With 45 games left in the season, the Mariners are still struggling to find the thing that's eluded the offense for the entire year.
SEATTLE — Saturday will be about honoring the past of the Seattle Mariners. At 5:30 p.m. PT, the Mariners will honor the 50th greatest players in team history before a game against the Tampa Bay Rays, with first pitch tentatively scheduled for 6:50 p.m. PT.
While the past greatest players in team history will be honored, the current team is still looking to capture the form that many envisioned when it began the season.
Seattle entered the season with its most legitimate World Series aspirations in a generation. It was one game away from the World Series last season, the closest its ever been to a pennant in the 50 years of the franchise.
The Mariners, on the first day of the weekend series against the Rays, came out flat, which has become a common theme this season. Despite allowing just two runs to a Tampa Bay team that entered the weekend with the top seed in the American League, Seattle was unable to capitalize on multiple opportunities throughout the game, one with the bases loaded and the other with runners at first and second with one out.
The Mariners ultimately lost 2-1, with their only run being a solo home run hit by center fielder Julio Rodriguez in the bottom of the ninth.
When Seattle has had scoring opportunities this season, it has too often struggled to find those timely hits. And that's if the Mariners get any traffic on the base paths at all.
Entering Saturday, the Mariners were 56-61 and four games out of first place in the American League West and 2.5 games out of the final wild card spot in the AL.
Seattle's offense entered Saturday ranked 30th in the majors in batting average (.229); 28th in OPS (.684); 19th in strikeouts (1,000) and 15th in home runs (135). They've scored five runs in four games since the Aug. 3 trade deadline and have been shut out twice.
There's a consistent balancing act throughout a baseball season for players to work on making adjustments without making wholesale changes. Do nothing and the struggles continue. Do too much, and difficulties persist.
"Consistency" has been a common word brought up by Mariners manager Dan Wilson since the first half of the season.
Injuries haven't helped Seattle find that equilibrium. Wilson has said several times this year that the positive turn in the offense "is coming." But now, with 45 games left in the season and the thinnest margin of error (if any) to work with, the offense needs to see a noticeable shift.
If not, this will be a season simply remembered as what could have been rather than anything that was.
"It's a daily thing," Wilson said in a pregame interview Saturday. "Baseball is a daily adjustment, particularly as a hitter. You're always looking for a different approach or a different way to make things more consistent. Once you find it, you hold onto it. Our guys continue to work at it, I give our guys a lot of credit. They've been working at it hard. We know it's coming. We got to continue to make our adjustments, both as a team and as individuals. We have to make it happen, as well."
