When Julio Rodríguez left Seattle's game against the Los Angeles Angels after a live ball hit his shin / ankle area, tortured Mariners fans everywhere assumed the worst. According to Daniel Kramer of MLB.com, X-rays came back negative, so the very worst may have been avoided.
But even if Julio avoids the IL and returns to the lineup soon, his absence from center field was pretty jarring — and should be a wake-up call to the Mariners' front office that this team still lacks the overall talent to be taken seriously in the AL. When you don't spend money for talent across the board, this is what happens. When you don't have MLB-level players across the roster, one injury can crumble a roster.
Any MLB team would be worse without its best defensive outfielder and one of its best hitters. But there's a steep talent cliff that Seattle's roster falls off after its star players, and that top-heavy construction will never be successful.
Leody Taveras was a nightmare in center field
After Julio left the game, Seattle turned to Leody Taveras for center field duty. It wasn't pretty. On the first batter, Taveras misplayed a routine fly ball about as poorly as possible, then booted it and it allowed Zach Neto to reach second base.
A few batters later, Taveras tried (for seemingly no reason) to leap at the right field wall for a ball he could have caught on the ground; it didn't go well. Seattle ended up losing the game 8-6, and Taveras also went 0-3 at the plate, two of those at-bats coming with RISP.
The cheap Mariners front office is seeing what happens when you don't spend
I'm not solely blaming Leody Taveras for having a bad game; he did have a bad game, but he was picked up off waivers a few weeks ago and shouldn't be expected to provide for this team in high-leverage situations. When a mid-season waiver pickup is your best option to play an incredibly important defensive position, something went very wrong along the way.
But his struggles are the latest example of the Mariners front office and ownership doing the barest of bare minimums in the offseasons and on the waiver wire and expecting any different result than mediocrity on the field. It's the same story every year; this year, Taveras and Donovan Solano are the latest examples of players being asked to do far more than they're capable of because the Mariners simply do not have any other options.
I would love for this to be alarming for Jerry Dipoto, Justin Hollander and John Stanton. It would make me awfully happy if they all watched what happened last night and said, "Wow, this team is not nearly talented enough to compete for anything, we should be aggressive at the trade deadline and get real, every day MLB players in the offseasons."
Mariners fans would rejoice if this was a real wake-up call for a front office that seems to sleep very, very deeply.
The Mariners are one serious injury away from completely bottoming out
This should never be the case in baseball. Any longer-term injury to Julio or Cal Raleigh would be completely detrimental to a team that already regularly makes fifth starters look like Nolan Ryan, and Julio's injury last night showed just how tenuous things are for a Mariners team that had suddenly fallen four games behind Houston in the AL West.
Now 32-31 and losers of five straight, all the promise that Seattle's offense showed at the beginning of the year is a distant memory. Things are rough in Seattle, and unless the front office makes a complete 180 in how it operates... reinforcements are not coming.