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Seattle Mariners

John Blanchette: M’s hopes became figment of imagination

How gracious of the Seattle Seahawks to take the upcoming weekend off, clearing the stage for their neighbors in the doublewide next door to bask in their big moment.

Playoff race. Wild-card sweepstakes.

A three-game showdown against the American League’s best team to kick in the door – OK, the back door – to baseball’s postseason.

Scoreboard watching for updates on the A’s and Royals. One last start for King Felix on the season’s last day. Just imagine the drama that’ll go down at Safeco Field.

Because that’s all you’ll be able to do: imagine it.

Man, the Seattle Mariners really have a way with the feng shui of a baseball season.

“We’re going to be OK, guys, I promise,” M’s manager Lloyd McClendon before the team skipped town for their final road trip. “Trust me.”

Trust?

Sure, McClendon hasn’t been in Seattle long enough to get a W-2, but even a noob can’t be oblivious to the comedic possibilities in anyone from the Mariners’ organization pleading for trust.

The Mariners’ public trusts that their baseball team will find a way to change chocolate pudding into lye, and in fact the M’s turned that process into performance art this past week.

Six days ago, Seattle, Kansas City and Oakland were all knotted atop the A.L. wild-card standings, promising a wild chase for two tickets to Bud Selig’s ridiculous contrivance of a one-game play-in to the postseason. Sure, it’s a cheap bauble. Does anyone expect a diamond ring buried in the Cracker Jack?

But not only is it plastic, the hungry M’s chipped a tooth on it.

They have lost five straight games, and are now but a single loss – if coupled with victories by the A’s and Royals – from elimination. This afternoon, they try to avoid No. 6 in Toronto. And to secure this gotta-have-it moment, their single-most meaningful game in more than a decade, the Mariners will send to the mound Tom Wilhelmsen, Fernando Rodney’s setup man, whose lone start in four years came this past July in a loss to the mighty Minnesota Twins.

Sure, the ’95 Mariners trotted out long-shot heroes like Doug Strange and Alex Diaz, but they drew the line at giving Jeff Nelson and Bill Risley starts.

But they have nothing else.

Roenis Elias is toast, done in by something called a flexor bundle, which is not a Comcast marketing come-on. Chris Young went off a cliff and did one of those Wile E. Coyote running-in-mid-air numbers before splatting to earth.

Hisashi Iwakuma, James Paxton and Felix Hernandez will be available for the final homestand, but all did the full core melt this week. Yes, even King Felix, who gave up seven runs to Toronto in the single-worst inning of his career.

This is a bitter irony for the Mariners, whose starting pitching – and, yes, bullpen – has continually bailed out a 12th-place offense, which on Wednesday was helpless again even as Taijuan Walker pitched the game of his life.

But naturally, no one’s going to be quite as bitter as fans who were allowed to dream, presuming there were any.

So dismal have the M’s been for so long – as so toxic is the public relations capital of CEO Howard Lincoln and general manager Jack Zduriencik – that even as the team overachieved and battled and entertained, it was a challenge to invest fully. There was that anemic offense, after all, and even a cannonball signing like Robinson Cano could not make anyone forget all the marginal producers around him.

Fans loved the uptick in fortunes. Many reasoned it wouldn’t last, perhaps as a defense mechanism.

Still, you had to admire what McClendon managed to wring out of his lineup, and the superiority of the pitching. Maybe it was a year where traditional bullies like the Yankees and Red Sox were nonfactors, and when the A’s and Royals diddled around when they could have settled this thing long ago. That didn’t make the M’s any less relevant.

But short of another $240 million free agent, just how are the M’s going to take the next step in 2015? More JayZee trade magic? Anyone notice that his midseason acquisitions designed to bolster the offense did nothing of the sort? Austin Jackson, Kendrys Morales, Chris Denorfia – all wound up producing worse than what average replacement-level players would have, according to the popular metric of the day.

And half of the mix-and-match pieces – Morales, Corey Hart, Logan Morrison, Justin Smoak, take your pick – will be gone, and Zduriencik will assemble a new group of .210 hitters with too-infrequent power.

The Mariners won back some of their disaffected constituency, first with the Cano signing and then with the follow-through of a fine, flawed season. But somehow they’ll have to solve the most obvious flaw – and outside of one contract splurge, they’ve shown little ability to do so.

They imagine they can. And you’ll have to, too.