On a sports-talk radio station Thursday in Seattle, they were having some fun with the mercurial nature of the Mariners, comparing things as inconsistent as the 2026 local nine. That’s the one that in a 10-day period in April, got swept in three at Texas, swept Houston in four at home and then got swept in three at San Diego.

I’ve got news for you, folks. It isn’t just 2026. It’s now a full season and a quarter that Seattle has been defined by wild swings, something seemingly counter to the old baseball thinking that it’s a season of gradual, almost imperceptible movement.

If the progression of a baseball season were set to music, it would perhaps be described in a quiet symphony. The Mariners are more like the car that pulls up next to you at the traffic light with the boombox thundering.

What they’re doing in 2026 – winning five of six on the road, coming home to get swept in three by the Royals and then taking two of three from high-flying Atlanta – is hardly new.

As I documented in this space at the end of 2025, their performance last season was unusually bipolar, especially for one that finished 90-72. They were swept in three-game series no fewer than eight times, but they offset that with 11 sweeps of their own.

Early in July, they took three straight from Pittsburgh without allowing a run. Then they went to New York and lost three in a row, to the Yankees the last in dagger fashion with a 5-0 lead in the eighth inning. Doom was at the doorstep, surely, going from there to Detroit, which had the best record in baseball.

The Mariners bludgeoned the Tigers over three games.

A month later, Seattle swept Tampa Bay at home. Three weeks hence, they got swept by the same team in Florida. Of course, they rescued the whole thing by winning 17 of 18 in September.

Lou Piniella used to say that it wasn’t necessary to go on seven-game winning streaks. If you could aspire just to win six of every 10 – seemingly not a Herculean thing – you’d be playing .600 baseball, which would be plenty good enough.

Two decades post-Lou, the manager is his former catcher, Dan Wilson, and I don’t think this inconsistency speaks very well of him. He had a relatively smooth 21-13 debut after he took over in late 2024, but the hallmark of the Mariners’ last 200 regular-season games is that they’ve been all over the map. Now they're fighting injuries, but this is a trend long in place before them.

Yes, they’ve been resilient, rebounding when they looked down and out. But then they toss out one of those efforts like the middle game against Kansas City. One radio host called it a “sorry-ass circus,” and that’s a pretty solid description for a loss in which Randy Arozarena loses track of the count in a bases-loaded, two-out situation and gets picked off.

A baseball manager’s job is chiefly to establish a culture, to set a tone in the clubhouse. And while there will be inevitable clunkers in a 162-game schedule, it would seem that part of that tone would be a generally even performance.

Personally, I hate the narrative that because the AL West looks weak, the Mariners can lollygag their way to a division title and just show up for the playoffs. If nothing else, it’s an affront to the guy paying $90 for a seat and $16 for a beer.

You can’t guarantee him a win. But he’d feel better with a little consistency.