Mariners get obliterated, all is right in the world

To say that the Mariners are playing poorly would be an understatement. So too would saying that they are playing abysmally, or atrociously, or with the approximate skill of a herd of walruses attempt to perform Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen. This might give some indication of how horrifically miserable the Mariners have been playing.

It’s gotten so bad that the Mariners, who just about a month ago had the best run differential in baseball, now have have a run differential of -71. They have allowed by far the most runs of any team this year, with 380.

For context, those 380 runs allowed put them on pace to allow 992. No team has allowed 1,000 in a season since the 1999 Colorado Rockies, who played in Coors Field during the steroid era and whose notable pitchers included former Mariner Jamey Wright as well as... Jerry Dipoto. Could Dipoto secretly be on a quest to erase his name from runs-allowed-infamy? Hard to say.

The Mariners have been so completely awful that it’s almost kind of comforting. Death, taxes, and the Mariners being down by four after the second inning. There are some things in life you can hang your hat on. The Mariners record makes a nice hat stand.

In fact, the Mariners have been so bad that we may have to re-calibrate our idea of what “bad” actually means.

Here are some things that, while previously considered by most to be “bad”, might now fall into the more “average” zone, now that this Mariners team is there for context.

• Paper cuts
• Pulling pants out of the dryer in the morning and realizing that they didn’t dry completely, so have to wear damp pants
• Mild headaches
• Walking past someone, catching a whiff, gagging, and then realizing with horror that you can tell exactly what part of their body smells
• Morning breath
• Going and getting your tabs renewed, but you could only go on a Saturday and there’s a line all the way to the sidewalk and then you finally get to the front of the line and, out of the five available tellers, you got the one that seems to have discovered a computer for the first time, and they tell you that you need your emissions tested, so you go and do that, and you go back, and you get there right before they close, and wait in the whole line again, and you actually get a good teller, who tells you that you did not, in fact, have to get your emissions tested, there’s a new exemption, it seems that other teller somehow managed to get a copy of the 1986 employee handbook, sorry for the inconvenience, that’ll be $280, thank you.

The Mariners are pretty much a science experiment in how badly things can go wrong.

Come on, Mariners. Play John Andreoli for a meaningful stretch of the season! Re-sign Jamey Wright. He must still play indy ball somewhere. For science.

Oh yeah, there was a game today. Marco threw 4.2 innings and gave up 10 runs. Tom Murphy threw an inning. Mike Trout and Albert Pujols combined to go 5-for-9. The non-Kyle-Seager Mariners went 3-for-27. So it goes.