Mariners Week in Review: April 24-30

4 and 2 makes for the first winning week of the season and brings their season record to 11-15. Two out of three from the White Sox was very impressive, winning in 11 after Eddie blew another save, Joel getting hammered in the second game and beating Mark Beurhle in the rubber game.After dropping the first game to the Orioles, they rebounded nicely to take that series as well, coming back in both weekend games. The Mariner’s are actually only two games back in the AL West, though I expect someone will catch fire here pretty quickly.

26 runs scored to brings the M’s to 114 and up one slot to 10th in the AL. Again they are 10th despite being below 10th in average, OBP and Slugging. They continue to lead the league in steals (and triples!) while being 4th in steal percentage. So it is possible that despite some really brutal outs, the crazy running may be helping the offense a bit.

Ichiro is your hitting star for the week with a line of 400/428/480, raising his season numbers to 287/315/391. Lopez and Ibanez also had good weeks slugging 625 and 615 respectively. Those two are your season long slugging leaders as well at 491 for Lopez and 505 for Ibanez (Excluding Petagine of course, who despite slugging .750 for the year has only gotten 11 PA’s). Willie Ballgame continues to crank out singles, hitting 4 in 11 Abs this week after 3 for 10 last week. He has neither walked nor rapped an extra base hit in that span. Two more steals also to run his consecutive steals streak to 17. The boy can run. Beltre finally hit a homer and actually slugged 350 for the week. Oh My!

The not so good performances belong to Reed, who went 0 for the week despite not playing against lefties. Kenji and Richie continued their struggles, Johjima managing just two singles for the week and Sexson three. Richie has not hit a homer since the granny in Cleveland two weeks ago. Ouch.

The M’s allowed 31 runs to bring them to 126, 13 of them in the blowout loss to the White Sox on Tuesday. They hold steady at 8th in AL in runs allowed. The M’s lead the league in K/s per nine at 7.44 tough they are only 8th in K/BB ratio. Need to cut donw on the walks a bit to continue to be effective.

The M’s got good starts in 3 of their 4 wins, two from Jamie and one from Washburn. Felix’s one start was not very good, 5 IP, 10H, 4 R, 2BB, 2SO. He was in trouble every inning but the 5th. The offense got their biggest inning of the year, a six run outburst to get the King a cheap win. Meche and Joel got beat up pretty good in the two losses. Two of Meche’s runs were unearned if you pay attention to those sorts of things.

The pen was not quite as dominant as usual as Woods, Soriano and Eddie all got touched up a little bit. Woods and Soriano at least threw strikes getting 5 and 4 Ks for the week without any walks. Eddie got two saves while blowing another, but did not look good all week. Baserunners and missed corners galore! Putz and Sherrill continue to be effective and Bobby Livingston came up to poke more holes in the “We need 12 pitchers” theory, getting lit up for 4 runs in his only appearance. The heaviest work load for the week was Putz at 5 innings in 3 appearances. Woods was next at 4 and 1/3. Sherrill threw one inning. Over 4 appearances. Mateo less than 3 innings. We have enough pitchers.

Nageotte went down after his terrible appearance Sunday, Livingston came up and got shelled as I mentioned. Mateo went on the DL on Sunday with tendonitis and Sean Green who was closing in T-town came up to take his place. 3 more days to figure out what to do with Borchard, hopefully he clears waivers and heads to Tacoma. A Borchard/Bloomquist platoon in center may not be too far from happening actually.

Two two-game series’ this week in Minnesota and Chicago, then home for 3 against