Well maybe the upside to being behind 7-1 in the 6th is that you don't go out and try to rent an overly expensive mediocre bat.  The possibility of doing just that this year has always scared me.  The idea of getting "one more bat" to put you over the top has not been very productive for the M's of late, re: Milton and Chone.  It is more spooky if you're giving up a prospect for the rent a bat. 
So, perhaps you dance with the girl(s) you brought to the dance.
I am pleased that Z is willing to move up guys who light AAA up.  I'm not really pleased with how Wedge uses those guys.  Wilson and Carp barely got to swing the bat.  I will concede that they didn't light up the majors, but they got to sniff the plate and that was it.
Peguero has been allowed to gorge himself with opportunities.  However, he hasn't shown any ablility to punish MLB mistakes.  He has to be a punisher to survive. Ain't happening, though.
In his final year at A+, his  one year at AA, his short stint at AAA and his MLB shot he has averaged striking out in about 1 of every 3 plate appearances.  He has been amazingly consistent in this.  However, he is walking WAY less.  In his final A+ and AA seasons he struck out 3.5 times per walk.  At AAA it was about 4/1.  Now in the majors he's at 7 to 1.  Better pitchers gobble him up.
And I'll point out that he really isn't showing that he is a maor banger.  His prorated AAA performance showed him to be a 24 homer guy there.  He is showing 23 homer style at the MLB.  A 24 homer total can't pack his other hitting failures.  Dave Kingman is mentioned as a nice comparison (and I've done it before).  During his age 24 and 25 seasons (he was not really a full time player with PA's in the mid to high 300's), Kingman struck out one of every 3.5 times at the plate.  He walked .90 points (Peguero is at .51) and he showed homer power that translated to 32-33 homers in a near full-time season (playing nearly fulltime in the net two seasons he hit 36 and 37 homers).
Pete Incaviglia is a quasi-template for Peguero.  but he showed fulltime MLB talent by the age of 22.  From the ages of 22-25 he struckout about every 3.5 PA's (remarkably similar to Kingman).  He walked at nearly the same rate as Pegeuro, but he hit .250.  He also showed fulltime 30 homer power.
Pegs hasn't shown that he's Incaviglia.
Bo Jackson was essentially a part time ballplayer when he came up.  Even then, in his age 24 year, he was a better player than Peguero.  Peg's isn't Bo.
As I've pointed out before, Peguero (as he is now) is in an historically unique place.  There has never been a fulltime player who hits (BA) as badly, strikes out as much, and walks as seldomly.  Well, my search doesn't find one.
And yet he gets pencilled in daily.
Why not Wilson or Carp?
Seager?  Let's hope he shows his AAA HIT/EYE.  If he doesn't I'm going to be interested in how long Wedge rolls him out there. I think he's a better bet that Peguero, though.
And so it goes.
I'm hoping we see a lot more of Halman, some less of Guti ('09 was his anomaly season, '08 and '10 are his to be expected performance), and Wilson or Carp to get their real fulltime shot in LF.
Go team!
Moe
 

But we're clinging to the ledge by our fingertips.  If we come out of the break and sweep the Rangers, we might have a little more to say about the AL West race.  If we get swept...
That's basically curtains. 
The problem for me is that we have plenty of tradable assets in the minors to use to GET someone, but far less major league talent available to go out.  We need all our young big-leaguers for ourselves, and our older players are either playing terribly or injured.  Bedard needed his health in order to get full value, and we won’t get that now.  League is a FA after next year, I believe, so we could trade him this year…but then who stays in the pen the rest of the season?
I’d still like to try a Bedard-as-closer experiment, but if he thinks he can get a multi-year contract as a starter after the great first half he’s had I doubt he’d agree to that.  So if Bedard doesn’t net us anything and we feel that we can’t replace League internally thanks to the Aardsma and Kelley injuries, then what?
I do believe there’s a large trade in our future, whether at the deadline or in the offseason. 
But right now, we’re kinda in no-man’s land.  We have few-to-no veteran assets worth parting with, and we can’t be realistic buyers of talent if we’re sitting 10 games back and in 3rd place at the deadline. 
Cust, Wilson and Figgins are not a part of our future.  Guti is losing his grip on that future with us if he can’t pull out of this nosedive.  The top two levels of the minors have Liddi, Catricala and Franklin…but all have deficiencies that need work before they are ready to come up and contribute.
 
*******************
 
For immediate help (within 12 months), we need to go outside…and we need immediate offensive help. 
OPS+:
Ackley: 154 (smalllll sample size, but yes, he's a plus bat)
Halman: 113 (I don't understand this, but I support it)
Smoak: 111 (OUCH has he had a bad month)
...
Kennedy: 100
Olivo: 85
Ichiro: 84
Ryan: 79
Peguero: 76
Gutierrez: 28
Any bets on whether Halman can keep it up this year and next?  Or Kennedy?
Smoak + Ackley + 7 guys under 90 OPS+ does not = a championship. I don't care how good our pitching is.
Which is why I still think Peguero and Liddi are our best options for trading bats, but that it's more likely that we need to move an arm or two, and it might hurt.
No Rendon + drafting glove-position hitters almost exclusively means that we DON'T have a guaranteed plus corner bat lying around someplace.  I like Catricala, but you're praying he can be Raul Ibanez.  Prime Raul Ibanez would not carry this team to greatness.
Franklin is a SS, and not in the A-Rod mold.  He'll be plus for his position IMO, but I wouldn't rely on him to be a MOTO hitter either.
 
***************************
 
Jack's mission:  to find us at least one and preferrably two plus bats.  The offense is at 76  OPS+ and falling, more than wiping out the 115 ERA+ the arms are providing. Yes, Smoak could find his mojo again (and will at some point, once his BABIP crawls out of the gutter and he stops being a weak out at the plate).  Yes, Ackley could be a rookie death machine.
Like you said, Doc, those are long odds, and getting longer.  Bedard is injured, Pineda is gonna hit his Mariners-imposed innings ceiling soon.  If Smoak plans to become a fire-breather once again he needs to do it right after the ASB.
And a few of his teammates are gonna have to help out.  We got some bad breaks in the Angels series to get swept, but we can't rely on only getting good breaks to make a theoretical run.  We need some margin for error, and right now there's zero. 
Time for Jack to impress us once again.
~G

I never thought we were in it this year just because of the large gap in true talent levels despite the fact that the Mariner pitching was doing so great.
Its a rebuilding year, but we really need to be adding some long-term pieces at the deadline. There are still too many holes in the OF, we need a DH, and we could also use a long-term C.
Its okay to overpay in short-term pieces for long-term pieces. If Cin offers you Yasmani Grandal for Bedard+League, you take it.
I strongly believe that both League and Aardsma need to be unloaded. Non-elite bullpen arms are a dime a dozen and both will be in their last arbitration years due for salary increases.
League leads the league in SVs and needs to be sold high.

As for the 2nd half, I think we're in for a slightly better offense and even more regression from the pitching. The RPs will get much worse, and the SP will likely continue to regress a little as well.
The offense has been terrible recently, but I still think it gets better in the 2nd half. Seager and Ackley are upgrades over Figgins+Kennedy. Smoak and Ichiro should do a little better. The rest may stay around the same, or slightly worse but overall we should see a bit of improvement.

I agree, I expect us to improve some offensively.  I mean it's a near-impossibility statistically for CF to be as poor as it was in the first half.  In the last 30 years only 15 players have had the 350 plate appearances we've posted in CF (combined) and had worse than our .530 OPS at that position.
NO ONE PLAYER has been as bad in the last 30 years in that many plate appearances as our combined 3B results have been - an unbelievably pathetic .467 OPS.  Seager's GOT to be an improvement at that position.
I just don't think it's enough (and I know you don't either, Taro).  If we were gonna add a multi-year bat at the deadline who is already plus, that was a solution I was fine with.  Now that it looks like we're about to fall off the competitive cliff, we'll need to obtain the help another way.
I wish we had a SS to trade to the Reds, maybe with Triunfel to back him up, since they've had an atrocious situation there (their combined SS output is barely outhitting Chone Figgins, and they've used two guys a LOT there to try to get it right).
The Reds don't need League, really, as their pen has been great, but a starter and a SS?  Yeah, they could use those.  Send them Jack Wilson for free, and Triunfel, and Bedard (or Vargas, if they'd prefer).  Just get a catcher (Grandal or Mesoraco) and maybe Alonso out of em.  Offer whatever fungible pieces they want for their stretch run.
At this point I would cough up quite a bit for somebody's good-but-blocked hitting prospect.  It happens occasionally with NL teams that already have a good 1B (see Joey Votto and the aforementioned Alonso).  It's happening with Grandal in Cincy too, as Mesoraco is ahead of him and killing it, while Ryan Hannigan is a cheap backup that is club controlled for many years to come.  I'm not a huge Alonso fan and he's not a good OF, really being more of a 1B/DH, but he has some value as well.
Whether they're currently in the minor leagues or the majors, we NEED to go fishing for bats.  If Jack knows we're getting a payroll bump (we're currently on pace for 1.8 million tickets, but I expect to get closer to 2 million again this year) then we can hope to buy a bat or two in free agency, but if payroll stays flat, or (God forbid) slides backward again, then we've GOT to get one in the trade market.
Whether we have reasonable offseason dreams (adding a Jason Kubel type, shoring up the pen) or extravagant ones (find a pot of gold and a leprechaun, sign Prince Fielder, rip Hanley Ramirez away from the Marlins, pave Edgar Martinez Way with platinum bricks and unicorn horn enamel) I think we've got to move minor leaguers to get enough hitting back to make a difference.
Filling the Guti and Figgins first-half craters with average hitters would/will cure much of what ails us, but not all.  Not nearly all.
~G

BTW,
I didn't clearly state this, although I intended to.  Even though Peguero is compared to Kingman in the TTO template sense, he isn't Kingman.  Or even close.  Doesn't walk enough and K's (compared to walks) at twice the rate, which means he doesn't make enough contact to get to the 32 homer range.
You roll Peguero out there every day only if you think he will eventually guess right on a pitch that the pitcher actually misses in the zone.  His pitch recognition is so bad that he can't simply be a mistate hitter. But every seven games, or so, you get your hearts desire as he launches one. Over the other six he goes 3/20 with 7 strikeouts.
Do the M's do something with lefthanded pure pull hitters (Peguero, Saunders) in the minors that messes them up.  Well, probably not.  Perhaps we're just overly enamored with LH pure pull hitting guys, assuming they might overcome the Safeco effect.
Perhaps.  But not if they can't find the ball.
Halman, btw has a 9-1 K/BB ration.  Even worse than Pegs.. And he's striking out about 1/3 of the time he comes up.  But, just as an observer, he looks to have more chance at the plate.  My 2 cents, anyway.
Tacoma stats?  M. Wilson 345/424/626 
Give him a real shot.   Or Carp. Real each and every day shots.  Heck, I might even prefer Langerhans to Peguero at this point.
My God! How far have I fallen?
moe

While I do love your math (and your conclusion) glmuskie, the Figgins/FGut duo's pursuit of a lifetime achievement award in Hall of Shame probably renders this all for naught.
My kingdom for some Replacement Level Players!