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Stop me if you've heard this one before. The Mariners play a nice stretch of baseball and you start to get your hopes up that they are figuring it out. That they can keep chipping away at the Astros lead in the AL West and make it a close race. Then, they fall flat on their fave by either blowing a lead or losing to a team that they should defeat.
Sound familiar? It seems to have been the case with the Mariners over the last 20... years.
That's what the team is faced with once again. They had started clawing back at the Astros and were only 3.5 games back. The Mariners had games coming up against the Angels and Athletics while the Astros were going to have to play the Royals. Fast forward to less than a week of time going by, and the Mariners now have a three-game losing streak that has seen them blow a 4-1 lead, lose to a 20-year-old rookie in embarrassing fashion, and give up a walk-off homer (just like the 5-4 Angels loss) only this time to the Athletics by the same score.
The Mariners have stumbled once again
I honestly struggle to wrap my head around just how much ground the Mariners have given up and lost since June 18th. They were 44-31 with a 10-game lead. Now, they are 69-69 with a 6-game defecit. That's a record of 25-38, which would come out to a full season record of 64-98. In case you were wondering, that would make them the 4th-worst team in all of baseball.
There was hope before, albeit slim. Now though, after watching this latest losing streak, it just seems like the season is over. 24 games and a six game defecit seems to much to overcome for this team. Can they really go 18-6 for the rest of the year? That would be with the Astros going 12-12 as well, and they would still need a one-game playoff to make it past them.
Just wait though. The Mariners are about to go on a run. They'll ge tto the Houston series only a few games back, and then sweep them. They'll go into the final series tied or a game back, and then lose the series and miss out on the playoffs by a single game. Only because that feels like the most Mariners way to end the season that I can think of. If they would've taken care of business at all over the last 60 or so games, they would be in a great position. Instead, it's going to be too little too late for the Mariners.