Mariners can't hide from MLB insider's blunt assessment of how to save their season

Memorial Day is usually when baseball people start acting like the standings are suddenly legally binding. Before that, "It’s early.” There’s more context. Mercury is in retrograde.

Well, now we’re getting ready to cross over into June. And the Mariners aren’t walking into the checkpoint with clean hands.

There have been plenty of national check-ins floating around. None of them are especially flattering. ESPN’s Memorial Day panel had Seattle all over the “biggest disappointment” conversation, which isn’t exactly a shocker. This team was one win from the World Series last year and is now stuck trying to explain why the American League West still looks so available.  

We’re past the 50-game mark, and we’re looking at a mediocre AL West begging for somebody to act like a grown-up.

Bob Nightengale’s USA Today Memorial Day grades were even more direct. The Mariners got a D, and the takeaway should be taped to the front office big board: “The Mariners have no choice but to get help at the deadline to prevent this season from being a disaster.”  

Mariners’ Memorial Day reality check should force Jerry Dipoto out of waiting mode

This isn’t a complicated mystery. The Mariners need better right-handed bats. They need bullpen help, and they also need the bullpen they already have to get healthy. And, most importantly, a front office that treats those needs like active problems instead of weather patterns.

We can criticize the national media all we’d like. But this time around, they’re saying the thing Mariners fans have been saying in increasingly exhausted tones for weeks.

The lineup still gets too easy to navigate. The right-handed hitting situation has been held together with pure hope. Rob Refsnyder batting cleanup over the weekend wasn’t just a weird choice. It was a flare gun. It exposed exactly how uncomfortable this roster is.

Andrés Muñoz is still the guy in the bullpen. But a contender cannot spend an entire summer asking the same small handful of high-leverage arms to save games that the offense and, sometimes the rotation, keep making messier than necessary.

The Mariners are still close enough for all of this to be fixable. Seattle is not buried in the AL West. ESPN even had Buster Olney pointing to the Mariners as one of the teams that could emerge from the American League clutter, especially with Colt Emerson already up, Cal Raleigh eventually coming back, and Kade Anderson looming as a possible summer weapon.  

That’s all fine and well. But also, that's why the Tarik Skubal conversation shouldn’t be dismissed. Is it complicated? Without a doubt. Is it expensive? Stupidly. Would it require the kind of prospect cost that makes everyone clutch their pearls? Buh-bye, Lazaro Montes and company. It would hurt, and there’s no way around it.

But are we really closing that door because it feels too aggressive? That would be a very Mariners way to talk themselves out of something bold before the conversation even gets interesting.

Skubal should not be treated like the only path. Plus, we aren’t exactly sure what version of him is speeding back from loose bodies surgery. But if Detroit keeps wobbling, they become more open to uncomfortable conversations, and if there is any version of the deal where salary movement changes the math, Seattle has to at least stay in the room.

Not every big idea is reckless. Sometimes the reckless thing is pretending the modest version is automatically wiser.

For all his classically wrong takes, Nightengale gets this assessment right. The season is not a disaster yet. But it is absolutely flirting with one.

Add us as a preferred source on Google

Follow