As you all may or may not believe, I don't go out of my way to disparage the "good guys" in blue, even when they are not performing for us in Seattle.  I try very hard to stay optimistic and yet still objective (not a mutually exclusive thing like a certain major Mariner blog would have you believe), and I usually react badly when people pour on the acidic, negative anger and pessimism that is so common amongst Seattle residents.  Despite my father's comment about my turning into a Philly fan (yes…that was my Dad…even I wasn't entirely certain before he admitted it…LOL), I would generally prefer to cling to hope than to spit bitterly onto the deck of the good ship Mariner and wish bad things on Bavasi.

That having been said, I've sat around and watched people try to explain this rough two week stretch.  I've watched people I greatly respect turn off the TV and then claim they know what is going on.  I've been quiet about blame being placed on the wrong shoulders for most of the last two weeks with a few exceptions.  This post will document the ten moments in the last two weeks that define everything that is wrong with this team and will demonstrate clearly that the man who should be blamed is none other than John McLaren.

We're 2-13 in our last 15 games (including today's offensive outburst against Jeremy Bonderman and Jason Grilli).  It can be difficult to remember what we were thinking and feeling 16 days ago, but let's rewind and then play out this string, documenting the key moments in each loss.   The Mariners won that Friday night in Texas in a convincing pitcher’s duel with Felix Hernandez dominating early in the game and Jose Guillen once again leading the offensive charge.  That win kept us a game back of the surging Angels in the AL West and moved us 4 games ahead of the Yankees in the loss column (3 games overall) while pushing our record to 73-53.  Now, in chronological order, I give you the ten things I hate about McLaren’s management philosophy.

1) August 25th: With the Mariners and Rangers knotted at 3 apiece in the 7th inning and the Yankees already well on their way to another blowout victory, McLaren inexplicably chooses to allow newly promoted ROOGY (righty one-out guy) Rick White to pitch to way more than one guy, including some lefties.  Not only is he using his worst reliever in a tie game (read: high leverage situations), but he’s not using him in an intelligent manner likely to produce his best possible performance.  White promptly surrenders two runs, although he isn’t helped by a wild throw from Adrian Beltre and some horrendously bad luck when Gerald Laird somehow gets a bunt down on a pitch right at his helmet.

2) August 28th: The Angels have handed the Mariners an embarrassing defeat at the hands of ace John Lackey and now the Mariners have grabbed an early 5-0 lead in the middle game of this season-defining series.  With Weaver obviously struggling to find his release point and leaving a lot of pitches up in the zone, McLaren chooses to leave him out there until he has well and truly blown the lead and brought the Angels right back into the game.  This is a pattern you will see repeated as we progress.  It is an unwritten rule in baseball that you never pull a starter if he still has a chance to get the win, but this is not the time to be fighting for Jeff Weaver’s baseball card stats.  This is the time to be going aggressively for a win.  McLaren certainly stands to face a lot of criticism if he pulls Weaver with the lead intact and the relievers can’t get the job done, but someone who is not managing to protect his job would make the appropriate call and go to his best relievers at the first signs of trouble.

3) August 28th: The score remains tied at 5 as the game pushes into the 7th inning.  Sean Green gives up a lead-off walk to the #9 hitter (this is always trouble), but then following a sacrifice bunt, he strikes out Orlando Cabrera, bringing Vlad Guerrero to the plate with two outs and a runner at second.  McLaren has Brandon Morrow and George Sherrill throwing in the pen and lefty Garret Anderson (who, by the way, has a large platoon split on average, making him vulnerable to a lefty-killer like Sherrill).  He has a few choices here: he can walk Vlad, bring in the lefty to face Anderson (who delivered a couple of big hits earlier in the series) leaving him open to criticism if the struggling Sherrill can’t get the job done, he can opt to pitch carefully to Vlad (a known free swinger with a penchant for hitting home runs on pitches in the left handed batter’s box), or he can have Green go right after Vlad and try to get him out.  He chooses to go right after their best slugger who promptly doubles on a belt high sinker to give the Angels the lead.  He then chooses to walk Anderson and bring in Morrow, meaning the Mariners never manage to get Sherrill into the game until it is entirely too late.

4) August 28th: But wait, it gets uglier.  The Mariners scratch out a run in the 7th to re-tie the score at 6, but in the 8th, Morrow struggles with his command and eventually gives up a double to put the Angels back on top by one.  As they continue to threaten, McLaren again has Sherrill throwing in the pen, but along side him this time is (you guessed it) Rick White.  Now maybe it’s just me, but with the heart of the Angels’ order coming and the Mariners down by just one run, I would want my best pitchers coming into the game to keep it close.  McLaren is trying to save JJ Putz, however, for the almighty save situation.  He doesn’t even warm him up in this all-important game.  Instead, he brings in White to face Vlad and White promptly gets rocked and blows the game open.

5) August 30th: The Mariners and Indians are locked in quite a battle in the 9th inning, tied at 5.  Borowski has already blown the save and the Indians are trying to bail him out.  The Indians send the heart of their order to the plate in the bottom of the 9th but once again, McLaren refuses to even have Putz warming in the pen.  In the post-game interview, he would confirm that he was saving Putz in case the Mariners got a lead in extra innings.  He chooses to use Eric O’Flaherty, which is not a horrible decision in and of itself, but when the Indians put two on with one out, he doesn’t have Putz ready to put out the fire and is once again forced to use Rick White in a tie game.  When White predictably walks in the winning run, McLaren sheepishly shrugs, and apparently doesn’t learn from his mistake.

6) August 31st: The Mariners fall behind early to the Blue Jays but plucky hitters that they are; they battle back and pull to within one run in the 8th inning.  McLaren has managed to squander all of his best set-up arms the last few games trying in vein to keep Putz for that big save situation that never materialized.  Now with his middle relievers and set-up men exhausted, he finally goes to Putz to pitch with the team trailing by one, and now that Putz has been sitting on his hands for six straight days he is obviously rusty.  He struggles with the command of his splitter, making his fastball very hittable and he gives up a critical 7th run.  The final score of the game was 7-5, so you may be wondering why that 7th run matters.  The answer is simple.  In the top of the ninth, the Mariners load the bases with one out against Jays’ closer Jeremy Accardo.  In a two run game, the infielders can play back at normal depth and concede one run to get the second out.  If the score were still 6-5, even the middle infielders (Hill and McDonald) would have been playing half way (still double play depth, but in close enough to go for the force at home if the ball is hit slowly up the middle).  With Accardo on the ropes, Ibanez singles sharply up the middle…until Aaron Hill, playing back on the outfield turf, makes a spectacular diving catch and somehow flips the ball over his back in one smooth motion to McDonald who turns the double play on a stunned Raul, extending the losing streak to seven games.  If it’s a one-run game, there’s no way Hill can make that play and the Mariners win it 7-6; it’s as simple as that.

7) September 1st: In a scoreless tie, McLaren bizarrely chooses to let Miguel Batista throw 120 pitches (when his previous high had been 114).  One of the last of those pitches was a monster home run off the bat of Greg Zaun (a switch hitter who could just as easily have been facing George Sherrill form his weaker right side).  Given the shaky performances from his relievers of late, I can understand not wanting to pull a pitcher too early, but McLaren has shown absolutely no confidence in Sherrill and Morrow and entirely too much confidence in over-exposed set-up man Sean Green.  Do you suppose there’s a connection between Sherrill’s struggles since the arrival of McLaren and McLaren’s lack of interest in using Sherrill in high leverage situations?  As the team fades, McLaren gets progressively less patient with his relievers and begins to panic, taking out pitchers if they give up so much as one walk.

8 ) September 5th: The lopsided, disgraceful umpiring in this frustrating 10-2 loss has been well documented and debated at detectovision.com, but McLaren isn’t blameless in this game.  The implosion in the 7th inning didn’t happen suddenly.  That half inning took almost 45 minutes to unfold, and Rafael Chaves and John McLaren came out to the mound an estimated four hundred thousand times.  Michael Kay is a rather annoying play by play announcer, but he and his color man have watched winning baseball for over a decade and when they watched the Mariners try to contain the Yankees in the seventh with some of this panicky micro-management, Kay says, and I quote, “What kind of message does it send to your relievers if every time they get to a 2-0 count, you send the catcher and pitching coach out there to talk to them?”  He went on to argue that McLaren was showing no faith in players who had gotten him wins all season and wondered whether this was contributing to their lack of command.  At this point, with the Mariners’ season and John McLaren’s career teetering on the brink of destruction, McLaren is absolutely TERRIFIED to manage proactively, fearing that if the club doesn’t win games, his choices will be blamed.  If he tries to coddle his pitchers and they let him down, he can’t be at fault, can he?  The officiating in this game definitely cost the Mariners the win, and the Mariners’ relievers definitely failed to respond well to adversity, and you could make an argument that McLaren should have pitched around A-Rod in the 7th, but the most important thing that happened in this game was that the Mariners’ field general panicked visibly, and all of his players followed his example.

9) September 8th: Not only does McLaren once again leave his starting pitcher in way too long (Weaver was obviously ineffective and McLaren decided to press his luck for a sixth inning out of Weaver, who promptly put the Mariners in a jam from which they couldn’t escape), but with the game still well within reach (6-8) in the 7th inning, and the bases loaded, evidently unhappy that Rick White has been released, he opts to bring in Sean White (equally unreliable) who puts the game out of reach.  He demonstrates absolutely no feel for the important moments in a ballgame and how best to get his team on the right track in those moments and he still has no faith in his best relievers, pulling Rowland Smith after a pair of walks, both of which were on bad calls (he was definitely being squeezed, especially on his breaking ball) to go to a much worse reliever just to get a righty vs. righty match-up, for example.

10) September 9th: The Mariners exploded for 13 runs in the first 4 innings, but McLaren still managed scared, forcing Felix Hernandez to throw way too many low leverage pitches (112) and using his best relievers to nail down a lopsided win.  The way things have been going for McLaren, he’s managed to get bad relievers high leverage innings, good relievers, low leverage innings, and starting pitchers extra runs on their records by overusing them, all because he’s been trying to do the safe thing and avoid criticism.  It’s been a brutal hack job from the Mariner dugout, and it’s the single largest reason the club is in free fall.

Dr. D watched the team run their record to 73-53 despite a lack of “support from the generals” as he puts it (a lack of impact trades made at the deadline) and play inspiring, coordinated baseball.  He’s watched Ichiro sign a five-year extension, saying “this is finally a team worth playing for.”  He’s heard Ichiro complain about the terrible umpiring in New York, and not say one negative word about the attitude in the clubhouse or the team’s focus, and yet (without even watching the games, no less!) he has concluded that the Mariners have fallen apart because their front office didn’t get them Ken Griffey Jr and because they got smoked by the Angels, putting it into their head that they’re not the top dogs.

I concede that losing to the Angels may have taken some of the wind out of their sails but it doesn’t explain a 2 for 15 slump.  They’re five out in the wild card now because John McLaren has personally thrown several games right out the window with his incompetence and because in between bizarre game-breaking decisions, he’s showing no confidence in his players and looking panicked out there, and the Mariners are playing the way he’s managing…panicked.  They make mistakes of aggression almost every day, from getting thrown out at home to overthrowing the cutoff man to unwisely trying to get an out on what is clearly an infield hit and turning it into a three base error to swinging at the first pitch even more than usual.

This is not a team that has “quit,” as some around the blogosphere have suggested.  A little quit in these guys might actually HELP!  They’re trying so hard to get the ship righted that they’re throwing runs away (on both sides of the ball).  If they would relax, they would win some of these close games.  This is a team that is being lead by a coward who is thinking only of his next job and is therefore paralyzed in the face of even minor adversity.  John McLaren is not only a bad manager, he’s a wuss, and the single most important explanation for why this team has gone from a group of overachievers to a pack of wannabes overnight.