mariner management is anything but inspiring.

Just a hunch, but barring a good next month to put them into contention, I’d say one or both of them will be gone before the end of the season, and possibly very soon.

So, is the season basically over?

I would say no. The M’s really just need for people to start hitting like they have before. A really good hot streak or two by someone would help too. The pitching will keep them in nearly every game, especially with Iwakuma and Paxton eventually returning. This team just needs some kind of spark. I have no idea what it will be or if they’ll ever receive it, but the pieces are mostly there to be a solid team. Whether they can get back into contention depends on whether Houston and Texas come back to the pack, but I think they will.

The preseason hopes were clearly too high for this team. The M’s have good talent, but it’s (mostly) not elite. They were always a team who could work its way into the postseason and then hope for a hot streak to carry them to the World Series, like the Royals last year. It would have taken everything going right to be a juggernaut, and instead everything went wrong, at least to start the season. This is a better team than they’ve shown, and is pretty fun to watch when they’re on, but it’s anyone’s guess when or if it will click and they’ll turn into the winning team everyone expected.

-Matthew

A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I, with the baby in the backseat, were driving home to spend the weekend with my parents and see some friends and relatives. We got to talking about my grandma, who passed away some seven or eight years ago. There was no one quite like Grandma Long, a spunky lady who overflowed with wisdom, loved people and fun, and worked harder in her retirement than I will likely ever work in my life. Every loss leaves a hole, but some holes are bigger than others, and the void created when she was killed one night in a car accident was massive.

As we were saying we missed her, I realized, and said to Lisa, that it’s sad knowing Wyatt, my son, will never know her. That someone who was such a major part of my life will be known to my son only through stories is something I had never given much thought. Life moves on. Lord willing, he will know and love people I will never meet, but there are people and memories I wish could be part of his life as they are mine.

I had a similar thought yesterday in the Mariners team store. They had a collection of the new alternate jerseys with the usual suspects on the back: Cano, Felix, Cruz, Zunino. And there at the end of the row was Griffey’s #24, and I thought, with another tiny bit of sadness, “Wyatt will never see Ken Griffey Jr. play baseball.”

It’s surprising, when you stop to think about it, how short a baseball career is in the course of a life. My brother is about nine years younger than I am. At this point, we experience much together, because we are good friends but also because we are grown and finally at similar points in our lives. Still, that nine year gap distinctly changes memories. He was five when the ’95 Mariners made their playoff run. I frequently rave about Randy Johnson, but he has few memories of the Big Unit as a Mariner. His pitching hero, as a fellow lefty, was Jamie Moyer, about whom I’ve always been somewhat lukewarm, probably because of those Johnson memories. Nine years is not much between friends or brothers, but it’s half a career for the greatest left-handed pitcher of all time.

What is thrilling and restorative about sports is there is a new legend for every generation. I have Griffey and Randy and Edgar, and Jordan and Pedro and Vlad and Marques Tuiasosopo and so many others. But I grew up listening to my dad talk about Willie Mays and Sonny Sixkiller, whom I didn’t come close to seeing. We might miss a legend, but if we are lucky enough to live a long, full life, we will see many more.

I envy Wyatt those early years of fandom and discovery, which I’m long past and from which he’s still some years away. He has yet to make his first trips to Safeco and Husky Stadium. He gets to experience for the first time baseball and football and basketball, not to mention books and music and everything else that makes life wonderful. He spent his first months in the hospital, fighting to live, and it thrills my heart to know he will never remember those months, that I can bear those hard memories for him as a father so he can fill his memory with sunny days spent with those he loves.

I don’t know who Wyatt’s legends will be. He’s too young to really remember anything but the tail end of any current player’s career. Maybe Mike Zunino, who I’ve decided is his current favorite player, will still be around. The timeline could be about right for Alex Jackson or even maybe Taijaun Walker. He’ll be wearing a Felix jersey onesie tomorrow for opening day, and I hope he gets to half-remember a couple of his vintage seasons. Most likely, his sports and music heroes are currently teenage kids in the middle of nowhere, waiting to be drafted or get their big break.

Sports are regenerative, and I can only hope Wyatt’s legends are as great as mine were. I know they will be, because that is their nature; legends are made as much by our lives and memories as they are by their own greatness. I don’t know the names, and I don’t know where his life will take him, but I know he has so much ahead.

-Matthew

On September 28th last year, Andrew wrote a memorial for the Mariners’ playoff hopes. After that, we were in such mourning we haven’t written a thing since. That’s not really the reason, of course. As usual, life just got in the way.

We missed a lot in the last six months. The Seahawks rode one of the best defensive runs ever clear to the Superbowl. We won’t mention what happened there, but the fact that a Seattle team was playing for their second championship in a row is amazing. The Huskies finished an uneven and ultimately disappointing football season. My hopes for Chris Petersen’s ability to create a Rose Bowl-level program haven’t dimmed, but 2014 definitely didn’t go according to plan. Speaking of uneven, Husky basketball had one of the strangest and most frustrating seasons we’ll ever see, going from undefeated to terrible and losing their most exciting player in years in the process.

Our personal lives have been even crazier. Andrew has a growing business giving guitar lessons and recently started a Disney travel blog. Dan became a father for the third time in October. I can’t imagine wrangling three boys under five years old, and he has a busy job running an assisted living home on top of it.

I became a dad in September, which was incredible and scary, since our baby, Wyatt, wasn’t due until December. He spent the next 11 weeks at the hospital receiving breathing and feeding support before finally coming home in early December. There were lots of scary moments, but he’s made miraculous growth and improvement and is now six months old and has gained 13 pounds since being born at 1 lb. 10 oz. I’m finding parenthood is just as tiring as people say but even better than I could have imagined.

I don’t know how much any of us will write, but we wanted to reopen the blog because we miss it. It’s fun being part of the larger conversation about the teams and sports we love so much. And if you hadn’t noticed, the Mariners, my personal favorite team of all, could be in for a huge year. It still seems somewhat impossible that they’ll be as good as so many are projecting, but hopefully that’s just years of cynicism and disappointment showing through. However the season turns out, it seemed a shame to stop blogging just before they get good, after going through so many terrible seasons.

We had to change the blog address slightly, due to some domain issues. It’s now goodguysports.com. All we did was drop an “s” in the middle, which we probably should have done all along. Thanks for reading, any of you still out there, and we look forward to hearing from you.

Believe big!

-Matthew and the Good Guys

Wyatt now and then

Dan’s three boys

1.  The Heartbreak

I arrived at my seat, with some family members, about an hour before game time.  I was in such a hurry to buy tickets last night, they weren’t at all where I thought that’d be but we had a great view of the Seattle skyline and we were sitting by people who cared in game 162 of the season so it didn’t really matter.  As we took our seats, Oakland took a 2-0 lead.  Not the best start to the day, but it didn’t seem to be a crippling blow as it was only the second inning in that game.  There were a lot of people there but the energy in the building was definitely a nervous one.

The first ‘moment’ of the day was when Felix came in from the bullpen after his warmup tosses.  As has been customary this season, Aloe Blacc’s ‘The Man’ blared through the Safeco PA as Felix walked in, Zunino by his side.  My wife had just ran in to a friend from her hometown that I’d met a few times before.  She stood and talked to her, while I stood behind her.  As they were having a conversation the crowd rose to it’s feet, saluting the man who’s been here when these games didn’t matter.  The yellow towels were swirling and the crowd was roaring.  Felix didn’t flinch, he just kept walking.  A man on a mission.  I slowly backed away from my wife and her friend so that they didn’t see the tear in my eye.  I’m not sure why I got emotional.  Maybe it was the Dave Niehaus call I had heard about half in hour earlier that I had been reflecting on ever since.  Maybe it was the stress from the last 2 weeks in my personal life finally having an outlet.  Most likely it was the realization that my favorite player was pitching in the last game of the season and it finally mattered.  Felix and Seattle have been joined at the hip for a long time and I think we’ve started to empathize with each other.  Whatever it was that got to me, I brushed it aside and got in my seat.

Watching the game was a mix of waving my yellow towel around when the game necessitated it and following the A’s-Rangers game on my phone.  There was the joy of seeing Felix rise to the occasion and the Saunders double.  There was the hope of the Rangers having first and third with no outs followed by chants of ‘Let’s go, Rangers!’ by the Safeco crowd.  But, in the end it wasn’t enough.  The Rangers just couldn’t get anything off of Sonny Gray.  As the Mariners were taking care of business, the sobering thought that this was the last game of the season took hold faster than a Felix fastball reaches Mike Zunino’s glove.  The A’s had scored 2 more in the top of the 9th.  It was all over and it was only the 5th inning.

2.  Anger/Sadness

Once the shock wore off, it was followed by a wave of sports depression.  The Rangers game was just about to go final, they weren’t mounting a comeback, and thoughts of all the missed opportunities wandered over to my head.  Just one more game.  If the M’s had just scored 2 runs for Walker on Wednesday.  Or if Brad Miller hadn’t flipped the ball over Cano’s head on an April night in Arlington.  Maybe if John Buck had been better at catching baseballs.  What if Rodney had been able to throw strikes in the 10th against the A’s a few weeks ago?  Or what if he hadn’t prematurely shot an arrow over the Anaheim dugout right after the All-Star game?  Never mind on that last one, that was cool.

Maybe it’s the Seattle fan in me.  I think the long-time Seattle fans fit in well with the Legion of Boom.  We always feel slighted, regardless of if we should.  I truly believe we don’t catch half as many breaks as other teams do.  I believe that we get jobbed by umps more than any team.  I have no idea if it’s true but I believe it is.  What if we had just caught a few more breaks or had a few calls go our way.

The Texas-Oakland game went final.

Those were only some of the games where the Mariners had a chance.  And as the brain thought about those terrible wasted games, it moved on to players.  Did Kendrys Morales not pick up a bat all winter long?  Did he just eat the whole time?  Why have Austin Jackson and Chris Denorfia not had an extra base-hit in what seems like 2 months?  Why was James Jones playing so much after it was apparent he was ineffective?  Why was Sean Barber a major league umpire?  There were so many things to be upset about but it clashed with another emotion. Gratitude.

3.  Gratitude

In the midst of the sadness that there wasn’t going to be baseball in Seattle tomorrow, there was a whole lot of appreciation to.

I was 5 years old when Edgar hit ‘The Double’.  I was an 11 year-old who didn’t have cable TV at his house during the 2001 season.  2007 was okay but I was busy playing baseball myself and then there was that terrible losing streak.  And Jose Vidro.  2009 was the season I remembered best.  I still love that team but they were built on nostalgia, quite a bit of luck (check out that run differential), and they were never really in the pennant race despite their parade around the field after the last game.

This was finally my team.  A team I followed through thick and thin.  Whether I was in a cabin in the mountains without internet or in a theme park in Orlando I always knew what this team was doing.  There were so many moments to remember.  Watching Opening Night with the rest of the Good Guys, followed by a sweep of the Angels.  There was the Seager walk-off and resurgence after the 8 game-skid.  Roenis Elias’ complete game against the Tigers, those routs of the Red Sox in Safeco, and Felix’s unbelievable run.  There were the 2 times the Mariners came back to score 5 runs in the top of the 9th when they were down to their last out.  There was the Robinson Cano home run in front a sell-out crowd that tied the game up against the A’s.  And there were the last 3 days.  As much as the last road trip hurt, the last 4 games were a joy.  They also described this team.  A young, resilient team with character that just didn’t quite have enough.

Felix Hernandez was pulled from the game shortly after Oakland had clinched a playoff spot.  He received an ovation fit only for royalty.  That’s what he is in Seattle.  As he left the field I (and I’m guessing any Mariner fan) felt so many things – pride, sorrow, joy, hope, anger, gratitude.  We felt those things for Felix and Felix felt those things for us.  Empathy between the king of a city and his loyal subjects.

Robbie came off the field a few outs later and as I watched him and Felix embrace I felt more hope and gratitude than I did sadness.  Although, the sadness was still there.

4.  Letting go (or not)

As I was driving home after a few stops, the Mariners post-game show was wrapping up.  Gary Hill and Shannon were talking about how it was all over, they sounded a little shocked still.  It was time to end the season, let go and get ready for next year.  As the show ended they played a montage of moments throughout this season.  All the great moments from this season came through the car’s stereo one last time.  I could have listened to that all day.  I wanted to get home to watch highlights from my favorite games.

During the game, once the Mariners chances at the playoffs were gone, I cracked a few jokes.  “This will probably be the last time I see Kendrys hit in a Mariners uniform!”  “Hey dad, what dates are you taking me to Spring Training again?”  It was my way of getting over this season and looking ahead to the next one.

I’m probably not going to let go of this team though.  Depending on the next few years, this will either be the team that jump started it all or missed a big opportunity.  I probably won’t be letting go of this team but I will look ahead because the future is pretty bright.

5.  Hope

At the end of the day, the Mariners missed out on a big opportunity.  But at the end of my day, I went to go see my nephew who was born 3 months early in the hospital.  I got to see him open his eyes for the first time.  It makes sports seem pretty small and puts them in their place.  Sports are important to me but they can’t ever bring me the joy that I have when I get to see that little guy.

Selfishly, I hope the Mariners just decided to wait until next year.  That way my brother can enjoy the run more than he was able to this year, and he can do it with his son on his lap.

Surely, this was disappointing but there’s reason to be hopeful.  We have a manager who understands his team, which might be more important than I thought.  We have a star second baseman and third baseman.  We have the young pitchers who were promised to us that came up big down the stretch, Paxton and Walker.  We have Ackley, LoMo, and Saunders who all look like they’ve found something in the last few months.  We’ll have those same arms in the bullpen.  And there’s a good amount of talent aside from that too.  There’s also Felix.  He’s ours.  The foundation was laid this year, now it just has to be built upon.

I’ll save an off-season post for later hopefully, but the age old Seattle Sports Insider question of ‘Can this player win me a pennant?’ is turning more and more in the Mariners favor.  So, I’ll look forward to next year.  I’ll be sad tomorrow night around 7 when I wish I could hear Dave Sims say goofy things and Blowers come back with his increasingly good insight.  But for now, I just look forward to the off-season and next year.  Go M’s!