It must be a tough time to be a sports fan in the state of Washington. The Mariners just lost 100 games with their $100 million payroll. The Seahawks are, as of me writing this paragraph, 2-5, which while not technically out of contention in the fetid cesspool that is the NFC West, is pretty gosh-darned close. The basketball team just up and left for Oklahoma City, of all places, after trying and failing to extort a huge cash giveaway from the citizens. As in most extortion situations, the failure to reach a bargain has probably left both sides worse off... but somehow my sympathies lie more with the good people of Seattle than with Clay "Bad Faith Effort" Bennett.

And the college football. Holy Christ, those are some bad teams. Washington State might be the worst BCS conference team I've ever seen. Counting their win over Division 1-AA Portland State, they've been outscored 443-111 on the season. That 443 was accomplished in 9 games, which means their defense is giving up a cool 49 points a game. I tried to calculate their Pythagorean record, and my calculator, I kid you not, spat out one of those numbers with an "e^-2" at the end of it. 

As for Washington, well, Washington State is the team of the two with an actual win this season. The Huskies also have a lame duck coach (ironically, Oregon, which ought in some sense to have a "lame Duck" coach quite often, has the longest tenured coach in the Pac-10).

So, while things are pretty bad-- as bad as I can ever remember, really-- right now around here when it comes to sporting success, thank your deity of choice that you are not in Seattle.

I apologize for the rambling intro-- suffice it to say that I come to bury the Mariners, not to praise them.

C: Kenji Johjima (0 runs offensively, 0 runs defensively)

Mariners fans can thank the chauvinism of the team's Japanese ownership for the fact that Johjima is now under contract for THREE more seasons, at a price of about $8 million per. He's 32, so he's not getting any better. The pitchers hate him. The rest of the team basically hates him. The only good news is that he figures to regress to the mean offensively. In prior years he was actually a pretty good catcher, and I'm giving him something of a pass on this horrible year, but my intuition tells me he'll be worse than I'm projecting him at.

1B: Bryan LaHair (-20 runs offensively, -5 runs defensively)

Took me a while kicking around the roster to even find this guy. It seems safe to write in replacement level performance at 1B for the Mariners. It never ceases to amaze me how any team cannot manage to find at least acceptable offense (or at least the promise thereof, eg Daric Barton) at first base. And yet the Giants and Mariners seem to make quite the habit of it.

2B: Jose Lopez (-10 runs offensively, 0 runs defensively)

I was under the impression that Lopez's defense was criticized often, but apparently it's not half bad. The offense, though? Bad. I know he had a good year this year, but it's mostly due to a spike in batting average and he has a ton of mediocrity to regress to.

SS: Yuniesky Betancourt (-5 runs offensively, -10 runs defensively)

If Betancourt could actually field his position, he'd be a perfectly acceptable shortstop. And, in fact, that's what the Mariners thought they were getting when they signed the guy. Apparently, however, he has become a fat slob with extremely limited range-- kind of a younger (hence less excusable) version of Juan Uribe. This middle infield is a suckfest and it's signed through 2010. Incidentally, in their combined careers spanning approximately 7 full seasons, Lopez and Betancourt have 147 walks. That has a lot to do with those negative numbers in the offense column...

3B: Adrian Beltre (+5 runs offensively, +15 runs defensively)

Finally some pluses. Adrian Beltre is a defensive stud who is tasked with making up for Betancourt's feeble range in the hole and somehow manages to accomplish that, while still doing a pretty decent job on balls hit to the "normal" third base zone. He's also surprisingly young considering how many years he's been in MLB. Next year will only be his age 30 season. If this sounds like a sales pitch, well, it is one.

RF: Ichiro (+15 runs offensively, +5 runs defensively)

Did I just rate Ichiro the same as Adrian Beltre? Hm. Yes, I believe I did. Well, Mr. Overrated, you deserve it... you could easily be 10 runs better than this if you played the correct position and got the memo that fouling off ball fours in an attempt to get more base hits is not the correct strategy.

CF: Jeremy Reed (-15 runs offensively, 0 runs defensively)

I like the concept of Jeremy Reed, but the execution blows. He's sort of the Mulholland Drive of outfielders.

LF: Wladimir Balentien (-10 runs offensively, -5 runs defensively)

I did not see this season coming, I have to say. Balentien put up great minor league numbers at every step-- good power, decent plate discipline, not a great glove but tolerable. This year he was quite possibly the worst player in MLB. He continued to mash in AAA and he's just 23, so I'm not bailing on the guy yet, but he's clearly a work in progress on both sides of the ball. I'd actually love to see the A's buy low on him as part of a Beltre deal.

DH: Jeff Clement (-10 runs offensively)

Seattle has handled Clement very poorly, I think, but the guy has a pretty solid bat if they give it time to come around. His upside is far higher at catcher (think about it-- the difference between a DH and a C is about 25 runs!), but "Nintendo Power" Johjima is blocking him.

Pitching

SP: Felix Hernandez (+20 runs)

Hernandez hasn't quite lived up to the hype, but that doesn't mean he isn't a good player. He's still crazily young-- next year will be his age 23 season; he's on pace to become a free agent at 26. Could he be the first pitcher to break the $200 million mark? I wouldn't bet against it.

SP: Erik Bedard (0 runs)

Bedard, himself, is a great deal better than this. But he's almost assuredly going to miss time next year and he's pretty likely to miss a LOT of time, and the fill-ins (hello, R.A. Dickey...) are not very good. And there's some chance he will return with diminished stuff or suffer a relapse.

SP: Brandon Morrow (+5 runs) 

I'm pretty high on the ex-Golden Bear, and once again I have severe criticisms of how he's been handled by Seattle. The decision to put him in the bullpen last year essentially crossed a year of development time off for virtually no return. Seattle, as we shall see, does not lack for solid bullpen arms.

SP: Jarrod Washburn (-5 runs)

Washburn was his standard somewhat lame self this year. No particular reason to expect any change in status. Still difficult to believe how much money he got based on one fluky-good season in 2005.

SP: Carlos Silva (-15 runs)

Silva, likewise, had a few good years in the middle part of the decade, but 2 of his last 3 seasons have been putrid, festering eyesores. Last year he was probably the worst starting pitcher in baseball. I don't see him as that bad going forward, but I'm sure as hell not optimistic either.

Bullpen: -5 runs

Last year the unit was right around league average, and I figure more Putz will largely cancel out less Morrow. I don't see a ton of reinforcements waiting in the wings, but Roy Corcoran, Sean Green, Putz and Ryan Rowland-Smith are pretty solid. Cesar Jimenez looks promising. The reanimated corpse of Miguel Batista is probably somewhere in here as well, but I'm not sure I'd characterize that as a plus.

Overall: -50 runs, 76-86

This is weird. The Mariners don't actually look that bad. Let me see if I can suss this out. They lose Ibanez, but that was less of a loss than it appears (him to Balentien is about 2 wins-- Ibanez should not ever play the field again in his life). On the other hand, I'm not forcing them to play Jose Vidro at DH, Richie Sexson at first, or Miguel Batista in the rotation... or, God help us, Miguel Cairo anywhere. Throw in some healthy regression from guys like Silva and Johjima and... eh, there's still some gap between my perceptions and what this projection is telling me. I chalk it up to the "Bill Bavasi is just that stupid" factor.

Still, I think it's a tear-down. The two best players are also two of the highest paid. Beltre's contract is about to expire, and he's edging toward the point where players tend to decline a bit; meanwhile Ichiro's new deal should take him well into his years of decrepitude. They need to move Beltre and Washburn for what they can get, pray Bedard gets healthy and do the same for him. Lopez should definitely have a ticket out of town this offseason. Score a few prospects, claim a few guys off the waiver wire, and stink it up until the farm system spits out a few more quality players.