Countdown to 100

SEATTLE – A bristling Raul Ibanez doesn’t want to know about the “100-100 club,” nor seek a membership card.

Ibanez won’t even allow it to enter his mind that the Mariners, who lost their seventh straight game on Thursday night, this time 2-0 to the equally reeling Oakland Athletics, are on pace to attain three dubious milestones.

There’s a realistic shot at a 100-loss season, from which the Mariners are just 19 defeats away.

They are within sight of the more frightening franchise record of 104 defeats, set back in the post-expansion season of 1978.

Attaining both of those marks would establish the Mariners as charter members of baseball’s 100-100 club – the first team to lose 100 games while spending $100 million or more in payroll.

Ibanez insists his teammates have to spend the final five weeks of the season trying to win games, not attempting to avoid their place in the lowest rungs of franchise history.

“For me, avoiding something is acting out of fear,” Ibanez said after the Mariners limped home from a 1-7 road trip on which they dropped their final six games, many by lopsided scores. “And I don’t face anything that way. The goal should be to win every game from here on.”

Ibanez isn’t talking about merely competing. He wants to see them playing to win games, something he isn’t sure they’ve mastered just yet.

“I think it’s a feeling, a mind-set,” he said. “A mentality.”

The Mariners haven’t done much of that lately, though starting pitcher Ryan Rowland-Smith gave it his best effort through seven innings in front of 25,611 fans at Safeco Field. But the M’s struggling offense, with just three runs scored in the previous two games, could not break through against an A’s squad that had dropped 27 of its last 33 games heading in.

Rowland-Smith struck out six batters and allowed just four hits during his 114-pitch performance.