This Division Subtracts Mariners

Who knows about those 116 wins of last year? Did they prove to be an albatross to the Mariners in 2002 or were they forgotten, dismissed as something of a historic aberration as Manager Lou Piniella had urged in spring training, cautioning his team that it was a new year?

The Mariners will have time to ponder those questions over a long winter, but it is safe to say that 116 now clouds perspective, complicating any attempt to measure what kind of season the Mariners have had. A year ago they had already popped champagne in celebration of a division title. Now, their wild-card hopes requiring a miracle as tall as the Space Needle, they are spoilers as the Angels and Oakland A’s battle for the title, and if it isn’t a bad season when you don’t win, what is it, what other measure is there?

Well, there’s the fact that the American League West is one tough division, and yet the Mariners are probably going to join the A’s and Angels as the third team to win 90 or more games, and while 90 is a long way from 116, there was Piniella to provide some of the elusive perspective as he sat at his desk and said, of the A’s and Angels, that the Mariners “were simply caught and passed by a pair of runaway roller coasters.”

“For three teams from the same division to win 90 games is unbelievable,” he said. “If you look at history, if you win 91 or 92 games, that generally gets you to the postseason, but not this season.”

Piniella shook his head, then said: “I knew coming out of spring training it would be very competitive. I saw Oakland and knew they were good. I saw the Angels and knew they were good. I knew it would be a dogfight. Now, what I didn’t know was that Oakland would run off 20 straight wins in August and that the Angels would win 15 of 16, and that’s what happened. That, plus the fact that we played about .500 ball for three months, and that wasn’t going to be good enough to hold off two teams playing as well as the A’s and Angels.”

The Angels, coming off their 8-1 victory in Friday night’s series opener, can officially clinch a playoff berth today by eliminating the Mariners from wild-card contention. Maybe the frustration of those three months on the .500 treadmill played into Piniella’s Wednesday night eruption when the 59-year-old manager rewound his personal highlight reel during a volatile argument with umpire C. B. Bucknor, kicking at his cap several times before dislodging the first base bag and heaving it up the line.

Piniella laughed in reflection and said he doesn’t expect to go out for the “Senior Olympics soon,” but of those three months when the A’s and Angels were picking up steam, the laugh faded and he said, “We’ve created expectations here, a lot of them, and because of it you sense that feeling of frustration. In retrospect, we needed things here all summer, and that came to light [as the Mariners were losing a division lead that was 6 1/2 games on May 11 and that they last shared on Aug. 22].”

That need, Piniella said, was one more pitcher and definitely one more run-producing hitter, and while Piniella kept expressing those needs to management--”I’m not doing my job if I don’t say what our needs are when I’m asked”--and while General Manager Pat Gillick kept trying to fill them, he was handicapped, Piniella said, by injuries in the farm system that limited who he could trade and by ownership’s reluctance to increase an $80-million payroll despite projected attendance of 3.5 million.

So, while the Angels added Alex Ochoa and the A’s added Ray Durham and Ricardo Rincon, the best Gillick could do was Jose Offerman and Ismael Valdes, not exactly what the manager had in mind, and the result has been speculation that an exasperated Piniella would ask out of the final year of his contract to possibly manage the Devil Rays in his Tampa Bay backyard--speculation he flatly denied Friday night, saying he would return to Seattle next year.

“I’m an organization man,” Piniella said. “My job is to manage the pieces I’m given.”

Well, one valuable piece was lost early when Edgar Martinez ruptured a knee tendon in April and sat out three months and that was just one complication. Jeff Cirillo failed to bring the Coors Field altitude with him and was a major disappointment at third base, and Mike Cameron, Bret Boone and Ichiro Suzuki have failed to duplicate their 2001 production.

That’s not to say they won’t emerge with some very good statistics, but instead of 116 wins, the Mariners lead the league in runners left on base, which undermined a rotation that lost 17-game winner Paul Abbott to a season-long injury and 15-game winner Aaron Sele to the Angels as a free agent and has lacked reliability behind Freddy Garcia, Jamie Moyer and rookie Joel Pineiro, who was racked by the Angels on Friday night.

And complicating all of that, one of Piniella’s 25 pieces was a Rule 5 draftee (Luis Ugueto) who was basically limited to pinch-running and another was an outfielder (Charles Gipson) basically limited to defense. “And when you have an older team that doesn’t have the depth it should,” the manager said, “you’re forced to overextend players who shouldn’t be overextended.” He was referring to 36-year-old Ruben Sierra.

So, on another night when the Angels looked more like the Mariners of last year than the Mariners did, a night when his team “might have played it’s worst game of the year” and failed to fulfill his pre-game hope “to make it interesting and competitive for the Angels and A’s over the final nine games” when they play only the Angels and A’s, Piniella would also reflect on all of the factors that have impacted 2002 and said, “you know, we’ve had a very respectable season but just fell a little short. I’m disappointed, but my disappointment is for the fans. They expected more.”

There are now eight games to play, and no one knows what to expect from the Mariners after that because Gillick might choose not to return and there is a lot of age on a roster that includes nine free agents (John Olerud, Dan Wilson and Moyer among them), and there is the issue of how much ownership is willing to spend, which means Martinez and his $10-million option could also be gone.

If that, too, has impacted performance in the season after 116 wins, one Mariner wasn’t buying any excuse. “I tip my cap to the Angels and A’s because they’ve played unbelievably,” said Boone, “but we had control of [the race] and let it slip away by playing under what we’re capable of.

“We have no one to blame but ourselves.”