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1.  Dr. D is wayyyy too old to apologize for enjoying sports.  Here there be standings-watching.

SSI refuses to reenact a grad-school class, in which we take turns trying to gain an occasional "solid work, old chap" from six or eight highly-specialized peers.  SSI's intended audience, which does happen to contain grad-school graduates, has a considerable joy-and-hope tolerance.  Whether the tolerance was natural or was developed through slow introduction of toxins, we're not clear...

So per Matty's adroit recommendation, we're hereby going to wallow in the wild card race until the M's next losing streak.  Such a losing streak, for obvious reasons, can't feasibly begin at least until Wednesday.  So we've got a 48-hour pass to hit the standings hot spots off the base.

2.  The Angels are 62-60 and -4.0 out of a playoff spot; nobody would call it weird for the Angels to chase the playoff spot.  Actually, people would call it weird if they didn't.  The M's are pretty close now to where the Angels are.  They do need to get to .500 as soon as possible, though.  After tomorrow night, they're four back of that.  :- )

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=== Gameflow ===

The first two innings of Monday's game felt like May:  crummy.   Had it been May, the following seven innings would also have been crummy.  After two innings, the Mariners had one scratch single and a bunch of ugly at-bats against an effectively-wild Ubaldo Jimenez.  The second inning was simply pathetic.  You could just smell the foul stench of 3-hit shutouts in the air ... or you could have, had it been May.

.................

In this game, though, the Mariners appeared to be lurking.

Gamelong, the ballclub seemed to have its head on a swivel, looking around for ways to win the game, rather than looking for ways to lose it.  Kevin Millwood, as he has done all year, dug in to his trench as if he'd been a WWI Allied soldier taking both gunfire and heavy rain.

.................

Two homers (?!) later, the Mariners went into the 7th inning having battled to a classic 1970's-style 3-3 tie.  Charlie Furbush came in, and it suddenly occurred, for the first time all year:  you know what?  This ballclub is going to be blinkin' tough to beat in a close game, late innings.  Maybe because this is pretty much the first game in which the following conditions have existed:

• Wilhelmsen at the, um, helm
• Pryor up, and in place as the backup closer
• Furbush back from the DL
• Brandon League pitching for another team
• Lucas Luetge there for one lefty
• Eric Wedge apparently having arrayed these pitchers in defined roles

It felt like the M's were -- against an Indians team out of synch -- about 2:1 favorites as we entered the last third of the game, tied.  Mathematically, that wouldn't be true.  But this post is about Gameflow.

.................

Furbush in fact went on to detonate the Indians, and I think I saw him monologuing beforehand.  You know, monologuing about how FEEEEBLE the super is and how INEVVVITABLE his defeat was.  Except Furbush followed up the monologuing by pulling the trigger, notably on his plus-plus slider.

When Saunders hit his second 2-run shot, it seemed scripted.

Actually, it was scripted, by Eric Wedge.  In the postgame, Saunders said that the Mariners drive to Safeco "expecting to win, and that's the truth."  He credited Eric Wedge, who on or about August 10th gave a pep talk after the M's 5th straight loss.  He told them that if the M's went on to lose the rest of the year, it wouldn't undo all of the good things they'd done since the All-Star Break.  Precisely as SSI had been whining that he should do, Wedge took on a sports-psych role convinced the M's that they were capable of winning.  According to Saunders, this "took the weight of the world off our shoulders" and the M's began their 8-of-9 winning streak.

As you know, sports psychology is a subject held in bad taste in pseudo-grad school classes.  As you know, this isn't a pseudo-grad school class.  Psychology exists; it can be verrrrrry easily misinterpreted.  Dr. D could be wrong, but he suspects that the game ball on this 8-of-9 winning streak goes to Eric Wedge.  Let's say that Mike Hargrove had been managing, then ...

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P.S. Tom Wilhelmsen ran into some bad luck, including a broken-bat double, so the script had a plot twist before bleeding out.  I wonder when the last broken-bat home run was in the majors; does anybody know?

Six in a row.  The O's and A's lost tonight.  Felix Hernandez goes tomorrow.  You remember 1995, as the M's scrambled to chase down the leaders, how giddy you felt before every Randy Johnson game?

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