Mariners' late swoon is one for the books

Just how drastic has been the Mariners' fall?

Well, the only teams to lose 13 out of 14 games at any point this season — as the Mariners have after Saturday's loss to the Tigers — have been those stalwart contenders, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays.

That's not good company for a squad purporting to have the playoff as its goal, seeing as how the Rays are fighting to stay out of last place in their division.

But it gets worse for the Mariners, whose nine-game losing streak that began Aug. 24 in Texas dropped them from three games ahead of the Yankees in the wild-card race to two games behind New York (not to mention from one game to 6 ½ games behind the Angels in the AL West).

According to research on the essential Web site Baseball-Reference.com, the last of only three teams since 1957 with a lead in the league, divisional or wild-card race to have a nine-game losing streak or longer that began as late as Aug. 24 was the California Angels of 1995.

Yeah, those Angels. The Angels that blew a 13-game lead to the Mariners. The Angels that had as their general manager one Bill Bavasi, who 10 years later would say of the experience of watching his team squander their lead and then get eliminated by the Mariners in a one-game playoff, "I don't know that it's a life-altering experience, but it hurt."

Those Angels actually had two nine-game losing streaks after Aug. 24. The first began on Aug. 25, when California was 8 ½ games ahead of Texas and 11 ahead of the Mariners, and ended on Sept. 3, when the Angels were 5 ½ games ahead of the Mariners and 6 ½ ahead of Texas.

Ten days later, the Angels began another nine-game losing streak that dropped them from six ahead of Seattle to two games behind the Mariners on Sept. 23.

To their credit, the '95 Angels would win their final five scheduled games to overcome a three-game deficit and catch the Mariners, forcing that one-game playoff at the Kingdome. The Mariners won 9-1, and the rest is history that the Mariners organization embraces as the very preservation of its Seattle existence.

Ominously for Seattle, no team in history has begun a losing streak of nine or more games after Aug. 24 and recovered to qualify for postseason play. The '95 Angels came the closest, but technically their sudden-death playoff in Seattle is counted as a regular-season game.

Two other teams in the 50-year span from 1957-2007 emulated the Mariners' smelly feat of producing a late nine-game losing streak while on a playoff path.

One was the 1973 Dodgers, whose streak ran from Aug. 31, when they led the Reds by four games in the NL West, to Sept. 8, by which time they had fallen 2 ½ games behind Cincinnati.

The '73 Dodgers, in their first year with the enduring infield of Steve Garvey (who split time at first with Bill Bucker), Davey Lopes, Bill Russell and Ron Cey, would rebound to win 11 of their final 15. But it still left them 3 ½ games behind a Cincy team that was in the formative stage of becoming the Big Red Machine.

And, no, the Dodgers' general manager in 1973 was not Buzzie Bavasi, Bill's dad, who had left his highly successful Dodgers post five years earlier to become president and part-owner of the San Diego Padres. This particular burden fell on Al Campanis, whose Dodgers career would self-destruct after a Ted Koppel "Nightline" interview in 1987.

The only other playoff-leading team to spin so helplessly out of control so late in the season was the 1964 Phillies, who have become the embodiment of spitting away a pennant.

On Sept. 20, 1964, the Phillies defeated the Dodgers, 3-2, behind future Hall of Famer (and current U.S. Senator from Kentucky) Jim Bunning. It raised their record to 90-60 and left them a seemingly comfortable 6 ½ games ahead of St. Louis and Cincinnati with just 12 games remaining.

But the Phillies, in an epic collapse, would lose their next 10 games (with Bunning dropping three of them) to drop to third place, 2 ½ games behind the Cardinals.

The Phillies would win their final two but still finish a game back of St. Louis. The Cardinals would give the Phils slight hope by dropping two games to the 109-loss Mets before Bob Gibson beat New York on the final day to clinch the pennant.

A Cardinals loss in the finale would have left a three-way tie among the Cards, Reds and Phils, but St. Louis would go on to win the World Series in seven games over the Yankees.

The scary part for the Mariners is that there is no sign that their slide is going to end any time soon. If it doesn't, future generations may be researching the decline and fall of the 2007 M's.

And while that might not be life-altering for the Mariners, it surely hurts.

Larry Stone: 206-464-3146 or lstone@seattletimes.com