Oakland travels to Seattle for a three game series--the first Mariner games in which Daren Brown is in charge.
From Carl Stewart at the San Jose Mercury News:
...perhaps the only drama left for Seattle this year is whether Hayward native Don Wakamatsu, the second-year manager, retains his job after this nightmare season.
Stewart wrote this yesterday--a harbinger of doom, that San Jose Mercury. By now, almost every Mariner fan knows that Don Wakamatsu was fired this morning, and that pitching coach Rick Adair, bench coach Ty van Burleo, and mental coach Steve Hecht were also dealt the same fate. Now Daren Brown steps up from Tacoma to attempt to see out the Mariners season.
The Mariners took two out of three from the Kansas City Royals in the last series, and managed two home runs as well, a rare sight from Seattle bats these days. This series was only the tenth won by the Mariners this season, but it did show a slight elevation in quality of play, with the first and the third games actually enjoyable to watch, what with the less frequent occurrences of leaving runners on base at the end of the inning. The wins in those games helped as well, of course.
Chone Figgins, the man whom everyone was upon, appears to have finally found the switch. Figgins (or Puddin' as I am wont to call him) was 2 for 3 on Sunday and 12 for 23 in his last six appearances.
After beating Texas 3-2 on Sunday, Oakland are still straining for the division title, sitting in second, just 7 1/2 games behind the Rangers. The Mariners, despite their lukewarm streak, remain 23 games back.
The pitching matchups are:
Monday: Vin Mazzaro vs. Doug Fister
Tuesday: Brett Anderson vs. Felix Hernandez
Wednesday: Dallas Braden vs. Luke French