It's time for my biweekly guest column for the Brock & Salk blog, where I discuss how the Mariners have taken a bizarre and unpredictable path to a not entirely unpredictable or surprising place in the standings. The Mariners as a team may be a little better than a lot of us thought they'd be, but this is within the range of realistic expectations. Further analysis, though, reveals just how weird these two months have been.
The intro:
Before the year, were you to ask a group of reasonably enlightened Mariners fans about their expectations for the upcoming season, they would've told you that the consensus opinion was that the M's would be decent. Not great - not great by any means - but okay. Respectable. Much better than they were in 2010. Something like a .500 ballclub, or maybe a little below.
And what do we have? As of this writing, in the second week of June, the Mariners are 31-30, pending the result of their current game against the White Sox. They've scored 222 runs, they've allowed 223 runs, and they've taken a big step up from 2010 while stopping short of taking another. They've been sufficiently competitive to remain interesting and relevant, but insufficiently competitive to feel like a real playoff contender just yet.
You can read the rest over here. And you should note that I'm panicking over using "they" to refer to "a group of" in the first paragraph. The worst part of writing guest articles is that I can't obsessively edit them after they're up.
Also I'm going to be on their show like any minute.