Sweet constancy

The Mariners are the most and least consistent team in MLB this year.

I split the season into 14 discrete 10-game stretches (one right after the other) and found the number of wins for each stretch.

The Mariners have the largest standard deviation of wins in MLB, implying theyve been the least consistent team of 2025.

They have five stretches of seven wins or more (the most in AL).

They have three stretches of three wins or fewer (the most among AL contenders).

They dont have a stretch of six wins.

These violent swings seem to be accelerating as 2025 gets late.

Theyve lost two series in a row, after winning two, after losing three, after winning three.

These ups and downs have clustered, with wins at home and losses on the road.

The vibes exist in some type of confusion arousal, underscored Tuesday when Dan Wilson held a closed-door open forum, then got ejected, then lost the game, then finished the day in a playoff spot.

Whether its a nervous media stoking concern for another September skid (they went 16-10 last September), or the clubhouses internal dialogue simply spilling into the public, accountability and preparedness are the obsession of the moment.

These werent issues less than a month ago, when the same group had (arguably) the best homestand in franchise history.

Vibes, as always, are myopic.

If the dream of the 2025 Mariners is in fact dying, though, its unlikely to be quick and painless.

The Astros and Rangers havent proven capable, either.

The Astros are no longer the most hurt team in MLB, but even with the returns of Jeremy Pena and Yordan Alvarez, their offense ranks 21st with a 93 wRC+ since the beginning of August.

Their once dominant pitching ranks in the bottom 10 over the same stretch.

Theyve hovered on the negative side of .500 since July 31, unable to burry their competition.

They too made a public display of their closed-door vibes when Framber Valdez hit his catcher in the chest with a fastball, with questionable intent and remorse.

The Rangers began the season projected in the three-way tie atop the division but have mostly floundered, with similar (and briefer) swings in competence.

Their lineup was terrible early, limiting a top pitching staff; those strengths and weaknesses inverted somewhere along the way, still unable to put everything together.

They lead the AL West by all the favored win estimators, but their distributions are skewed, with tons of blowout wins and one-run losses.

Their home park, Globe Life Field, has played more suppressive than even T-Mobile Park this year, providing both an ostensible home-field advantage and fogging up any assessment of true talent.

They are a game short of the third wild card spot, as a bizarre amalgamation of the last five years of Mariners baseball.

And so the Mariners are incidentally still in the picture for both the wild card and the AL West.

They havent won much of late, but they also havent lost much ground.

Their season could be over in the next 10 game stretch, or they could be firmly in first place.

That the Mariners lack consistency might be the best thing going for them at the moment.

Its worth returning to something I wrote in June , after they bottomed out in Arizona: This is kind of the Mariners thing.

This is the gamble they willingly accept and the one they say they can win.

If theres anything this organization has proven capable of, its getting to the end of the season in the mix.

Thats still highly relevant as we re-re-enter the its so over cycle of the season.

Despite their short-term swings, the Mariners went 36-34 in the first 70 games of 2025 and 37-33 in the next, making them the most consistent team in MLB from a broader view.

That long-term consistency tracks all the way back to 2021: 90 wins, 90 wins, 88 wins, 85 wins the last four seasons is the lowest standard deviation in MLB over that span.

Plummeting now would be an aberration.

If theres anything we can say about the 2025 Mariners, its that we really dont know whats next.

Its all still there.

They are still good.

They are still the Mariners.

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