Mariners' offense already approaching the 2023 record for ineptitude

As we sit here on the morning of game 2 in the Toronto series, watching the Mariners wrap up their first road trip of the season, it reminds me that this is the life of a Mariners fan. Hope springs eternal throughout the offseason. The moves made sense on paper, there was a worry about defense, but the team was supposed to be better. The pitching staff had a massive ceiling and even was ranked as the best in baseball.

Yet, that hasn't been the case, and the team is already struggling in 2024. Sitting at 4-7, it's not that the team has a bad record to start April, but it's how they've done it that really stings. The Mariners have the 4th worst run differential in all of baseball, better only than the 1-win White Sox, 1-win Marlins, and the Rockies. They've also given up the second most runs in the American League up to this point.

The Mariners offense is once again struggling to open the season

All of that is separate from what most people want to hear about, and that would be the struggles that the offense has had so far this year. With 11 games played, the Mariners have yet to need a second hand to count their runs in a game, scoring five runs just three times this season. To some, that probably seems like a historic run of ineptitude, or something that hasn't happened in a long time to the Mariners. Right?

Wrong.

Last April, the Mariners defeated the Rockies 1-0 on April 16th. That was the beginning of a stretch where they would go 4-8 while scoring only 37 runs. They gave up 55 runs over that stretch as well. The Mariners head into game 2 against the Jays looking to avoid a similar fate to that stretch. They've already given up more runs (57) than they did in that stretch, but a nice offensive game today would help them to avoid that numbers of 37 as well as avoid the same record of 4-8.

The Mariners also had an 11-game stretch of the same 5 runs or less in 2022, before defeating the Yankees 8-6. In May of 2021, they would actually go 14 games in a row without scoring over 5 runs, and then they had a separate 10-game stretch later in the year where they would do the same thing.

I'm not getting into which players are struggling specifically. That's a whole separate article. Even talking about where they rank in specific categories takes its own article and was something that we talked about earlier this week.

While this offensive lull sucks, it happens every year to teams. It is just rough for us as fans (and I'm sure the players feel worse about it) that it's happening in April. Of course, if the team's pitching can't stop giving up runs, they are going to need to start scoring more than 5 every game in order to have a chance. Better times are coming, and the hope is it starts today against Chris Bassitt to get the offense turned around.