Why the Mariners are in the worst place to be at the MLB trade deadline

The Mariners find themselves in the worst place to be as the MLB trade deadline rapidly approaches: Not quite bad enough to write off the season, not quite good enough to warrant an aggressive push to the finish.

It’s the dreaded no man’s land, the netherworld between borderline contention and full capitulation. The Mariners haven’t earned the right to be a buyer, but they haven’t plummeted far enough to be an outright seller.

Not yet anyway. These final few days before the Aug. 1 deadline will speak multitudes, and it’s not trending in a good direction. The lack of a definitive status — all in or all out — is no doubt giving team executives Jerry Dipoto and Justin Hollander ulcers these days.

It might feel like the bottom has dropped out of the season, with all the gut-punch losses the Mariners have experienced this year — none more devastating than Monday’s defeat to the Twins when they had potentially their most galvanizing and improbable come-from-behind victory yanked right out from under them. But hovering at or near .500, their forever home in 2023, you can still conjure up a scenario that’s not altogether outlandish in which they finally get the surge they’ve been waiting for all year for, and close that gap.

Let’s be real, though. Such an outcome is getting increasingly implausible. Oh, you can throw out as a role model the 2014 Kansas City Royals, who stood 48-50 at roughly the same stage of the season and were given 8.5 percent playoff odds on July 21 of that year by FanGraphs’ formula. The Royals went 41-23 (.641) the rest of the way to finish 89-73 and narrowly grab a wild-card spot. They then came from behind twice to win the loser-out wild-card game in extra innings, got hot in the playoffs and won the American League pennant in a sweep of Baltimore, then took the Giants to seven games in the World Series (before winning it all the next year).

But it’s getting harder and harder to envision a similar storybook fate for the Mariners, whose FanGraphs playoff odds fell to 11.8 percent with Monday’s excruciating loss. It left the Mariners with a 50-50 record — the 22^nd time this year they’ve been at .500. The math is getting more difficult by the day — far worse than the “could go either way” connotation of 50-50. They have been mediocrity personified this year.

To reach 90 wins, which has been regarded as the magic number for a wild-card berth, would require a 40-22 record by Seattle down the stretch entering Tuesday. That’s a .645 winning percentage that the Mariners have achieved in just one stretch this year, when they won seven of their final nine games before the All-Star break.

That spurt left them seemingly poised for a second-half run at a wild-card berth or even chasing down the division-leading Rangers. But Monday’s loss left them 5-6 since the break — the very essence of the mediocrity that has marked their season. It left them 8½ games behind the Rangers and 5½ games out of the final wild-card, with four teams to overtake. Yet another instance of a surge gone bad.

The math is daunting, but it’s the flaws we’ve seen all year that most clearly defuse the optimism. Despite a borderline elite starting rotation, the Mariners’ offensive woes and glaring lack of clutch hitting continue to sabotage every juncture when they seem poised to finally make a run. At some point, you have to resign yourself to the fact that they are what they’ve shown us, and nothing more.

Which is why Dipoto has already acknowledged that he’s not likely to be an aggressive buyer at the deadline like he was last year, when the Mariners sent a package of young players to Cincinnati, including elite prospect Noelvi Marte, for would-be ace Luis Castillo. The fact that the Mariners are 9-12 in Castillo’s starts this year, and he’s won just six of his 11 quality starts (six or more innings and three or fewer runs allowed), speaks volumes to their struggles.

And it’s why they are far more likely to explore moving pending free agent Teoscar Hernandez, closer Paul Sewald or backup catcher Tom Murphy than they are to empty out the farm system to get an elite bat. Because with the struggles and regression this year by Eugenio Suarez, Ty France and especially Julio Rodriguez, one bat isn’t going to cure what ails them.

If the next week goes completely off the rails, I wouldn’t be shocked if Dipoto at least did do due diligence on trading some of his established veterans such as France and Suarez. What I don’t expect him to do is to dangle a young starter such as George Kirby (as close to an untouchable as they have) or Logan Gilbert in pursuit of a bat.

Disgruntled fans might not be willing to hear this, but the Mariners still have the core of a contending ballclub. Most teams would kill for a rotation of Castillo, Kirby, Gilbert, Bryce Miller and Bryan Woo, with Robbie Ray returning at some point next year and Marco Gonzales still on the roster. That’s a tremendous base to work around. Rodriguez can still be an offensive force once he figures out how to not chase that slider out of the strike zone; writing him off at age 22 is just foolish.

However, if this year hasn’t driven home the need to be more aggressive in the offseason, monetarily and otherwise, in getting offensive help, nothing will. Even Dipoto acknowledged during his radio show on Seattle Sports 710 AM that he didn’t do enough to “[build] a group around that core to support the bumps and the bruises.”

Given the Mariners’ well-established difficulties in attracting hitters to T-Mobile Park in free agency, it would be wise at this deadline for Dipoto to work the same margins he has in the past to identify players such as Mitch Haniger, France and J.P. Crawford, who were blocked in their own system but on the verge of being big-league regulars. Every team will want Miller and Woo; only a significant offensive upgrade — with club control — should warrant giving one of them up.

The Mariners no doubt envisioned they’d reach this stage of the season in the middle of a playoff fight, preferably ensconced at the top of the division. It hasn’t worked out anywhere close to that, and they have only themselves to blame. No man’s land is a desolate place to be in late July.