It looks like this may be Mariners’ last day in first place for a while.

I’m not jumping ship; just facing facts. They lost the last two games against the Rangers; games they should have won, especially with their two aces, Hernandez and Bedard on the hill. Granted, Hernandez was not at his best, fighting the flu, and was probably a little weak. He made some mistakes and the Rangers made him pay. Bedard, on the other hand, put up another good seven innings, keeping us close, only to watch it destroyed by a poor performance by Stark in the tenth inning.

The fact is, these Mariners have been winning some highly improbable games lately. I’m honestly amazed at some of the wins they’ve pulled off in the last week or so. I’m still excited about watching this team, even though it seems they are starting to level off in the standings. One can never seem to count this team out, and that makes them enormously fun to watch.

That said, I think there is a real big problem with this team: They need to start hitting the damn ball.

In his post today, Geoff Baker of the Seattle Times points out where the M’s are failing in a big way; their two highest paid players are not producing offensively.

As we saw a year ago, the Mariners are now well into May and still waiting for their two highest-paid players to do what they are supposed to. Beltre has yet to hit a home run and he’s struggling to keep his on-base-plus-slugging percentage above .500 — .500! A slap-hitting middle infielder can’t get away with numbers that bad, never mind a clean-up hitter. And moving Beltre to No. 5 isn’t the answer either. If you’re in the middle of the order, you have to hit.

If you were wondering, that OPS total makes Beltre the worst clean-up hitter in all of baseball by roughly 120 points of OPS. In other words, even the next worst guy is in the mid-.600s.

And then there’s Ichiro, who has a .322 on-base percentage at the moment that ties him for second-worst among AL leadoff hitters with at least 50 plate appearances. His OPS is also second-worst, as is his runs total. Now, the runs can be explained away by his early ulcer and lack of games played relative to others. But not those other stats. His batting average is .291, but it’s an empty number. The kind Jose Vidro used to put up. A leadoff hitter has to have an on-base percentage up in the mid-300s and Ichiro’s isn’t there. He’s only 20th best in the majors at the moment and the M’s are paying him big money to do a whole lot more.

You have to be pleased with the way the pitching staff, for the most part, has stepped up their game this year. And a few of the new guys are generally doing well (Gutierrez, Chavez, and Branyan in particular). But the lack of performance from the team leaders is disappointing and will need to change if this team expects to compete going forward.

…but I’m enjoying it while it lasts. The Seattle Mariners are playing some great baseball so far this season. They are 7-2 with a six game winning streak to start the season. Oh, and they are in 1st place.

The Mariners are showing the kind of spirit that has been missing from this club for several years. It’s a joy to watch them again.

Last year, they were a team that performed like… well that’s just it, they DIDN’T perform. They sucked in every way imaginable, and also in some ways that were unimaginable, from the front office on down to the lowly minor league call-ups (not their fault, of course, but they were subject to the vastness of suck that dominated on the club, and played accordingly). In every game last year, you could see (or perhaps imagine to see) the players looking at their watches, wondering, like all of us, when the season was going to be over. They were mailing it in from May through September, and everyone knew it. The end of the season came as a relief, like a mercy killing that ended everyone’s pain.

This year, they look and play like a totally different team. This is a group of guys that play as though they aren’t just there for the paycheck. In the first week of play, I’ve seen more see-saw battles where the M’s fought back from a deficit, sometimes more than once in a game, than I saw all of last year. To me, that’s the mark of a team driven to win. A team that won’t give up. It’s not appropriate to draw any parallels to earlier M’s teams (it’s way too early, for one thing), but it’s clear to me that these guys have the right mental attitude to go along with their abilities – and that’s something the Mariners have needed for a long time.

Finally! It’s good to be a Mariners fan again.