I’m the Only Man in America Who Predicted the Mariners Would Be Good

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We all make predictions that don’t come true.

You stick your head out the window, note the cloud cover, and loudly announce it’s going to rain. A couple of hours later, the sun burns through, and voilà — it’s a sunny day.

You’re not alone. Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan erroneously postulated in 2009 that interest rates would soon soar to double-digit levels. 16th century astrologer Nostradamus envisioned a non-existent “Great King of Terror” descending from the sky at the cusp of Y2K. In 2002, Donald Trump predicted a malevolent partnership with an over-sized sock puppet:

If you view Grimace a metaphor for Vladimir Putin and reverse the roles, that one actually turned out to be true.

The point is this: you’re off the hook when you get things wrong now and again. After all, someone else is almost certainly guessing the exact opposite and life is a 50/50 crapshoot. But what if everyone is wrong about something except a lone, studly, bald-headed prognosticator? If you haven’t figured it out by the title of this piece (and if you haven’t, go back to sleep), that’s where we are with respect to the 2019 Seattle Mariners.

Everyone claimed the Mariners were tanking

Google “Mariners rebuild” and the flood of links is endless.

“Mariners may tear down roster, start rebuild” speculated MLB.com. “Whether step back or rebuild, Seattle Mariners focus is on the future” said The Spokesman Review. “In Jerry Dipoto’s plan, Mariners rebuild happens sooner than later” reported The Seattle Times. I’d keep going, but I’d ultimately run out of bandwidth.

There’s the usual hedging and qualifying, but in a world where we can’t even agree upon the shape of a negotiating table, the views were remarkably consistent. At best, the M’s were going to take “a step back” (to use Dipoto phraseology) and at worst, they were in full rebuilding mode.

Twitter concurred:

Nobody thought they could contend this year. Well, almost nobody.

The Lucky Rock got it right

After a deluge of  Jerry Dipoto trades over the winter, I sat down one Saturday in January and took a good, hard look at where things stood. As noted, everyone was calling it a full-scale rebuild, so that must have meant the Mariners would be trotting out kids and hanger-on types for a couple of years while a trove of acquired prospects baked in the minors.

But that’s not what happened. Dipoto picked up Mallex Smith, Domingo Santana, Edwin Encarnacion, Omar Narvaez, and Tim Beckham — five new starting position players with experience and serious bounce-back potential — while still improving the farm system. As for the pitching staff, he held onto veteran Mike Leake, signed coveted left-handed Japanese star Yusei Kikuchi to a four-year, $56 million deal, acquired top prospect Justus Sheffield, and overhauled the bullpen.

Are these the moves of team in full rebuild? To quote myself:

And yet, although the current big league roster is filled with bounce-back candidates, it isn’t a mess. The M’s have formidable bats up and down the lineup and three proven starting pitchers. Meanwhile, newcomers Yusei Kikuchi and Justus Sheffield will battle with Wade LeBlanc for the final two starting spots. Only the bullpen remains a significant work in process.

Even after tonight’s ugly loss to the Houston Astros, that paragraph continues to ring true. The bats are still on fire, driving home six more runs (amazingly, lowering their average runs scored per game) and extending their MLB record of games starting a season with at least one home run to 16. Kikuchi and LeBlanc are entrenched as starters, with Sheffield in Tacoma. And as evidenced by the two grand slams they gave up tonight, the bullpen remains a serious work in process.

Some tasty tidbits

The following are a few other observations from my January post:

Dipoto has an affinity for acquiring players coming off down years under the hope they will negatively regress to the mean. If Santana, Seager, Healy, Beckham and Gordon do that, this won’t just be a solid lineup — it will be good.

Incidentally, let’s not forget Jay Bruce, who hit 36 homers and drove in 101 runs in 2017 and will likely see time at DH, first and in the outfield.

Not to mention this:

In order to contend, Gonzales will need to be an ace, Kikuchi will have to seamlessly make the jump to American baseball, Felix has to reverse his implosion, and LeBlanc must show he’s for real.

And lastly, this:

Unless Dipoto trades almost everyone away and goes with castoffs and minor leaguers, the M’s are going to hit this year. In fact, if a few players enjoy bounce-back campaigns, they should outpace the AL’s 11th-best offense Seattle put up last season.

Pitching is where the proverbial rubber will intersect with the long and windy road. It’s going to take some luck and the right bullpen mix, but assuming the new arms hold up and the existing ones don’t fall off, it’s possible they’ll have just enough to contend in 2019.

Mariners
For the Mariners to contend, Felix will need to turn back the clock this season. Credit: Ted stein [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]

Ok, so maybe just mostly right

Like Wesley from The Princess Bride being only “mostly dead”, I was pretty much only mostly right. A couple of my questionable calls were pegging the likelihood of winning 90 games as “not particularly good” and zeroing in on the starting pitching as the M’s Achilles heel, not the bullpen. With that said, my post stands alone as the only one that asserted before the season began that the Mariners could contend in 2019. So far, it’s still mostly right.

Am I the new Nostradamus? Maybe so. We’ll revisit that question if the name picked for the new Seattle NHL team ends up being Sneeze.

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