John Blanchette: Mariners can’t be mediocre

SEATTLE – Hard times for Seattle’s flagship institutions.

Boeing can’t get the 787 Dreamliner to the gate on time. Starbucks’ policy of letting supervisors help themselves to baristas’ tips gets double-shot down by a California judge, who wants the java pusher to stuff $100 million back in the cup. Microsoft is still redfaced about Vista. Husky Stadium is falling apart, following a football program that already did.

The city is losing its NBA team to Oklahoma City, where they’ve offered to build a new arena with a two-holer out back. The Seahawks lose their placekicker to the Rams, but can go 11 deep at running back.

And batting cleanup, Richie Sexson.

Yet apparently Seattle Mariners’ manager John McLaren hasn’t been reading the local barometer.

“We feel good about ourselves,” McLaren said on Sunday as the M’s assembled at Safeco Field for the 2008 season.

Actually, he said it at least three times, a sign that he’d been rehearsing in front of the bathroom mirror.

But why shouldn’t he feel good? After all, Jeff Weaver is somebody else’s problem now and if CEO Howard Lincoln hasn’t turned the temperature down on the hot seat, he’s at least turned down the volume.

On the other hand, as noted, Richie Sexson’s batting cleanup.

As newly acquired ace Erik Bedard hurls the season’s first pitch this afternoon, the Mariners will have achieved the most pronounced dichotomy in all of major league baseball: No other team will be burdened by both the greatest of expectations and the gravest of doubts about its ability to fulfill them.

As for McLaren, all he has are expectations.

“The bar has been set higher for everybody,” he said, “and it should be.”

For all sorts of reasons. The $115 million payroll. A division that is both the smallest in baseball and possibly the weakest. The incremental improvements since the 2004 nadir. The general restlessness of a fan base that hasn’t seen its heroes in the playoffs in six years.

And, of course, the blockbuster deal of the winter that brought Bedard from the Baltimore Orioles in exchange for the brightest young prospect in the M’s organization, outfielder Adam Jones.

This delivered to the Mariners their first true, dominant No. 1 starter since Randy Johnson and the storm cloud he wore as a hoodie exited almost a decade ago. But beyond that it signaled the realization from M’s management that the club had to launch its assault on the summit now and not hunker through another year at the base camp.

Which will play as faulty, myopic thinking should Bedard not be the solution to the no-playoff riddle – or if the M’s cannot secure his services beyond the 2009 end of his contract while Jones uses his five tools to build an All-Star career.

The Bedard deal is one of the most confounding in M’s history not because it was made but how it was received. It was unanimous that the club had to do something about its starting pitching to give proper chase to the Los Angeles Angels in the American League West, but couldn’t general manager Bill Bavasi have pulled it off by swapping the Orioles some unwanted spare parts?

You know, like cleanup hitter Richie Sexson?

The most vehement critics suggest that now isn’t the time for the bold stroke because the M’s weren’t as good as they thought they were – that they didn’t really win 88 games last season. Victories are no longer just victories in baseball unless they can be proven via some other algebra, and in this case the fact that Seattle scored 19 fewer runs on the season than the opposition was the tipoff that the Mariners were, well, lucky.

This means that the Arizona Diamondbacks did not get within an NLCS sweep of the World Series, either, since they scored 20 fewer runs than their opponents en route to 90 wins.

Heck, if the M’s can get their minus-differential down to 30 or 35 runs, they might win 100 games.

The Mariners are not without their issues, of course. The bullpen, worn out a year ago, will be helped by the rebuilt rotation but is hurting itself with George Sherrill sent off in the Bedard trade and Brandon Morrow in Double-A building up his arm strength. With Jones and Jose Guillen gone, the outfield is defensively mediocre on either side of Ichiro Suzuki in center. There has been no offensive upgrade in any category other than mere hope.

Which is why Richie Sexson is still batting cleanup.

And there will be no pleading for patience. Of Seattle’s 28 April games, only eight will be played against teams that were .500 or better a year ago – six against the Angels, two against Cleveland. If the M’s don’t fatten up on Baltimore, Tampa Bay, Texas and Oakland, there may not be panic – but the discontent will be measured at the turnstiles.

“I don’t think we need to overemphasize that,” McLaren said. “We know the circumstances. It’s always important to get off good. We’d like to come out of the box roaring – that’s our game plan. We’re ready to get going. We had a nice spring training and we feel good about ourselves.”

Feeling good is fine. Being good is better – and for their own sake, the Mariners had better be good.