**Seattle Mariners 2024 Season Thread ** | 6-8 | v. Cubs & Reds |

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Y’all really about to flip Encarnacion for something nice... the amount of balance in your guys’ lineup is crazy.
 
Encarnacion with two homers in an inning. Last time a Mariner did that was back in 2002 vs. the White Sox with both Bret Boone and Mike Cameron doing it in the same inning. Cameron had four dingers in the game.
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That cws game is one I won't forget. When Cammy almost sent #5 into the seats...man. Just read yesterday Mike is actually back with the team working with Dipoto on some things behind the scenes.
 
Happy Felix Day, lots of homers, loads of runs, solid pitching. No errors. W.

Felix's line, you ask? 1IP, 3H, 2R, 2ER, 0BB, 0K. 29 pitches, 20 strikes. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
 
Felix post game said he thinks it's something like food poisoning,

It's strange because i thought he had settled down after giving up the 2 early runs....then the trainers come out....he stays in to finish the inning....then they pan to him in the dugout and he looks like me after a night of drinking
 
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So I’m listening to the latest lookout landing podcast and question they had from someone was “do you think jay bruce will be around come indenpence day?”

With how he and Edwin have started this season what do you guys think?
 
SpeedforceKJ said:
So I’m listening to the latest lookout landing podcast and question they had from someone was “do you think jay bruce will be around come indenpence day?”

With how he and Edwin have started this season what do you guys think?
Click to expand...

If the team continues its success I can see just one of them going for the best offer in return. Closer or SP who can step in right away. I would assume you'd get more for Edwin - but who knows.

If the team falls flat and by July it's back to the norm, I think both are gone for whatever in return

Going to be exciting to watch this all unfold
 
Having watched both play for the reds I’ve always been more prone to Bruce(though the sounds of my grandfather watching the reds on tv just shouting at the tv/jay because “all he does is swing for the fence” :rofl:

Personally I’d rather us keep Bruce and move Edwin if it came down to it but agree, if we’re back to the normal neither will be here come that time. I think no matter what whoever we move it’ll be for a pitcher.
 
I hope they do whats best for the team and not simply fold for the sake of 'cutting payroll'

I hear we have gusts of 30 MPH in KC tonight, hopefully the wind is blowing out :evil: :lol:
 
From MLB.com

4 reasons why the Mariners are 11-2
Power, pitching, speed contributing to Seattle's strong start

KANSAS CITY -- Let this sink in for a minute. Two Major League teams have scored six or more runs in 11 of their first 13 games in a season since 1908. That would be the 1932 Yankees and -- after Tuesday’s 6-3 win over the Royals -- the 2019 Mariners.

Things are getting historic in a hurry for a surprising Seattle club, which is off to an 11-2 start with a team expected to take as step back this season with 15 newcomers on its current 25-man roster and having traded away the veteran nucleus of last year’s 89-win club.

Here are four reasons the Mariners are rolling early even without Robinson Cano, Nelson Cruz, Jean Segura, Edwin Diaz, James Paxton, et al.

1. The power is definitely on

Right fielder Jay Bruce, one of those newcomers, extended the team’s streak with a home run to open the season to 13 straight games with a first-inning shot off Royals starter Jakob Junis.

The Mariners are now tied for the second most consecutive games with a homer to start a season, one back of the Indians’ record of 14, set in 2002. Seattle is tied with the 1954 Cubs and 2017 Tigers with 13.

Bruce, one of five players acquired from the Mets in the Cano/Diaz deal, now has seven homers in 12 games, tying him with Cody Bellinger for the MLB lead. Bruce was batting just .186 heading into Tuesday, but seven of his first nine hits this season have now cleared the fence.

“You ever go to the store to buy one banana?” Bruce asked with a semi-straight face. “No, you buy them in bunches. That’s usually how homers come.”

The 32-year-old totaled nine homers in 94 games last year in an injury-plagued season, but hit 36 in 2017 for the Mets and Indians, and has been healthy this spring for Seattle.

“I feel like there’s a lot more for me in the tank this season as far as just playing, just overall,” Bruce said. “I try to turn the page as quickly as I can after anything happens, whether good or bad. I’m just looking forward to the next game.”

Seattle’s 33 homers ties the record for most in the first 13 games of a season, equaling the 2000 Cardinals.

2. On the Marco again

Not all the Mariners’ success has been about mashing homers. Marco Gonzales became the second Seattle pitcher to win his first four starts to open a season while lowering his ERA to 3.16 with six strong innings.

The 27-year-old southpaw allowed six hits and three runs (two earned) with two walks and five strikeouts in a smooth 97-pitch performance. Gonzales got a jump on the rest of MLB by winning Seattle’s Opening Day in Tokyo against the A’s a week before everyone else started playing, then he beat the Red Sox in the Mariners’ home opener.

He’s now added wins over the Angels and Royals, giving up just two earned runs in 14 1/3 innings in those latest two victories. The only other Mariner to win at least four straight starts to open a season was Rick Honeycutt, who racked up six consecutive victories in 1980.

Mariners starters are now 9-0 with a 3.66 ERA in 13 games.

“I’m pretty team-oriented,” Gonzales said. “I love that we’re out swinging the bats. Run support is the story of the start to the season so far. It’s pretty comforting when you take the mound knowing our guys are going to come out swinging.”

3. Speed-Dee doesn’t hurt either

Add No. 9 hitter Dee Gordon as another non-thumper reason for Seattle’s early success. The 30-year-old second baseman dealt with a broken toe that slowed his second half last year, but he’s off and running again in '19, and went 3-for-4 with two RBIs and swiped his MLB-leading sixth stolen base.

For all their power display, Seattle also leads the Majors with 15 stolen bases in 13 games, thanks to Gordon and fellow speedster Mallex Smith, who has four. The Mariners have outstolen their opponents, 15-5.

“No pain. My feet are healthy. I just get to play baseball again,” said Gordon, who feels back to being himself at second base again after last year’s center-field experiment.

Gordon is hitting .341, but his glove was even more critical in the eighth inning, as he made spectacular back-to-back diving plays -- on a 112-mph grounder by Hunter Dozier with two on and one out, then snaring a 105-mph line drive by Chris Owings for the third out to preserve a 6-3 lead for Rule 5 Draft pick, reliever Brandon Brennan.

“That man is my savior right now,” Brennan said. “I love him. Dee had an absolute great game today. You can’t be more confident on the mound than when you have a guy like that behind you.”

4. It takes a village, or at least nine guys

The Mariners racked up 15 hits and have had 12 or more in their past four games. Daniel Vogelbach went 3-for-5 with two doubles and is hitting .611 (11-for-18) with nine extra-base hits and nine RBIs in his last five games, and the entire lineup kept producing.

“Our lineup, top to bottom, has been really good,” manager Scott Servais said. “We had the one home run early -- I say just one home run, we’re kind of getting used to more. But we grinded it out, put a number of pitches on their starter and got him out of the game after four innings and were able to tack on a few runs late, which was really helpful for our bullpen tonight.”

“I think we’re hitting on all cylinders right now,” Smith said. “ We’re playing the whole game. The speed game. The power game. Defense, we have our little miscues, but it’s been made up other places. We’ve got a really complete team, top to bottom.”

“No matter how rosy-colored glasses you look through, it’s not going to be like this all year,” Bruce said. “It’s important to win these games and take advantage of our opportunities. We’re playing great baseball right now. We’re playing with a lot of energy, our starting pitchers are taking care of business and we’re working on defense every single day. It’s been good.”
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From the Athletic (sorry if posted):

Keri: The red-hot Mariners are trying something different — rebuilding without stinking

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By Jonah Keri Apr 9, 2019

The best and highest-scoring team in baseball isn’t the defending champs. It isn’t the mega-talented club that won the year before. It isn’t even any of your favorite sleepers. The team with the best record so far is an out-of-nowhere early juggernaut, a ballclub that would be nearing the longest-ever undefeated run to start a season if not for a couple of late-inning blips.

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome your MLB fever dream, the 2019 Seattle Mariners.





The @Mariners were down 5.

That's nothing for the league's hottest team.

If you wanted to break down the reasons for the Mariners’ 10-2 start, you’d start by invoking small sample size. No team, no matter how good, can sustain that kind of winning pace over the long slog of a season; even a single month of .833 baseball is nearly impossible. But dig deeper, and you can trace both the M’s hot start and their best-in-baseball offense to another factor: When the Mariners made the decision to rebuild, they didn’t want to completely stink while doing it.

As a team, Seattle’s batting a huge .287/.374/.571 this season, which works out to 68 percent better than league average on a park-adjusted basis. The leaders of that prolific offense are mostly players acquired in offseason trades.

The Mariners traded away enough top players to make you think they were engineering a complete teardown. To the Mets went $240 million second baseman Robinson Canó and lights-out closer Edwin Díaz. Power-hitting catcher Mike Zunino landed in Tampa Bay. Two-time All-Star shortstop Jean Segura relocated to Philly. Staff ace James Paxton shuffled off to the Bronx. Top setup man Alex Colomé joined the White Sox. Outfielder Ben Gamel departed for Milwaukee.

But the players the M’s acquired in return didn’t fit the mold of a team trying to strip everything down to the studs. There were few A-ball phenoms. No Baseball America top-25 wunderkinds. Very few players who required three or four years of seasoning to determine if you were getting big-league material in return.

There were multiple reasons why that didn’t happen. For one thing, teams have become hyper-protective of their most hyped prospects. No one wants to be the general manager who gives up John Smoltz for Doyle Alexander, Jeff Bagwell for Larry Andersen, or to use a more recent example, Fernando Tatís Jr. for James Shields. So many late-teens and early-20s powerhouses have made an instant impact in the majors at rock-bottom salaries, driving the next wave of such players to sky-high valuations.

The Mariners also didn’t offer any absolute, no-doubt commodities last winter. As good as Díaz and Canó are, Canó’s gigantic salary meant that potential suitors would need to use up huge chunks of their budgets to acquire him, thereby lowering the return the M’s could get on the package of two players. Zunino has loads of power and was great with the staff, but also has big holes in his swing. Paxton wields ace-like stuff, but he offered only two years of controllable service time and a career-high of just 160 ⅓ innings pitched in a major-league season. Colomé and Gamel were useful players, but not stars. You might’ve figured Segura, signed to an affordable long-term deal and coming off three straight seasons hitting .300 or better, could bring back an impeachable, blue-chip prospect … but the Mariners say some would-be suitors doubted his upside as he approached his 29th birthday.

So the M’s tried something different: They loaded up on major leaguers instead. Many of them were young…ish, like Domingo Santana, J.P. Crawford and Omar Narváez. But there were more established veterans too, like Mallex Smith. Even over-30 veterans — Jay Bruce, Edwin Encarnación and Anthony Swarzak — joined the fray. Not satisfied with the returns on those trades, the M’s then did some free-agent shopping too, most notably reeling in Japanese lefty Yusei Kikuchi, as well as less coveted infielder Tim Beckham.

Mariners GM Jerry Dipoto is known as the most active trader in today’s game, solidifying that reputation by pulling off one offseason deal (the Encarnación pickup) from a damn hospital bed. But more than the sheer volume of moves, the Mariners were trying something different than what we’ve seen from some other clubs in recent years. Though the M’s did land legitimate prospects in Justus Sheffield and Jarred Kelenic in their shopping spree, they decided something else too. In loading up on capable major leaguers and also hanging onto an established top-end player like outfielder Mitch Haniger, they were most definitely not going to punt on the 2019 season … or beyond.

“We went (into the offseason) with an open mind, to do whatever was the right thing for the Mariners,” said M’s assistant GM Justin Hollander. “Some teams, most notably the Astros, went down to the studs. Doing it one draft pick at a time, assuming no compensation picks, was going to be tough for us. We were 30th out of 30 in future value of our farm system, by internal and external metrics. So building that up would have taken forever.”

That 30th ranking happened because the Mariners went all-in from the start of Dipoto’s tenure in an effort to break the longest postseason drought in baseball. A team built around mid-to-late-30s sluggers like Canó and Nelson Cruz, with veterans like Kyle Seager, Félix Hernández and Segura on board, made that strategy a logical one. So the M’s spent as much as ownership would allow, then cashed in as much prospect capital as they could to push their way into October. It didn’t work. Seattle finished fifth in the AL in wins over that three-year stretch, but came up short despite 86- and 89-win efforts.

So rather than assemble a bunch of Hail Mary prospects, the Mariners went looking for players who had less distance to cover to find big-league success. In some cases, they sought out players who may have needed mechanical adjustments or better health. But more often, they targeted players they liked who simply lacked opportunity with their old teams, with a bias toward blocked younger players.

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Domingo Santana is tied for the major-league lead with 19 RBIs through 12 games. (Denny Medley / USA Today)
Santana fit that mold perfectly. Two years ago, he was a revelation, pounding 30 home runs and batting a terrific .278/.371/.505, the sixth-best mark among all full-time National League outfielders. The Brewers dared to dream even bigger. After an encouraging 86-win season left them just short of the playoffs, GM David Stearns moved swiftly and aggressively, swinging a blockbuster deal for Christian Yelich and agreeing to terms with Lorenzo Cain on a five-year, $80 million deal on the same day.

The Brewers would reap the benefits of those and other moves, winning the NL Central the next season and nearly making it all the way to the World Series. Santana was the most notable casualty of an otherwise incredible season. He struck out four times more often then he walked, hit a modest .265/.328/.412, and struggled in the statistical category that mattered most to his fortunes, appearing in just 85 games for the 2018 Brew Crew. But where other clubs might have worried that Santana wasn’t the hot commodity he’d been a year earlier, the Mariners saw a huge opportunity.

“We viewed him as a ‘could be’ top-20 outfielder,” said Hollander. “That’s the mode we have to be in, is to give opportunities to ‘cans’ and hope those ‘cans’ become ‘definite.’ We traded a player who was optionable and played all 3 outfield spots, which were things we didn’t need as much — we needed someone with the upside to take a job every day. Flexibility is less important to us now than it was two years ago.”

Santana’s been a top-20 outfielder and then some so far this season. After a 3-for-5 performance (with four RBIs) in Monday’s 13-5 annihilation of Kansas City, he’s now hitting a massive .340/.431/.640.

Ironically, it’s Santana’s former team that Hollander said the Mariners are trying to emulate. The Brewers hired Stearns after a 94-loss in 2015. Rather than tear down even further the way the Cubs and Astros had earlier in the decade, Milwaukee went looking for opportunities too, pouncing on second-chance players and those seeking opportunity, thus creating a road map that the M’s would eventually follow.

Stearns had come from Houston and played a role in building the team that both went through three straight seasons with 106 losses or more and a bunch of 0.0 local TV ratings. That same franchise was on the rise by the time he left (and would win the World Series two years later), so you could understand if Stearns preached a total gut job in Milwaukee. He just never did.

“I had some personal knowledge of the strategy in Houston, and I thought I had a solid understanding of the costs — and benefits — of going with that approach,” Stearns said. “I also had an appreciation for the unique nature of the Houston situation in terms of both the business and baseball challenges that led to their strategy selection. As we evaluated the state of the franchise in Milwaukee at the end of the 2015 season, the situation we had was different than what Houston had faced. It really is a combination of factors including revenue streams, fan engagement, market tolerance and player talent presently in the organization. There probably isn’t one overriding reason; it’s evaluating the entirety of the organizational environment and then selecting the strategy that best aligns with that environment.”

Before the Mariners, one of the best recent American League examples of a team that struggled but refused to bottom out and reaped the rewards of that approach was the A’s. Oakland did follow a run of three straight playoff berths with three straight last-place finishes. But the A’s never spearheaded the same level of purposeful capitulation that we saw in Houston and Wrigleyville.

Oakland’s executive vice of president of baseball operations Billy Beane said the Astros and Cubs had the financial wherewithal to eventually keep the great young players who came out of all the high draft picks and selloff trades that came with losing. If the A’s felt their window to keep their best young guys was more like two or three years than the five to seven that richer-market teams might have, than a complete teardown made less sense.

More than that, Beane said, you can miss out on opportunities if you set out to purposely lose, or at least to unload too many of your best players.

“I remember in 2012 … a very prominent sports website had us as the worst team in baseball after we had traded Trevor Cahill, Brett Anderson and Andrew Bailey,” said Beane. “We were 30th out of 30 and we were predicted to lose 110 games. Now we knew internally that we were a much better team than that. We thought we would win a certain number of games that would put us in the division hunt, which is ultimately what happened … We’d used our young assets to acquire young players and then we used the remaining capital we had in January to sign guys like Coco Crisp, Yoenis Céspedes, Bartolo Colon, traded for Seth Smith. All of these guys were key members of that team that went on a three-year (playoff) run for us.”

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Edwin Encarnación and Tim Beckham have been swinging for the fences — and connecting. (David Banks / USA Today)
In Seattle, Santana’s got loads of company. Leading the team’s 20-something offseason pickups, Beckham’s batting a ludicrous .400/.489/.825, with only a hamstring injury able to slow him down to date. In the older set, Encarnación blasted two homers Monday night, to hoist his season line to .324/.465/.676. And while Bruce is hitting just a buck-eighty-six, he’s also slugging .628, having swatted a tied-for-AL-best six home runs.

If anything, the Mariners’ immediate problem is finding room for all their hot hitters, several of whom would probably be best served DHing. After plus-sized slugger Daniel Vogelbach homered twice and knocked in six runs Sunday against the White Sox, it was fair to wonder how he, Bruce, Encarnación and cornerman Ryon Healy could all possibly squeeze into the lineup. Those four all started Monday’s game anyway, batting three through six and manning DH, right field, first base and third base, respectively. Vogelbach homered again and reached base four times, while Healy added a 2-for-5.

Whether this will last is, of course, the million-dollar question. The Mariners might have a bunch of crafty lefties, but that rotation might be overmatched by other AL rivals. The bullpen was already iffy with Díaz and Colomé shipped away, and new closer Hunter Strickland just hit the 60-day injured list. The team’s defense could be awful, with the M’s leading the majors in errors and dead last in Defensive Runs Saved, with the threat of more begloved comedy if Seattle dares try to wedge Bruce, Encarnación, Healy and Vogelbach into the lineup on a regular basis.

But in the meantime, the M’s could be fun as hell to watch, swinging for the fences and very possibly playing a bunch of 10-8 games for now. In baseball, necessity is often the mother of invention, and Seattle’s barren farm system made a different kind of rebuild a more logical and palatable option than total surrender. More than that, the Mariners stuck their collective finger up and sensed which way the league’s winds were blowing.

“The AL is very top-heavy, plus there are a lot of teams in rebuild mode,” said Hollander. “So trying to race to the bottom and get the first pick wasn’t going to be the most efficient way to rebuild anyway.”

Lucky for us. Unlucky for pitchers on the other side.
 
SpeedforceKJ said:
So I’m listening to the latest lookout landing podcast and question they had from someone was “do you think jay bruce will be around come indenpence day?”

With how he and Edwin have started this season what do you guys think?
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Already brought this up a few days ago because I definitely think it's likely. If these two keep producing, you can squeeze out even more prospects from guys that realistically only have another 2-3 season shelf life. Bruce especially, since he's all power and not much else at this point in his career. And because of guys like Healy and Vogelbach coming on, you don't have to worry as much about creating 2 more voids if they happen to still be in the playoff race come mid-Summer.

Besides, when the M's got Encarncion, a lot of people thought he wasn't going to last but a few weeks until they flipped him for more prospects, so Dipoto actually played this perfectly if he can maximize on the return from a true playoff contender who needs an experienced power bat.
 
Is it a coincidence kikuchi has been getting squeezed since that game he pitched in Japan? I didnt think much of it at the time but he was clearly displaying his emotions/disapproval then...all I can point to right now
 
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