John Blanchette: M’s hot start could cool talk of hot seat

SEATTLE – Thank heavens that the rote disclaimers and feisty optimism of Opening Day are behind us. Now we can get down to the real business of Seattle Mariners baseball in 2007.

You know. The Year of the Hot Seat.

Sodo En Fuego.

For the first time since 1995 – when the Mariners had to reinvent themselves into winners to finagle a stadium out of the Legislature and preserve their place in Seattle – every night at the ballpark is a referendum on the judgment, competence and futures of everyone from CEO Howard Lincoln down through general manager Bill Bavasi and manager Mike Hargrove to, well, the Moose if there’s any justice in the world.

In other words, major league baseball as it exists in most other cities.

Naturally, the Mariners did the their best in Monday’s opener not to find a season’s worth of truths in nine innings, even when Felix Hernandez made it such an appealing notion after undressing the Oakland Nemeses. This sort of thing is never necessary by Game 2, mostly because two-thirds of the media mob abandon the press box, having temporarily exhausted their big-picture pronouncements.

Game 1 is Opening Day. Game 2 is Just Another Day.

Never mind that there were as many encouragements to come out of Tuesday’s 8-4 victory over the A’s as in the opener – in this case, a solid start by Jarrod Washburn, another what-you’re-being-paid-for pop by Richie Sexson and other assorted clutch hitting, a concept with which recent Mariners converts may not be familiar.

So for one more day, let the embers cool beneath the executive butts.

Lincoln’s pronouncement last fall that all the major characters of Mariners baseball were on the hot seat – his words, to his later dismay – has led to a consensus that Seattle better experience a whiz-bang April in the won-lost column or the pink-slipping will be on.

Even if it’s not true on that level – Hargrove suggested that such a line of questioning is “pissing up a rope” as spring training began – on a practical level the M’s must do something special just as a come-on to the constituents, to get them even a little jazzed about baseball again. It should be noted, however, that the attendance dropoff from the opener to the second game was 5,000 less than a year ago.

Either the new message of hope is resonating with the fans, or Joel Pineiro’s departure did.

As much as you want to demur that you can’t rush the results of baseball, the urgency here is unmistakable. It is, in part, why Hargrove had one foot on the top step of the dugout when rookie Brandon Morrow let two on with nobody out in the ninth – though Seattle still had that four-run lead.

Of course, it’s also why Morrow – with 16 minor league innings for experience – is in the big leagues.

No longer is it “You Gotta Love These Guys.” Now it’s “These Guys Gotta Win.”

Or as Hernandez himself insisted, “We’re going to make some noise this year.”

It’s a little amusing that it has come down to raw results here. The charming conceit of Seattle baseball between 1995 and 2003 was that while, yes, the Mariners won, community connection was perhaps just as important. Safeco Field was “Cheers,” where everybody knew the players on a first-name basis, and those who turned their backs on Seattle – Randy Johnson, Ken Griffey Jr., Alex Rodriguez – were treasonous, or worse.

All that warm-fuzziness seduced the front office into letting the club grow too old too quickly and dissuaded them from a rebuilding philosophy whereby the present was sacrificed for a wholesale youth movement. Then it turned out the youth on hand wasn’t all that good – certainly not the vaunted pitching arms of the farm system – and the present was sacrificed anyway.

Now there are all sorts of predicaments. Thanks to a misread of the free-agent pitching market, the payroll is $107 million – seventh in baseball behind all the you-know-who big market teams. Yet that buys only one established drawing-card star – Ichiro Suzuki, who is conducting his own season-long referendum as he ponders a possible exit. The M’s are destined to lose money for the first time in the Safeco era, though a $23 million profit last year gives them that luxury.

Yet there is also the sense that while the M’s haven’t necessarily been rebuilt, they have been fashioned into something that can be lived with.

The everyday lineup seems to project more balance, with no sure outs. All but Ichiro and Jose Lopez are signed beyond this season, and they average just 29.3 years old – not callow, not ancient.

It’s the newly acquired pitchers who will make the next three starts – Miguel Batista, Horacio Ramirez and Jeff Weaver – will likely decide how hot the seat gets, and since they were Bavasi’s answer to Honey I Forgot the Pitching Staff, so they should.

“If last night was all about pitching,” Hargrove said after beating the A’s for the second time – already the M’s are as good as last year – Wednesday, “then tonight was all about hitting.”

He might be saying that a lot this season.

At least, he’s hoping to.