Good news, everyone!

It's been a pretty great week in the news, largely because of the absolute delight that has been the Democratic National Convention. So many standout speeches and fantastic energy that I could write long posts about and maybe will.

But not today. Because the best news from today (so far) comes from Your Seattle Mariners. The headline:

Mariners fire manager Scott Servais amid AL West slide

To quote my friend Mack, whose reaction was much like mine only slightly sanitized, "AMFT." (The A stands for "about," the T for "time," and the middle letters for a descriptor Samuel L. Jackson uses for snakes and planes.)

You may recall my posts about how the Mariners have been wildly inconsistent this year, or how they were pathetic as a club because batters having trouble had no support from their own dugout/clubhouse and had to seek help elsewhere. Or how the Mariners absolutely suck at driving in runners from third base, generally at worst a 50/50 proposition but with them 40% is a reach.

You may also recall my stance from a couple years back that the only reason the Mariners could possibly get into the postseason going forward is because we now live in the Manfred Era of participation-trophy-level playoffs and roster rules designed to protect managers from their own dumbness, and even then if the M's were to get in they wouldn't last long. And that would hold true until significant changes were made in management.

Well, someone with the power to do something about it finally reached the same conclusion.

Also canned, just as importantly, was alleged hitting coach Jarret DeHart, a primary figure in a couple of the posts linked above and a clear liability to the team.

The firings come at the conclusion of a road trip that saw the M's lose eight of nine games and fall from a first-place tie to five games behind the Houston Astros in the division. Going back a bit farther, since June 18th—when the M's held a 10-game lead over the Astros—Seattle has a winning percentage of just .377 (20-33), including 18 losses by two or fewer runs and 16 losses when their starting pitcher turned in a quality start (6+ innings with <=3 earned runs allowed). And over those 53 games, the Mariners' offense has managed to post a batting line of .208/.300/.354 with an average of 10½ strikeouts per game. For the non-baseball stat nerds, that's bad.

The frustrating thing is that none of this is new. This has been standard operating procedure for the Mariners for four years, and for longer than that no matter how good the roster of personnel was the lineup underachieved. It's astonishing that the team won 88 or more games in four of Servais' nine years at the helm, and all of the credit for that goes to the pitchers. Even there, Servais had issues—he had such a tendency to call on the worst possible option from the bullpen that I actually believe that certain relievers were traded just so Servais wouldn't keep bringing them into critical game situations (looking at you, Dan Altavilla, Ryne Stanek, Rafael Montero, Taylor Williams, et.al). Those unlikely win totals masked what I always thought were Servais' flaws and probably kept him around despite what should have been obvious reasons not to. In addition to the weird bullpen decisions there was the insistence on a three-man bench (before Manfred's reign mandated at least four), odd lineup constructions, and basic inflexibility when it came to deviating from pregame decisions regardless of what happened on the field.

Hopefully this will be a "better late than never" situation rather than one of "too little too late." The M's are still just five games out thanks to Houston's terrible start to the season. It's not likely that they can catch the Astros, but nor is it all that unlikely with five and a half weeks to go in the season (including three games in Houston).

The new manager will be Dan Wilson, former Seattle catcher and a guy who always struck me as possible manager material. He's had no coaching experience other than as a roving minor-league instructor for the M's here and there, but there have been successful big-league managers that came in cold—Craig Counsell, for one, who took Milwaukee to the postseason five times in eight years; also Aaron Boone, though when your first gig is the Yankees you're already a step up. Of course there's also David Ross and Gabe Kapler, who didn't fare so well. 

No word yet on a new batting coach. That might be important. If the M's just go with DeHart's assistant for the rest of the year I doubt much will improve, but just being without DeHart should help. The rumor mill has Edgar Martínez returning to coach in some capacity. We'll see.

I've got tickets for next Tuesday night. Who wants to go?