With Bruce and Encarnacion gone the outlines of the new Mariners are slowly becoming visible. Again, it's all new and very early, but watching Mallex and JP hitting the ball over the place, seeing Vogie hit monster homers, observing Narvaez learn how to frame pitches. Nothing big or necessarily dramatic, but all pieces that, fitted together, could become a winning team.
Yesterday's loss to the Brewers looked and felt different. Even the best teams are going to lose 60 games a season. And this loss felt like one of those. The M's ran into some good Brewer pitching. Leake threw one bad pitch. That stuff happens in baseball all the time. No five-run innings on either side, no triple errors on a play, no one caught wandering off base. Just your basic baseball, ultimately forgettable in a string of 162.
But the routine nature of the loss, the absence of gross misplay, the very ordinary quality of it, offers, oddly, a kind of comfort. This is baseball at neither its worst or best; this is the game. After what we've been through over the first half of the season, the lack of drama and head-shaking plays is a relief.
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