SEATTLE -- As the Mariners wrapped up their 50 Seasons celebration weekend, Alvin Davis sat in the bowels of T-Mobile Park and preached the sort of stubborn, excited optimism that only a literal preacher can.
“Mr. Mariner,” fittingly, was the one ex-player to speak to the crowd during Saturday’s pregame ceremony and used the opportunity to address a team stuck in a rut. Sunday, sitting in the corner of an interview room, asked what it meant to him to be asked to give that speech, his message was the same.
Saturday, to 26 players in the first-base dugout and an announced crowd of 41,351 in the stands: “Outsiders have doubted this franchise for 49 years. Let that doubt fuel you. Prove them wrong. We believe in you -- prove us right.”
Sunday, to six reporters around a card table: “It’s not the way we scripted it, but we’re here. And there’s 44 games left to change the narrative of the season.”
That narrative didn’t change Sunday, though. The 50 Seasons celebration came and went, ending with a 4-1 loss to cap a sweep at the hands of the AL-best Rays. Seattle went 3-6 on its nine-game homestand and has gone 9-19 since July 7, the second-worst record in MLB in that span.
“Difficult day,” manager Dan Wilson said. “Difficult series.”
The gap in the AL West is up to 4 1/2 games; with division-leading Houston playing Sunday night and Monday while the Mariners are off, Seattle could find itself up to 5 1/2 games back when it returns to play Tuesday vs. the Yankees in New York.
And that’s the looming threat for a club looking for any spark of optimism; this past week was supposed to be the easier start to a hard month, and now it’s about to get a whole lot harder. The set against the Rays was the first of six straight against teams currently in playoff position. Their road trip will send them to face the Yankees (14 games over .500), Astros (two games over .500 going into Sunday night’s game) and Brewers (30 games over .500), followed by a homestand against the Cubs (19 games over .500) and Phillies (seven games over .500).
September could be an easier road, but if the struggles continue, the hole could be too deep to escape.
And Sunday showed just how stark the struggles have gotten.
The matinee was a rematch of Seattle’s first-half finale at Tropicana Field on July 12. The Mariners went into that matchup on a five-game skid but jumped on Ian Seymour for three runs in the second inning, then kept pushing until they knocked him out of the game after recording just 10 outs.
Sunday, Taylor Ward led off the bottom of the first with a triple -- his first extra-base hit in a Mariners uniform -- and came home a pitch later on Cole Young’s RBI single.
The next inning, the Mariners loaded the bases with two outs, but Young grounded out to end the threat. Seattle managed just one more hit off Seymour the rest of the day, on a Dominic Canzone broken-bat knock. He finished with six innings under his belt for just the fifth time this year.
“We had him on the ropes early, and we weren’t able to convert it,” Wilson said. “At that point, he was able to settle in. He had a pretty good changeup today, kept us off-guard going back-and-forth with that. Not able to square anything up, not able to find barrels consistently. When we did find some barrels, it seemed like there was a guy standing there. It’s frustrating.”
That’s been arguably the most frustrating theme in a frustrating stretch. On the homestand, the Mariners hit .333 in the first inning and scored 10 of their 22 total runs in the first two frames. But they were held scoreless in the third, fourth and fifth innings with a combined average of .132, showing just how bare the pantry has been the second and third times through the order against opposing starters.
“We’re frustrated,” said starter Emerson Hancock, who allowed two runs in 4 2/3 innings -- just the fourth home start of fewer than five frames this season for Seattle. “You want to go out there and you want to get the results. But what we believe in and what we talk about is that it is still in front of us. Guys are working as hard as they possibly can.”