Humor me for a minute, and let’s try a bit of an exercise together: close your eyes (or retreat to that blank space in your mind typically only visited when meetings run 15+ minutes past their scheduled time) and think back to March. What did you expect from this season? What were your pie-in-the-sky hopes? What were your cake-in-the-lake fears?
It’s July, and the Mariners are 54-31, 23 games above .500, with the second-best win/loss percentage in franchise history, behind the 2001 squad. They closed out the month with duel sweeps of the Baltimore Orioles and the Kansas City Royals and, as of yesterday, were half a game back of the division and up on WC2 by eight games.