Salk: For Seattle Mariners to make playoffs, they need these 4 things

Pitching, focus, urgency and luck. Four things the Seattle Mariners need in order to make the playoffs, despite the enormous hole that they have dug for themselves.

With 22 games left to play, they have to win 15 of them to get back to .500. They might need to win more than that to win the division. I think the wild card is going to be tough.

It’s go time: Seattle Mariners’ last road to a playoff push is now

Can they do it? Sure, because 17 of those games are against the three worst teams in baseball. And they play both the Astros and the Rangers, the two teams they’re chasing in the AL West, a total of five times combined – and all five of those games are going to be here in Seattle. They play more games at home than on the road, too.

There are a lot of opportunities still in front of them, but they’ve got to play in a way that they have not through the first five months of the season.

How do they do it? Well, it starts with pitching. It always does. The starting rotation has not been as good as expected this year. It needs to be down the stretch. They need to be turning it over one guy after another after another. And they need to see those relief appearances where a guy is coming off the mound yelling and screaming because he got himself out of a big spot. We saw it on the last homestand against the Cubs and the Phillies. You need to see more of it moving forward for the last month of the season.

Second for me is that sense of urgency. We saw that in Boston with manager Dan Wilson twice going to the bullpen a little quicker than maybe he has throughout the earlier parts of the year. They need to show that sense of urgency because the margin of error is basically gone.

Now, focus is all over. I mean, that has been their defensive lapses. It has been throwing the ball into the stands with only two outs. It’s been not ready to play at the beginning of an inning. It’s been running into outs. It’s all of these bad decisions and mistakes that the team has made mentally throughout the course of the year. They’re not going to continue to win at the rate they need to if you continue to make mental mistakes. The focus has to be there.

And even if they do all those things, and more – and Cal Raleigh gets hot, and Julio Rodríguez gets hot, and Josh Naylor hits for power, and and and – it’s still going to take a little bit of luck. Because the reality is the Astros have a five-game lead on you heading into these final 22 games.

So it’s going to take some luck. It’s going to take some good fortune. But it’s not impossible. It’s just very difficult.

This article is a transcript of the video at the top of the post. It is edited for clarity. Catch Mike Salk weekdays from 6-10 a.m. on Seattle Sports’ Brock and Salk.

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