Mariners Noon Number: .200

The Seattle Mariners’ win percentage after 10 games is .200 (2-8), which is – somewhat shockingly – not even the worst in the Major Leagues.

The M’s are off to a rough start. How rough? Well, they’ve lost games where they led 5-0 and 8-1. Anecdotally, it’s early. A six-game win streak erases all the bad. Of course, a six-game win streak on a .500 record would look better, but that’s not the case.

Over on the indispensable Fangraphs website, writer Jeff Sullivan laid out the Mariners’ troubles, comparing the record though 10 games against other slow starts over the past 10 years. His headline shows the bottom line: the Mariners could be in trouble.

It’s a sober look at where the M’s stand and the hole they’ve already dug for themselves. Mariners fans can look to 2011 for inspiration, as the Red Sox, Rays and Tigers all opened with similar records and won more than 90 games.

So, are the M’s really a 2-8 team? If they held on to those two disastrous meltdowns, a 4-6 record would be much more tolerable and we wouldn’t be having this discussion. But they didn’t, so we are.

Were the projections of a playoff-contending team that wrong? Are the Mariners just in spate of bad luck? Did the injury to Drew Smyly mean that much?

It’s hard to write a team off after 10 games. That’s not what we’re doing here. Shoot, they’ve only played three home games! But as the evidence suggests, the Mariners have a lot of work to do to make up for the early damage.