Good News, Bad News, No News: Mariners through 10 games

The Seattle Mariners go into the week with a 4-6 record, and they narrowly missed getting back to .500 on Sunday with their loss in extra innings to the Cleveland Guardians.

Guardians rally to win 7-6 in 12 innings, avoid sweep by Seattle Mariners

On Monday, Seattle Sports’ Brock and Salk brought back an old favorite – their Good News, Bad News, No News segment – to determine their feelings on some of the things the M’s have done throughout their first 10 games of the year.

Listen to the full conversation in the middle segment of the podcast below. After that, we’ll break down exactly what they had to say.

Jarred Kelenic is hitting .286 with three doubles.

• Good news

Brock Huard: “Amazing what a series can do, especially at this time of year, and Jerry (Dipoto) was saying that to us last Thursday after (AJ) Pollock and Teoscar (Hernández’s) big, explosive night that all of a sudden they went from drought condition to overflowing. If Kelenic just continues to do this day after day after day and put great at-bats together, and (Sunday) statistically speaking was not as good as the day before – he had three singles (Saturday). But I’ll tell you what, man, those at-bats late, the walk late against that filthy closer, the double when it mattered late in extra innings to give you the lead? I think he had a better Sunday than he did Saturday.”

Mike Salk: “Nobody’s numbers through 10 games really matter, so it’s not the .286, it’s not the three doubles, it’s not any of that. But it is the fact that he has started off well, and the real good news for me is starting to see his personality come out a little bit yesterday. He got that double, he’s on second base, you see the huge fist pump, you see everything that makes him Jarred Kelenic. I like that we’re gonna get an opportunity, hopefully at some point, to see the full spectrum of his personality. All we’ve seen is the anger part of it and the frustration part of it because he hasn’t played very well. … (ROOT Sports Mariners analyst Mike) Blowers had a good point that he’s not swinging for the fences. He’s looking to hit singles, he’s looking to go the other way, and then when the right opportunity comes, he’s trying to take advantage. The quality of his at-bats are a huge positive. To me, that’s the real news.”

Reliever Andrés Muñoz lands on the injured list.

• Bad news

Salk: “This one’s bad news, for sure, and you already can see that it may have cost you the game (Sunday). Not having him and not putting everybody (in the bullpen) into their regular spot was a huge, huge factor in the way that game went down. I don’t know why this has happened, I don’t know how serious it’s going to end up being… Maybe it’s nothing, maybe he just hasn’t looked great so far to start this year. But we’ve seen him be up and down at times and in the cold… Hopefully he just needs a week off and he’ll be right back at it but I don’t like that at all.”

The Seattle Mariners have just eight home runs so far.

• Bad news (Brock), no news (Salk)

Brock: “Bad news. Hit the ball out of the park.”

Salk: “I’m gonna say that’s no news, but it certainly isn’t good news. I mean, this is a team that is built on the home run ball. … They’ve played in very cold ballparks so far so I’m not gonna freak out about it. (Eugenio) Suárez doesn’t have any, nobody’s got more than two, but it is something I’m watching even though right now I’m going to call it no news.”

Eugenio Suárez is hitting .357, but with no homers.

• Good news

Salk: “I like that he’s off to a good start. It’s certainly not bad news and I don’t think there’s any worry that the home run power isn’t going to come for a guy who’s hit as many home runs as anybody over the course of the last four or five years. So for me, I’m going to still call this good news, but we heard that one of the things they were looking for from him was to use all fields and sort of be a little bit more of a hitter and a little less power. Good, but I also still need to see some of the power from Suárez.”

Brock: “I’m gonna guess if that goose egg (no home runs) sits up there a little bit more for another four, five, six games, you’re gonna see him try to pull something.”

Logan Gilbert’s velocity was down in his second start.

• No news

Brock: “I’m gonna say no news based on his 52 mechanical movements that he does on the pitch farm in Florida that he carried over into Peoria, and maybe in that cold all of those mechanical movements didn’t come to life in Cleveland. I’m gonna say it’s more mechanical than it is injury.”

Salk: “I don’t like it. I don’t like the idea of even thinking about a another starting pitcher issue. Hopefully we’ll see him in his next start and he cruises and we say, ‘OK, everything’s good to go.'”

Kolten Wong is 2 for 27 with two singles.

• Bad news

Huard: “Bad news, and (he’s not playing) a great second base, either. … We watched him in the spring struggle, and Jerry said, ‘Hey, he’s the one guy whose numbers don’t tell the story of what he’s doing behind the scenes.’ But yeah, two singles, 27 at-bats in some pretty significant moments.”

Salk: “If he had started off 5 of 27 or so you’d be like, ‘Alright, kind of a slow start.’ But 2 of 27 with two groundball singles? I’m gonna call that one bad news. I want the new guys to get off to a start, and I’m sure that he will hit better than .070 this year.”

The Seattle Mariners are almost making tough catches.

• Bad news.

Brock: “Lots of horseshoes. Lots of almosts, lots of off the gloves and at times some (miscommunication).”

Salk: “I don’t like this at all. In one game when those things happen you can say, ‘Alright, an inch or two here or there.’ When it starts to become a consistent issue, because I don’t know that any one of those balls should have been caught… none of them individually are balls that I felt like should have been caught, but taken as a whole, at some point, you’re a step too slow, you as a team are not getting a good enough jump. Some of that may be the shift (restrictions) and adjusting to it and some of the changes that they’ve made. So I’m not willing to go crazy or get super mad about it yet, but that is definitely one that I don’t think is good news.”

The Seattle Mariners lost the season series to Cleveland.

• No news

Salk: “I’ve seen a lot of people really freaking out about this, and as we get to the end of the year in September, October and they lose a tiebreaker to Cleveland because they’re tied, OK, you can absolutely point back at yesterday’s game and be upset about it. Ultimately, the chances of that being the case are very, very, very low. I’m gonna call this no news, and a fairly hearty no news at that.”

Brock: “Yeah, I’m not gonna get worked up about this either.”

More on the Seattle Mariners

• Seattle Mariners Table Setter: 3 things to watch coming off 1st series win
• Seattle Mariners Moves: Muñoz to IL, Festa optioned in ‘pen shakeup
• Fann’s Takeaways: Mariners’ Dipoto details what needs to be fixed
• Seattle Mariners Breakdown: Bob Stelton reacts to M’s start

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