Tuesday was supposed to be the day that Robinson Cano learned of the prognosis regarding the fractured fifth metacarpal he suffered on Sunday. Instead, both he and the Mariners suffered a bigger blow, as MLB suspended the 35-year-old second baseman for 80 games for violating baseball’s joint drug agreement. The news is quite a shock, to say the least, given Cano’s standing within the game. It’s also quite a coincidence given his injury.

Cano will not be paid during the suspension, which means that he stands to lose about half of his $24 million salary. If the Mariners were to make the playoffs — something they haven’t done since 2001, giving them the longest postseason drought in major North American sports — he would be ineligible to participate. He can, however, serve the suspension while on the disabled list, a loophole that should have been closed a long time ago but for some reason has not been. Edinson Volquez (suspended in 2010) and Freddy Galvis (suspended in 2012) are among the players who served their PED suspensions while on the DL. Cano will be eligible to return for the Mariners’ 121st game of the season, on August 14.

According to MLB, Cano tested positive for furosemide, a diuretic better known as Lasix. Via WebMD, the drug can be used to treat high blood pressure, fluid retention and swelling caused by congestive heart failure, liver disease, kidney disease, and other medical conditions.

Via a statement by Cano issued through the Major League Baseball Players Association, Cano claimed that the substance was given to him by a licensed doctor to treat an unspecified medical ailment. (MLB.com’s Mark Feinsand reports that it was an episode of high blood pressure.)

Here’s the statement in full:

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The Mariners own the longest postseason drought among major North American professional sports teams, and their chances of breaking that streak, which began in 2002, only got longer on Sunday. Robinson Cano was hit on the right hand by a pitch from the Tigers’ Blaine Hardy and suffered a broken metacarpal. While the full prognosis won’t be known until he sees a hand specialist on Tuesday in Philadelphia, the team will be lucky if he’s back before the All-Star break.

“They didn’t say anything about how long I might be out, but it is broken bad, so there might be surgery,” Cano told reporters after Sunday’s game.

Though they had merely been alternating wins and losses over the course of their past 11 games, the Mariners entered Sunday with a 22-16 record, matching their best start since 2004, and just 1.5 games behind the Angels in the race for the second AL Wild Card spot; with Seattle’s loss to Detroit and Anaheim’s win over Minnesota, the gap is now 2.5 games. Their Playoff Odds were at 13.9% entering Sunday. Without Cano for the foreseeable future, however, they’re down to TK.

The 35-year-old Cano has been the Mariners’ top position player thus far in terms of WAR (1.4) and second best in terms of wRC+ (128, on a .287/.385/.441 line) behind hot-starting Mitch Haniger. He’s been a remarkably durable player, averaging 159 games per year from 2007 to -17, visiting the disabled list only for hamstring strains in 2006 and 2017; he still played 150 game last year. That day-in, day-out durability has helped him rack up 2,417 career hits and 305 homers. Yes, he’ll be a Hall of Famer some day. He’s already seventh in JAWS among second basemen.)

Cano’s loss is a shame, first and foremost, for what it means to his team, but secondarily because he’s in the midst of a couple is-this-for-real trends about which we won’t get satisfactory answers for months. Inquiring minds want to know now!

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Ladies and gentlemen, for the first time in Major League Baseball history, continental North America is fully accounted for on the no-hit front within a single season. The United States of America checked in with its first no-hitter of 2018 on April 18, when the A’s Sean Manaea held the Red Sox hitless in Oakland. Mexico got on the board for the first time last Friday, May 2, when the Dodgers’ Walker Buehler and three relievers no-hit the Padres during the Mexico Series opener in Monterrey. And on Tuesday night, Canada completed the sweep when the Mariners’ James Paxton no-hit the Blue Jays in Toronto.

Paxton, who was born and raised in Ladner, British Columbia, made history by becoming just the second Canadian-born pitcher to throw a no-hitter and the first to do so on Canadian soil. Toronto-born Dick Fowler, pitching for the A’s, no-hit the Browns on September 9, 1945 in Philadelphia. While we’re dispensing with ordinal trivia, it seems appropriate to mention that Paxton is third pitcher to throw a no-hitter at the Rogers Centre (previously the Skydome) after the A’s Dave Stewart (June 29, 1990) and the Tigers’ Justin Verlander (May 7, 2011); no Blue Jays pitcher has ever done it there. Paxton threw the sixth no-hitter in Mariners history, after Randy Johnson (June 2, 1990 against the Tigers), Chris Bosio (April 22, 1993 against the Red Sox), Kevin Millwood and five relievers (June 8, 2012 against the Dodgers), Felix Hernandez (a perfect game on August 15, 2012 against the Rays), and Hisashi Iwakuma (August 12, 2015 against the Orioles).

(While the record books are silent on the matter, Paxton is assumed to be the first pitcher to throw a no-hitter in a season where a bald eagle landed on him.)

Paxton was nearly unhittable the last time he took the mound, striking out 16 in seven shutout innings on May 2 against the A’s. In that contest, during which he threw 105 pitches, the 29-year-old southpaw got 31 swinging strikes, 25 of them via four-seam fastball, many of them at the top of the zone. On Tuesday, he was more efficient, needing just 99 pitches for the entire night, and inducing “only” 15 swings and misses, eight with the four-seamer. He got squeezed a bit at the top of the zone and walked three, but faced just two batters over the minimum thanks to a double play, and threw more than five pitches to just one batter. In only two innings did he use more than 12 pitches, and in four innings, he needed 10 or fewer pitches, including the eighth and ninth. Thus, when he needed to reach back for more gas, it was there. The pitch speed graph from Brooks Baseball tells the story:

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This is Jake Mailhot’s first post as part of his May Residency at FanGraphs. A lifelong Mariners fan, Jake now lives in Bellingham, Washington, just a little too far away from Seattle to make it to games regularly, which is sometimes for the best. He is a staff editor at Mariners blog Lookout Landing. He can be found on Twitter at @jakemailhot.

There has been no shortage of remarkable relief performances during the first month of the season. Jordan Hicks and Tayron Guerrero are playing a game of one-upmanship with their fastballs. Josh Hader is striking out basically everyone he faces. Adam Ottavino resurrected his career in an abandoned storefront. But the most impressive performance of all might be what Edwin Díaz accomplished in April.

The ninth batter Díaz faced this season was also the first to actually put the ball in play — he’d struck out the first eight. Seven appearances into the year, he finally gave up his first hit, a single to Jed Lowrie. He gave up just one other hit the entire month. Among pitchers who’ve thrown 10 or more innings, possesses the fourth-highest swinging-strike rate and has produced the lowest overall contact rate when batters actually swing. If you prefer more traditional accolades, he’s also leading the majors in saves. His performance earned him the April AL Reliever of the Month Award. Any way you slice it, Díaz has been pretty great so far.

Díaz has shown flashes of dominance like this before — his 2016 rookie campaign was good for 1.9 WAR on the back of a 2.04 FIP — but he’s always been a little too erratic for his own good. Some of his success in April came despite the inherent chaos of slinging a projectile at 98 mph. He’s already walked nine batters and hit three more, and he’s given up a pair of home runs in May already. A quick look at his plate-discipline stats reveals that Díaz is throwing in the strike zone at the lowest rate of his career, around six and a half points lower than last season. And he isn’t really inducing any more swings on those pitches out of the zone — in fact, batters are swinging far less often at his pitches overall. But again, when batters do swing, they just cannot make consistent contact. Díaz’s contact rate of 55.2% is better than Aroldis Chapman’s, Josh Hader’s, and everyone else’s.

So what has made Díaz so effective this year when he does find the zone?

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When Matt Harvey burst onto the scene in 2012 — yes, it has been six years — there was every reason to believe he was destined to lead the long-maligned Mets back to the promised land. Over a 10-start camero, he struck out 28.6% of the batters he faced, good for nearly eleven strikeouts per nine innings. And while he walked more than 10% of his opponents, the future seemed limitless: Eno Sarris wrote before the 2013 season that “Yu Darvish might be his floor.”

Then Harvey went out and blew the doors off Queens in 2013.

However good you remember Harvey being in 2013, he was probably better. His ERA? It was 2.27. His FIP? Even lower than that. He cut his walk rate down to 4.5% while preserving his strikeouts (27.7%). He recorded an average velocity of 95.8 mph with his fastball, which was an incredible 30 runs above average. But his slider, and curveball, and changeup were all plus pitches, too, which is what has to happen to be 50% better than league average.

In the 2013 campaign, Harvey accrued 6.5 WAR in just 178.1 innings. To understand that in context, consider that, last year, Clayton Kershaw threw 175 innings and accrued 4.6 WAR. The mighty Noah Syndergaard was worse in 2016 than Harvey was in 2013. Harvey was, in 2013, the best pitcher in baseball.

Then Harvey tore his UCL and needed Tommy John surgery, forcing him to miss all of 2014. Still, Derek Ambrosino wrote before the 2014 season that “there isn’t a great reason to worry that he won’t regain form as soon as he regains health” — and, a year later, before his return, Eno called him a “top-15 pitcher” even with the uncertainty of the surgery.

Matt Harvey circa 2015 wasn’t the same pitcher he was in 2013, but you would be forgiven for thinking otherwise. After the All-Star break that year, Harvey posted a 25.7% K rate, a 3.6% walk rate, a 48.6% ground-ball rate, a 2.28 FIP, and a 7.18 K/BB. In other words, post-TJ Matt Harvey in 2015 looked an awful lot like prime Cliff Lee.

Then the postseason happened, and the World Series happened.

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On Thursday, the Mariners announced that Ichiro Suzuki would transition to the role of Special Assistant to the Chairman, effective immediately. While the agreement covers only the 2018 season, it appears quite likely that we’ve seen the last of the wiry, slap-hitting international superstar in a playing role, even given his stated desire to play “at least until I’m 50.” At 44 years old, he was hitting a meager .205/.255/.205, and with outfielders Ben Gamel and Guillermo Heredia now both on the roster, his continued presence created a crunch whose resolution couldn’t even wait until this weekend’s series with the Angels, which might have included a possible encounter with the pitching version of Shohei Ohtani.

From the Mariners’ PR department:

“We want to make sure we capture all of the value that Ichiro brings to this team off the field,” [general manager Jerry] Dipoto said. “This new role is a way to accomplish that. While it will evolve over time, the key is that Ichiro’s presence in our clubhouse and with our players and staff improves our opportunity to win games. That is our number-one priority and Ichiro’s number-one priority.”

Ichiro will work in collaboration with the Mariners Major League Staff, High Performance Staff and Front Office personnel. He will assist, based on his experience, with outfield play, baserunning and hitting. And he will provide mentorship to both players and staff.

The plight of Ichiro wasn’t far from my mind as I wrote about Albert Pujols‘ crawl to 3,000 hits, and the struggles of other players when they made the push for that milestone. Back in 2013, when Ichiro was playing for the Yankees, I had the privilege of covering his 4,000th hit — his combined NPB and MLB total — for SI.com. At the time it was clear that his offensive skills had faded, and the celebration felt like a stand-in for that of an increasingly unlikely 3,000th major league hit. At 39 years old, he didn’t figure to collect the 278 he still needed. I even asked the question myself as to whether the more conventional milestone was in his sights. “I don’t make goals that are so far away,” he said through his translator. “What I do is do what I can every single day and build off that and see where that takes me.”

Lo and behold, Ichrio built off enough days to reach 3,000 while enjoying an unexpected renaissance with the Marlins in 2016. Even having not debuted stateside until he was 27 years old, he was the fourth-fastest player to 3,000 hits in terms of plate appearances, and sixth-fastest in terms of at-bats. As with the 4,000th combined hit and his long-awaited MLB pitching debut from October 4, 2015, the milestone 3,000th, a triple against the Rockies on August 7, 2016, brought a good bit of joy to the game. It also sealed the deal, once and for all, on his future enshrinement in the Hall of Fame. While his anachronistic slash-and-run style rarely produced the value to rival that of the era’s top sluggers, it was a vastly entertaining one nonetheless, and he staked his claim on a plaque via his initial decade-long run, during which he annually made the All-Star team, won a Gold Glove and cranked out at least 200 hits. He led the AL seven times in that category, setting a major league record with 262 hits in 2004 and claiming two batting titles as well as his AL Rookie of the Year/MVP combo in 2001. He will be eligible for the Hall of Fame in 2024 if he doesn’t return, although Seattle’s 2019 season-opening series in Japan offers a tempting possibility for a cameo.

Ichiro’s awe-inspiring total of 4,367 hits (1,278 in Japan, 3,089 here) will stand as the signature accomplishment for a player who has spent more than a quarter-century serving as a wonderful ambassador for the sport on two continents. Here’s hoping he can continue that ambassadorship in a non-playing capacity for years to come.

Wednesday night, in a game against the A’s, the Mariners started James Paxton and received one of the most dominant starts in the franchise’s whole entire history. A couple innings after Paxton was removed, the Mariners lost, and the conversation deteriorated into an argument over bringing in the closer in a non-save situation. Thursday has brought the additional news that Ichiro Suzuki is transitioning into a non-roster advisory role, so it would be easy for Paxton’s start to get lost in the shuffle. It wasn’t the most important story of the game, and the game is no longer the most important story of the day.

But I won’t turn down many opportunities to write about James Paxton. I have the freedom to write what I want. And Paxton wasn’t only good against the A’s. He wasn’t only overwhelming. He was almost genuinely unhittable, collecting 16 strikeouts over the span of seven innings. Paxton issued one single walk, and he allowed a handful of hits. Nobody scored. Of Paxton’s 105 pitches, an incredible 80 of them were strikes. I know that, through the lens of ERA, this year’s Paxton has been modestly disappointing. That ERA misleads, and Wednesday provided a reminder that Paxton is almost as good as it gets. And as he went about setting down the A’s one by one, Paxton followed a pretty simple game plan. It’s one that could hint at even more to come.

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The Mariners aren’t a difficult team to understand. On the pitching side, they want to get the ball from James Paxton to Edwin Diaz. When those pitchers aren’t available — which is most of the time — the position players need to hit the crap out of the ball. To this point, it’s worked; while the Mariners have been outscored, they are in at least temporary possession of a wild-card slot, with the lineup owning a 109 wRC+. During a four-game weekend series in Cleveland, the Mariners put up 32 runs, which would be a lot of runs against anyone anywhere.

It shouldn’t surprise you to learn that Robinson Cano has been productive. He’s dramatically cut down his swing rate, causing his walk rate to double. Nelson Cruz, Jean Segura, Dee Gordon — these players, also, were supposed to be good. Yet the best hitter on the team has been none other than Mitch Haniger. In other words, Haniger is doing it again. He’s looking to cement his place as the breakout star of the Segura/Taijuan Walker trade.

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Last Friday, in the second inning against the Rangers, Robinson Cano went where no man, at least no infielder, had gone before.

Cano, the Mariners’ nominal second baseman in this instance, was situated in an alignment in which he began 221 feet from home plate against Joey Gallo. Read the rest of this entry »

On the heels of a pair of injury-shortened seasons, it was a rough spring for Felix Hernandez, who was drilled by a line drive in his first Cactus League start. Fortunately, he bounced back in time to build up his pitch count, and when he takes the mound tonight for the Mariners at Safeco Field, he’ll claim a little slice of history.

Hernandez will be making the 11th Opening Day start of his career, putting him into a tie with CC Sabathia for the lead among active pitchers, and the 10th-highest total since 1908, as far as the Baseball-Reference Play Index now reaches. He’ll also be making his 10th consecutive Opening Day start, moving him into a tie for fourth place with Hall of Famers Walter Johnson and Steve Carlton as well as Roy Halladay.

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