Please Gimme Some Oldtime M’S Relievers

Come back, Rich DeLucia. All is forgiven.

Steve Trout, too. And Todd Cruz and Maury Wills and even George Argyros. Let’s make it a party.

Let’s bring back all the terrible old M’s - the Seattle Mediocres - so we can come to our senses and see how silly and premature any despair is over the state of the current Mariners, whose pennant pretensions would now seem to rest on their remaining games all being shortened to five innings by rain.

And when your home field has a roof, that’s bloody unlikely.

The M’s did it again while you were holed up in church Sunday, the bullpen snatching defeat from the gums of victory not once, not twice, but three different times in an 8-7 loss to Boston at Fenway Park.

That’s five in a row - a longer losing streak in the first two weeks of the season than the Mariners endured in all of 1997.

Christian acquaintances say not to worry, that all is well now that Easter has passed.

It seems Seattle relievers were stumped as to what to give up for Lent and some wise guy suggested “the go-ahead run.”

Meanwhile, newsprint sages over in the big city and the M’s themselves sneer at the distraught and bitter fan invective they’re picking up on their antennae, painting the Mariners’ constituency as spoiled and not-so-savvy in understanding the undulations of a baseball season.

“If we were 12-0, it wouldn’t make us world champion,” insisted shortstop Alex Rodriguez, “and being 3-8 doesn’t mean we’re knocked out.”

Certainly not.

It does mean, however, that Mariners ownership and management stared straight at the club’s glaring weakness all winter and spring and chose to ignore it. Manager Lou Piniella in particular spent his days in Peoria so deep in denial that he needed hip boots.

And touched typists in Seattle peddling “perspective” should go sell crazy someplace else.

The bullpen that has Piniella’s unwavering faith also has an 8.27 earned run average, four losses and three blown saves. Lefthander Tony Fossas - the one acquisition made in the off-season for situational use - has faced 15 batters and retired exactly seven. Closer Heathcliff Slocumb’s ERA is 21.62. Bobby Ayala’s ERA is - oh, who cares? The man is the prince of darkness.

How many leads have to be flushed before somebody like Jay Buhner takes a bat to Beelzebub’s locker?

“They’ll come around,” Piniella keeps insisting, mostly because he has to.

But where’s the evidence of that? Those who defended the acquisition of Slocumb, Mike Timlin and Paul Spoljaric as “trades that had to be made” last year cited a substantial improvement in the Mariners ERA (from 5.12 to 4.14) the last two months of the season. But that was fool’s gold, attributable to sensational pitching by the big three in the starting rotation, whose aggregate ERA went from 3.53 to 2.59. Timlin and Spoljaric actually pitched worse once they came to Seattle; Slocumb saved 10 games, but lost four and blew another.

Their mounting failures this April only accentuate the fact that those deals were made out of panic and that Seattle’s talent scouts made some monumental miscalculations.

And not a thing was done to undo them over the winter.

It’s true - the bullpen can’t blow every lead this season. But being 0-for-3 at this point suggests a total considerably higher than the 27 blown saves that topped the American League last year.

Is this any way to win a pennant?

And by the way, what’s wrong with thirsting for that?

A theory is being floated by supposedly wiser heads that Seattle fans should be satisfied with just having an exciting team with a high superstar quotient - that after the numbing mediocrity of two decades, mere hope should be enough to sustain the faithful.

Well, before we were being gouged for new stadiums, millionaires’ salaries and outlandishly-priced tickets, parking and licensed apparel, perhaps. But the players and owners sucked all the romance out of this relationship long ago.

For better or worse, performance - and performance only - counts.

Besides, the fact is that the Seattle fan is savvy enough to recognize that hope has a short shelf life. The Mariners’ door of opportunity, even Piniella has acknowledged, will not be ajar in perpetuity. And the fans appreciate what it means to have a great team.

After seeing management so clumsily decide to divorce itself from Randy Johnson, fans can assume the likelihood that the contracts of other stars will expire without extension, too. This group is not getting too old to win, but too expensive for this management’s tastes. These M’s will not be together long - and they need a major league bullpen to be all they can be.

What fans can see, now that the farm system has been gutted by mostly ill-conceived trades (though there are some promising-but-extremely-young pitchers well down in the system), is a hasty return to those bad old days, even if the M’s should reach a World Series. A similarly quick return to prominence is unlikely.

So, yes, there is an urgency in this equation that makes apoplexy in April entirely reasonable.

“I just hope the people who are writing negative things about us and writing us off will write positive about us when the time comes - and the time will come,” Fossas sniffed.

Hope you’re right, Tony. Because there is no tempo to baseball anymore, only a ticking clock.