2018's Bogus Schedule Has Actually Helped the Ners

The scheduling of the opening two weeks of the Mariners’ 2018 campaign has been a complete disaster, but that may not be a bad thing.

If that sentence seems contradictory to you, you’re not crazy – but also, bear with me. Have the seemingly random off-days made following the team a head-spinning exercise? Sure. But it has also afforded a roster snakebitten by injuries a chance to heal up from a ridiculous slate of DL stints.

Now, we at Mariner Muse of course love our off-days. They’re our niche: on every off-day, we publish articles and send you a newsletter, returning a bit of baseball to your life when baseball otherwise takes a brief hiatus. So yes, we love off-days…but to a certain point. That point has been passed.

The Ners have had five off-days in the two weeks of the 2018 season thus far, and four of them were scheduled. Two of those came on Fridays (both of them scheduled), which – if you follow baseball ardently – should raise some alarm. For years, baseball has exclusively placed its off-days on Mondays and Thursdays, meaning baseball fans know their team will play every Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday during the season, weather and All Star Break permitting.

These Friday off-days therefore look completely foreign to fans, but Major League Baseball allegedly has a good reason for them: namely, insurance days for games that have a decent chance to be called off for inclement weather. But in the Mariners’ case, that concept is dumb for multiple reasons.

The first Friday off-day (March 30) gave the team a break between consecutive home games at Safeco Field – which makes absolutely no sense, since the Safe is impervious to weather cancellations. And the excuse that, well, everyone else was doing it doesn’t apply in this instance, since there were 11 other MLB games played that day, 9 of which were scheduled in advance. It was a head-scratching decision that immediately threw off the rhythm I’ve grown accustomed to following America’s Pastime.

The second off-day made more sense from a weather standpoint, but also shined a light on the absurdity of the scheduling to begin with.

Let me say that it is idiotic to play baseball outside in the first week of April in Minnesota. There’s absolutely no excuse for it. I can’t decide if it’s: a) worse to build a modern stadium in Minneapolis (below) that doesn’t have an indoor option, or b) to recognize this and go ahead with scheduling baseball there anyway.

What’s worse is that, in practice, it didn’t even work. The Mariners sat through Friday, played Saturday, and then got snowed out Sunday. They’ll lose an off-day in May as a result and have to stop in Minnesota on their way back to Seattle from Detroit, adding yet another travel stint to the team that already travels the farthest each year (because Seattle is so isolated).

Really though, why on earth are we even playing professional baseball in March? This year, I know I was itching for baseball by about mid-February, and was happy that the season started before the calendar turned to April. But if the integrity of some of these games and the rhythm of the players playing them gets completely thrown off because every other game might get postponed, then let’s all just wait a couple of weeks into April to get underway. Just a thought.

This negative side of the schedule would probably be discussed more on Mariners media markets if it hadn’t opened up so many opportunities for them. Last year was an injury disaster, this spring was an injury disaster, and it all has unfortunately carried over into this season. By the end of the opening series, the Ners were down Ben Gamel, Mike Zunino and Nelson Cruz, and would lose Ryon Healy a week later.

If Zunino, Gamel and Cruz all return this weekend as they’re projected to, they’ll have only missed 10 or so games – even though they’ve been out for two weeks apiece. Opportunities to heal on off days don’t present themselves very often in the heat of the baseball season, meaning that the plethora of funky rest days we’re getting right now are actually presenting a huge schedule break for those three guys and the team in general.

The other benefit from all of the random off-days is that the team has only had to use four starting pitchers thus far, which is a huge break for a squad that’s thin in the rotation to begin with…and with one of its top five guys (Erasmo Ramirez) ailing severely. We at MM like Ariel Miranda more than most, but we can also fully admit that being able to use Felix Hernandez or James Paxton in games that he presumably was due to start has been a huge lift to kick off 2018.

If you look at the MLB standings, the Mariners having only 10 games in the book at the end of Wednesday is an anomaly. Division rivals Houston and California Los Angeles Anaheim both have 13 games behind them through already – while, Texas already has 14 in the books. No team had played fewer games than Seattle at the end of Wednesday, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the only two teams that had played the same amount were the Twins and Royals.

So while the schedule has pretty much been an unmitigated disaster from a planning standpoint, the Ners have still managed to benefit from it. The real challenge going forward will be to try and somehow slow the injury bug at points of the season when off-days are far less plentiful. Fans will be crossing their fingers and hopefully not pulling some unknown tendon that James Paxton has probably hurt before in the process.

#Opinion