Mariners at Yankees: Yankees Sweep Hopeless Mariners

For the first month of the season, Felix Hernandez and Carlos Silva were staples in the Mariners rotation. Because of Hernandez and Silva, the Mariners were able to win some games despite not hitting the ball well.

This weekend in Yankee Stadium, Hernandez and Silva faultered the first time in 2008. And with the offense still struggling, that meant a Yankee sweep was inevitable.

Before the series started, both the Mariners and Yankees were struggling offensively. I figured the Mariners would take at least one of the three games because I didn't anticipate both Hernandez and Silva struggling so mightily.

Today at the Stadium, Silva gave up eight runs and 11 hits in just three innings. Yesterday Hernandez gave up six in 5 2/3.

With the sweep the Mariners went 1-5 on the road trip, fell to 13-19 overall and now sit 6.5 games behind the AL West leading Los Angeles Angels. This is NOT the way the Mariners were supposed to start the season. With Bedard, Hernandez and Silva anchoring the rotation, the Mariners were supposed to be better than the 88 wins they won last year.

With the Angels losing Kelvim Escobar and John Lackey for more than a month at the start of the season, the Mariners were supposed to be the team to beat. Now they're fighting for third place. Once again, it's still way too early. The Detroit Tigers started the season 2-10 but have gone 12-8 since to fight there way back into the AL Central race.

With the weekend sweep, the Mariners are now hitting just .204 in the month of May and .251 overall. Except for Ichiro and Raul Ibanez, not one Mariner is hitting higher than .250 so far this month.

The Mariners will be glad to be going home. This week they have a four-game series against Texas and a three-game series against Chicago. That's seven games against teams that are also sub-.500. This is a great opportunity for the Mariners to climb back into things.

At this point, the Mariners can't worry about how far behind the Angels they are. They have to just focus on winning games and winning series. They have to focus on getting over .500 and staying over.

Nothing is out of control yet. It's not looking good. But every team throughout the season has periods where they just don't play good baseball.

Hopefully the Mariners just decided to get that period out of the way early in the season and now can focus on playing better.