Starting to see a trend

If the Mariners don't get an extraordinary outing from their starter, they haven't been winning many (or more accurately any) games this season.

We’re in our third week of the baseball season, and your Seattle Mariners have yet to win a series.

Actually, they may not be yourMariners. Perhaps you had the good sense to root for one of the other 29 major-league teams, all of whom have made the World Series as opposed to the Mariners, who alas, have not. They are my Mariners, however, and while I wouldn’t say that I derive any enjoyment from the early-season struggles. I have, however, been able to laugh. Last Thursday, I noted that the Mariners were 4-0 when their starting pitcher held the opponent to one run or less, 1-8 when the starting pitcher allowed more than one (1) run.

In other words: If the Mariners didn’t get extraordinary effort from their starting pitcher over the first two weeks of the season, they weren’t winning. A more elegant explanation of this trend was expressed in a flow chart passed along by TheBeaver_Shark on the platform formerly known as Twitter.

Let’s apply it to this past weekend’s three-game set against the Cubs.