Mariners have no leaders, no chemistry, no relief for fans

Richie Sexson had a decent idea Thursday. Just let it all out. Fight the pitcher — and the frustration — until his punches turn cathartic. In the process, perhaps he would also awaken the languid Mariners.

And then, in another display of lousy execution, Sexson threw his helmet at Kason Gabbard.

It was foolish. It was cowardly. It was even a little humorous, the sight of a 6-foot-8 man resorting to a wimp's maneuver against someone five inches shorter.

So we're back to familiar territory with this ballclub, wondering where their fight is.

Sexson's folly was just the latest indicator of how irreversibly discombobulated this team has become. The Mariners do very little right, and although they will play better stretches of baseball, they're too lacking to sustain any level of good play.

Right now, they're just hoping to breathe again, wishing to start the season over. But they could rewind the year several times, and they would keep discovering the same holes. If Erik Bedard and J.J. Putz hadn't suffered injuries, if the team hadn't even bothered with Brad Wilkerson, the Mariners would have a better record. Nevertheless, they would still be missing three essential characteristics.

Leadership. Chemistry. Winning savvy.

They don't have great clubhouse personalities. They are disjointed, mostly because management cobbled this group together. And despite finishing 88-74 last season, they don't know how to win.

On Friday, before the Mariners lost for the ninth time in 10 games, manager John McLaren tried to sum up the situation succinctly. "We're a good team playing terrible baseball," McLaren said.

Really, he should've said: "We're a good collection of players playing terrible baseball, and we have no idea how to recover."

Over the past few weeks, McLaren has yelled to no avail, comforted to no avail and mixed lineups to no avail. The team has met together and met in smaller units, and Sexson has gone Incredible Hulk, but the Mariners remain a soft-hitting, hard-luck squad.

"We've been through different scenarios," McLaren said. "We've tried the build-me-up approach, the challenge approach, the get-down-and-dirty approach, the get-nasty approach."

When will it be time for the detonate approach?

I'm not saying start over, but a team predicted to make the playoffs can't keep playing like this without significant change. The Mariners need to search hard to identify their core, the players they can really win with, and then start ridding themselves of everyone else.

During this early-season fiasco and their summer swoons of the past two seasons, they should've learned much about their personnel. Now, it's time to stop looking at the pattern and actually do something to change it.

They need to acquire a respected veteran who isn't afraid to speak up. Raul Ibanez is a great team guy, but he doesn't lead in this manner. Same with Adrian Beltre. Ichiro is the Mariners' best player, but he's spent seven years shying from the vocal-leader role.

Putz embraces being a leader and does a good job with it, but keeping a clubhouse together requires more than the closer.

The Mariners are a team with too many walls. The players get along, but they aren't unified. They are divided by ethnicity, by age, by the pressure to win. In baseball, you can be a good teammate simply by doing your job, but when tough times arrive, division becomes problematic, especially if a team can't draw from a winning history.

"I don't think we're lacking in leadership," McLaren said, defending a team in shock. It's admirable that he doesn't bad-mouth his players, but fans are tired of McLaren's kind words. Maybe if the players had a true spokesman, the manager wouldn't have to do so much spinning.

"There's nothing you can put your finger on," McLaren insisted. "If we could, we'd put our finger on it. It's just a lot of things."

A common complaint is that the team shows no life, no heart, but how can a team show heart when it's not getting hits? Effort isn't the issue. A lackluster lineup is. Still, the Mariners should be better at the plate, but during this poor streak, they haven't shown any discipline to try something to break the slump.

Entering Saturday night's game, the Mariners had scored 19 runs in their past 10 games. Take away the seven runs they scored in a victory over Texas on Monday, they have 12 runs in those other nine games, all losses. Despite the offensive futility, the players have generally continued to hack away at the plate, refusing to take pitches and work the count, free-swinging themselves to embarrassment.

It leads to games like Friday's, quick ones in which you feel like the team has no chance to score more than two runs. It leads to statistics such as this one: The Mariners are 0-18 in games in which they fall behind by two runs or more. Get a quick lead on the Mariners, and they're done.

The problem isn't just that the Mariners are playing badly right now. It's that they provide little evidence to suggest they can escape from this pit.

This season hasn't reached the quarter mark, and the Mariners already are on Plan E. Don't throw your helmets at them. The ride figures to get more treacherous.

Jerry Brewer: 206-464-2277 or jbrewer@seattletimes.com. For more columns and the Extra Points blog, visit seattletimes.com/sports