The Seattle Mariners are in a tough spot. They’re not a bad team, sitting a game over .500. By both Pythagorean wins and BaseRuns, they profile a few games better than that. Over the course of the rest of the season, they’re expected to continue to be a bit above average and our projections have them finishing at 83-79 for the year. That’s not a bad season — and if the team made a few big moves and caught a few breaks, they might even sneak their way into the playoffs where anything can happen. Unfortunately for the Mariners, that scenario isn’t very likely.

The division-leading Texas Rangers hardly seem invincible, but they’ve accrued a decent lead on the Mariners, while other divisional-rival Houston possesses the advantage both of more wins than the Mariners and more talent. This makes the M’s current chances of winning the division rather low. (For an interactive version of the chart, click here.)

They’re not out of it, as you can see, but they do face difficult odds. And keep in mind: these odds are reflective of the talent each club currently possesses on hand. Both the Rangers and Astros are expected to be buyers, and further moves by those teams figure to push their odds higher and the Mariners’ lower unless they counter with a move of their own.

As for the wild card, the task is equally as daunting. The chart below shows the wild-card probabilities only and do not include a team’s chances at the division. (Interactive version here.)

If you’re willing to hand the American League Central to Cleveland, that leaves four additional available playoff spots. Seattle is seventh on that list, with less than a 10% shot. That the top three teams all play in the AL East — and also expected to be buyers before the deadlines — makes Seattle’s predicament all the more obvious. The team isn’t likely to win, so the team should sell. How they should sell, though, is a bit more difficult to decipher.

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We all knew Dan Vogelbach’s days in the Cubs’ organization were numbered. His lackluster range limit to first base, and if we’re being serious, even that’s a stretch. He didn’t have a future with the Cubs. Not only do they lack a DH, but they also have more quality hitters than they have lineup spots. A trade was imminent, and the Cubs finally pulled the trigger on Wednesday night, dealing the 23-year-old slugger for unheralded — yet effective — reliever Mike Montgomery and Double-A hurler Paul Blackburn. Triple-A pitcher Jordan Pries also heads to Chicago in the deal.

Dan Vogelbach, 1B, Seattle (Profile)

KATOH Forecast for first six seasons: 2.8 WAR

Vogelbach offers zero defensive value, which means he’ll need to hit a lot to get by in the big leagues. To his credit, however, his exploits in the minors this year suggest he might hit enough to make for a productive DH. He’s slashed a gaudy .318/.425/.548 in Triple-A, and has little left to prove in the minor leagues. KATOH isn’t crazy about Vogelbach on account of his defensive limitations, lack of speed and iffy contact numbers. Vogelbach’s power is excellent, but the other facets of his game threaten to chip away at his value.

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The Cubs had no room for Dan Vogelbach. Hit though he may, the absence of the designated hitter in the National League was always an inhibitor for his future there, to say nothing of the wealth of young bats the Cubs have amassed at or near the major-league level. For several months, Vogelbach was an obvious potential trade candidate simply because the Cubs had nowhere to put him. Yesterday, that trade occurred: Chicago sent Vogelbach and Paul Blackburn to Seattle in exchange for Mike Montgomery and Jordan Pries.

Then a third baseman, Vogelbach won a 3-A state baseball championship in high school at Bishop Verot High School in Fort Myers. He tipped the scales at close to 280 pounds at the time and was asked to shed weight early in his pro career with the Cubs. He’s now listed at 6-foot, 250 pounds. There are certainly baseball players built like Vogelbach who are still able to effectively execute all aspects of their given position. Stories about Bartolo Colon‘s athleticism or Livan Hernandez’s flexibility are common in scouting circles and it’s not impossible that someone built like Pablo Sandoval or John Kruk can maintain enough lateral agility to effectively play a corner infield spot. Vogelbach doesn’t appear to be one of those players. He’s not a good athlete and has issues with range, footwork, flexibility and throwing accuracy. He’ll make the occasional, spectacular-looking, effort-based play but hasn’t shown enough technical refinement in his five pro seasons to convince scouts he can play a position.

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Everybody wants Andrew Miller and Aroldis Chapman. If the Yankees elect to sell off, everybody will want Andrew Miller and Aroldis Chapman. I don’t need to explain to you why — they are two very obviously dominant left-handed, late-inning relievers. If the Yankees sell, they’ll ask for a high price. Teams, in turn, will pay high prices. You know how the trade deadline works.

People have linked the Cubs and the Yankees. The Cubs don’t need to improve much, but they’d like a steadier bullpen, and they could use a steady lefty. The Yankees present options. On a different tier, I figured the Cubs might have interest in Will Smith. I never once thought about Mike Montgomery. The Cubs just traded for Mike Montgomery. It might not be all they do, but it’s what they did today.

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To begin with a gross oversimplification of a maddeningly complex sport, there are two ways to win a baseball game: score runs and prevent runs. Those two acts inform the predictive significance of run differentials and Pythagorean record and represent the reason I enjoy perusing leaderboards to see which teams are currently the best at run generation and prevention. We’re at the point in the season where the tops of the leaderboards aren’t terribly surprising – the Red Sox score frequently, the Mets don’t allow many runs, the Cubs are ridiculously great in both categories – but one team I’m still getting accustomed to finding near the top of the runs-scored leaderboard is the Mariners.

After years of battling mediocrity and a frustrating relegation to relative baseball obscurity, the Mariners have scored more runs than any American League team not named the Red Sox. With 315 runs scored through 63 games played, the Seattle is now averaging five runs scored per game — a rate they haven’t sustained over a full season since averaging 5.02 runs per game in 2002… you know, back when they had a designated hitter named Edgar Martinez, a second baseman named Bret Boone and a catcher named Dan Wilson. As offense has declined around the league during the last decade and a half, the Mariners’ offense has more than followed suit. In all but one season from 2004 to 2015, the Mariners finished anywhere from 11th to 14th in the AL in R/G. (Recall that, for a majority of that stretch, the American League consisted of only 14 teams.)

But now they’re scoring five runs a game – and are on a pace equivalent to 810 runs over a full 162-game schedule. Only five teams in the past five seasons have scored 810 runs and, of those five, all but the 2011 Red Sox made the postseason. And you might remember that the 2011 Red Sox team had to work darn hard to not make the playoffs. What the Mariners are doing right now is an undeniably good thing, and one that’s very much conducive to winning. And a little further digging reveals something endearingly quirky about the way the Mariners are scoring all of their runs.

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This past Monday, against Cleveland, Seattle left-hander James Paxton recorded the highest single-game average fastball velocity of his career, at just under 99 mph. While sources differ on the matter, it was at least a mile per hour harder than his previous single-game high, which he’d established in his previous start (and season debut) at San Diego about a week earlier. Jeff Sullivan described that appearance against the Padres as “horrible and promising,” because Paxton had allowed eight runs in just 3.2 innings, but also exhibited a sort of arm speed he hadn’t previously. Monday’s start wasn’t horrible, at all. And even more promising.

There’s a mechanical explanation for why Paxton threw harder on Monday than he’d ever thrown before. But there’s also a change in pitch mix that led to one of the best starts of his life, too. And with those new mechanics and that new pitch mix also came a new mindset. It might be fair to say this is a new James Paxton.

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The Mariners started James Paxton on Wednesday because they had to put Felix Hernandez on the disabled list with a hurt leg. That’s bad! Paxton proceeded to get lit up, by literally the San Diego Padres. That’s worse! Here, watch Paxton give up an opposite-field dinger to Wil Myers:

Familiar enough. Here’s last year’s Paxton giving up a dinger to Eduardo Escobar:

There’s nothing good about giving up eight runs in less than four innings. It’s even worse when that happens in a pitcher-friendly environment, against a pitcher-friendly opponent. Paxton was so ineffective the Mariners won’t commit to giving him another go, even though Felix is down a few weeks. By results, Wednesday was a nightmare.

By process? By process, it was less nightmarish. There were actually positive signs. Based on everything but the results, Paxton showed promising skills, and the Mariners should want for him to get another opportunity.

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I keep a little notebook next to my computer, so I can keep track of potential things to write about. Generally, topics break down into two categories: there are the topics that practically need to be written about, and there are the possible topics to monitor. Maybe those need bigger sample sizes; maybe those just need to become more interesting. Some of those topics turn into posts, and some of those topics never leave the piece of paper. I see that I crossed out something about Joe Ross. No idea what that was supposed to be.

For weeks, because of the notebook, I’ve been casually following Leonys Martin. I noticed in the early going that Martin didn’t look like himself: he was striking out a bunch, but he was also hitting more baseballs in the air. That seemed to me like something to follow, and wouldn’t you know it, but here we are, and Martin is still a fly-ball hitter. That’s odd because, in his entire major-league past, Martin was a ground-ball hitter. We’re more than a quarter of the way through the season, and now Leonys Martin appears to be a bat worth talking about.

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This isn’t my own subjective interpretation. When you throw around a word like “favorites,” that opens the door to opinion-based writing, but I have numbers on my side. Sweet, sweet, precious numbers. Look at the following table. You have our preseason projected win totals, and our current projected win totals, which take into account everything that’s happened.

We liked the Astros a lot. Still do, but they’ve done themselves considerable harm. After the Astros, there was a group of four teams, all vying for second or last. The Mariners have emerged through the early going, and now they’re well out in front. Sure, that’s just us, but if it makes you feel any more trusting, PECOTA agrees. Projections still like the Astros, but the Astros are way behind the Mariners, just because of the games in the books. So the Mariners find themselves in a great divisional position. Getting to the point faster: This.

A lot has gone into that picture. Let’s talk.

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When you’ve got a problem with command, your options seem obvious. You can clean up your mechanics, which is easier said then done. You can focus on throwing strike one. You can move on the rubber in order to move your heat map to a better spot. You can tinker with your fastball selection in case you have better command or outcomes with one of them. You can limit throwing a secondary pitch you don’t command that well. You can throw in the zone more and risk home runs if you miss more middle-middle.

It looks like Seattle’s Taijuan Walker is fighting poor command with a new weapon: throwing a secondary pitch in the zone more often. The best part is that, if it’s the right secondary pitch, command of that pitch is not super important. Tai’s fighting with a new approach to his curveball.

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