Dan Wilson's favorite strategy is doomed unless Mariners upgrade the roster

That the Seattle Mariners are 22-25 despite a plus-11 run differential could be written off as "just one of those things." Yet placing blame at the feet of manager Dan Wilson isn't unfair, particularly given how his pinch hitter strategy just keeps failing.

As the season has gone on, the drumbeat of criticism over how Wilson uses pinch hitters has only grown louder. And as Ryan Divish of The Seattle Times covered, Friday's 2-0 loss to the San Diego Padres may have been the low point. Wilson used three pinch hitters and they yielded just one walk and no hits in five plate appearances.

It felt like the Mariners' fate was sealed in the seventh inning, when Wilson inserted Connor Joe and Rob Refsnyder for left-on-right matchups against Adrian Morejon. A rally didn't happen, and the absence of Luke Raley and Dominic Canzone in those two spots later made it too easy for Mason Miller, who fanned Joe and Refsnyder as part of a four-out save.

All told, the numbers tell a damning story. Wilson has dished out 51 plate appearances to pinch hitters, the seventh-most in MLB. Yet those have produced a .580 OPS, the ninth-lowest in the league.

It's not actually Dan Wilson's fault that his pinch hitters aren't getting the job done

Yet if the whole idea of pinch hitters is to gain an edge in moments when gaining an edge matters, Wilson has actually picked his spots well.

According to Baseball Reference, the average leverage index for Wilson's pinch hitters is 1.76. That's well above the neutral mark of 1.0, and indeed the fifth-highest figure in the league.

This tells us that Wilson is not being frivolous when he calls on pinch hitters, and that's not the only way that he generally has the right idea. He almost always uses pinch hitters to gain the platoon advantage, as he did with Joe and Refsnyder on Friday.

Raley is having a fine year, as is Canzone. Yet each has historically been helpless in left-on-left matchups, to the tune of a career OPS in the .500 range for both. By contrast, Joe has a .745 OPS against lefties and Refsnyder has an .802 OPS against lefties.

But at this point, it is indeed hard to shrug off how the right process keeps leading to bad results. That mostly comes down on Refsnyder and how he's not doing the one job the Mariners are paying him $6.25 million to do. As he also has high strikeout rates against both lefties in general (28.8 percent) and in pinch hitting spots (35.3 percent), his signing increasingly resembles a failed experiment.

Joe is at least batting .400 with a .625 OBP as a pinch hitter, yet he's frankly miscast as a platoon bat. That .745 OPS against lefties amounts to an average-ish 102 wRC+. The Mariners are no better off with him than they would be with Victor Robles (career 101 wRC+ vs. LHP) if he was healthy.

What is needed, then, are better options. Because he has a 1.183 OPS against lefties and a .954 OPS overall for Triple-A Tacoma, Brennen Davis is one the Mariners must consider. There's also the switch-hitting Brock Rodden, who has a .291 average against lefties for Tacoma.

For his part, Wilson seems determined to stick with the bit in hopes that his pinch hitters come through eventually. Yet the longer that continues to not be the case, the closer he should come to pleading his case to the front office that he's not the problem.

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