Mariners' road trip from Hell has fans fearing the worst for playoff push

The Seattle Mariners have put on a movie that their fans have seen before. Everyone knows how it ends, and what's happening now feels an awful lot like how the end usually begins.

The Mariners concluded a nine-game road trip on Wednesday, and to say that the entire thing was a bummer would be like saying that taking a sledgehammer to the knee is mildly unpleasant. They lost seven games on the trip, including each of the last five.

Though the two clubs have 142 wins between them, the Philadelphia Phillies made beating the Mariners look especially easy over the last three days. They swept the M's right out of Citizens Bank Park, bookending the series with blowouts of 12-7 and 11-2 that somehow felt less close than those final scores indicate.

The implications? They're bad. Whereas the M's were tied for first place in the American League West after a 1-0 win in Baltimore last Tuesday, they're now 1.5 games back of the Houston Astros and clinging to just a 2.0-game advantage for the AL's third wild card spot.

The Mariners have gone from skyrocketing to freefalling in a hurry

If there's any solace to take right now, it's in how FanGraphs still gives the Mariners an 87.1 percent chance of playing in October for only the second time since 2001. They're also just four percentage points shy of the Astros in their odds to win the division.

Then again, the high-80s is just about where the Mariners' odds of making the playoffs also peaked in 2023 and 2024. Exciting stuff at the time, but all it led to was the M's falling short of the playoffs by a single game both times.

A week ago, there was just about every reason to think this year's team would prove to be choke-proof. The roster was solid even before Jerry Dipoto got to work ahead of the trade deadline, and the next thing anyone knew, Josh Naylor and Eugenio Suárez were on the corners of the infield and Caleb Ferguson was in the bullpen. It truly felt like it was World Series or bust, and even more so after the new-look club ripped off 10 wins in 11 games.

What is apparent now, though, is that all that excitement was hiding deficiencies that were still there.

For one thing, this is simply not the same starting rotation that the M's had in 2024. I mean, it literally is in terms of names and faces, but not in terms of productivity or intimidation. The rotation's ERA is up from 3.38 to 4.08, and Adam Jude of the Seattle Times pointed out just how much the road trip didn't help:

It wasn't a great trip for the bullpen either, which posted a 5.53 ERA in the first eight games and then got shelled for eight runs in the finale on Wednesday. Suffice it to say that Dan Wilson's attempt to get through the middle innings with Taylor Saucedo — yes, the same Taylor Saucedo who has spent much of the year banished in the minors — did not pan out.

A boneheaded decision on Wilson's part? You bet. But he can only work with what he has to work with, and the reality is that Dipoto didn't stick the landing with his pre-deadline efforts to improve the pen. It needed another high-leverage arm, and not having better talent for medium-leverage innings was always going to be a downstream effect of that.

It is not yet time to bury the Mariners, who will at least get a chance to reset over the next week. They need Thursday's off day in the worst way, and then they'll play out a six-game homestand against the Athletics and San Diego Padres. Both are tough customers right now, but so are the M's at T-Mobile Park to the tune of a 37-25 record.

Another nine-game road trip lurks after this homestand, however, and the Mariners generally have a more difficult remaining schedule than the Astros. Meanwhile, their closest pursuer in the wild card race is a red-hot Kansas City Royals squad that has won five in a row and 26 out of 41 since the start of July.

To paraphrase Yogi Berra, it's getting late early for the Mariners. And where their playoff pursuit is concerned, this movie is getting a little too scary for comfort.