No matter how good the Yankees record, there are always people finding flaws with the team that need to be fixed.
This year has offered such people several different outlets for their dissatisfaction. The starting rotation is thin, the lineup has a couple of dead spots and watching Eduardo Nunez field is like watching a three-year-old try to do his family's taxes.
Voices rage about the need to fix these problems and, since we're on the topic, the Yankees really could use a better lefty specialist than Boone Logan. These things have all been problems over the course of the season, but we all got a little lesson in the relativity of problems when the Mariners took the field in the Bronx on Monday night.
It is very hard to complain about the state of the Yankees when watching the Mariners stumble and bumble their way to a 10-3 loss. That one game had all sorts of sobering reminders of what it is like to watch a truly bad baseball team, but the fact that it was their 16th straight loss made you appreciate this year's Yankee team more than ever before.
The Mariners can't field, as evidenced by the errors committed by Adam Kennedy and Dustin Ackley during the five-run Yankee fourth inning that turned the game into a laugher. Ackley's error, a throw to the plate on a grounder that hit Derek Jeter's bat and bounced away, was the kind of thing that makes you wonder what hideous thing the Mariners did to generate such bad karma.
You knew going into the game that Seattle isn't so sharp at the plate, they're last in the AL in runs and OPS, but actually watching them try at the plate is still an eye-opening experience. Nobody in the lineup takes pitches, they chase almost everything and there's almost no power in the bats when they do actually make contact.
Freddy Garcia only faced nine batters who felt the need to see more than three pitches in their at-bats which made for an easy night's work for a guy who usually has to work a lot harder to get outs. The Mariners actually have had some decent pitching this season, although the long losing streak has seen those pitchers start to slip down into the abyss created by their teammates.
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It has gotten so bad that even the umpires have turned against them. Bob Davidson blew two calls at first that went the Yankees' way, neither of which determined the outcome of the game but simply made the pain that much more excruciating.
After watching nine innings of Mariners baseball, the idea that you could be frustrated by the Yankees is as foreign as the rules to a game of cricket. The gulf between the two teams is so wide that it barely seemed like they were on the same field Monday night.
That's good for the Yankees, who need to be stocking up on wins during this stretch of schedule, but you can't help but feel for those watching the Mariners on a nightly basis. At some point you just have to throw your hands up and laugh, if only to keep from crying and keep you occupied while waiting for that night's version of the other shoe dropping.
The wins all count the same, so the Yankees shouldn't feel bad about doing this a couple more times this week. The image is something worth remembering the next time Logan's getting booed off the field for not getting an out in the seventh inning of a 8-4 Yankee win, though.
Josh Alper is a writer living in New York City. You can follow him on Twitter and he is also a contributor to Pro Football Talk.
