Adrian Beltre

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

This famous saying serves not only as a motivational tool, but also as a solid offseason philosophy for small-market general managers.

The Minnesota Twins magical run is over.

After falling to the New York Yankees in the American League Division Series, the players can now head home for the winter and the front-office—lead by General Manager Bill Smith—can begin the work of ensuring the Twins are a contender again in 2010.

The pieces are already in place for a very good ballclub next season.

Perennial All-Stars Joe Mauer, Justin Morneau and Joe Nathan should all be healthy and ready to contribute.

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The Mariners started off the 2009 red-hot and gave us all a glimmer of false playoff hope when they were a top the AL West at one point with a 15-10 record. We seemed to forget this was a team that was supposed to be in a full-blown rebuilding mode.

I have heard it said before, and I do believe it: One of the hardest things to do in any sport is to hit a baseball.

But with 14 guys on the roster, you think that someone could do it. OK, that’s not fair, I hear ya, but last night the Mariners were held scoreless again, thanks to Joe Saunders dazzling the Mariners at the plate with the nine inch in circumference, five ounce object with white with red stitching we call a baseball.

Adrian Beltre has been a source of contention among Mariners fans since signing a contract with the team before the 2005 season.

Fans were warned that Beltre, who’d hit 48 home runs in 2004, and finished second-place in MVP voting in the National League had never duplicated those numbers in his career. Following an unprecedented season is an uncomfortable time to sign a player.

The Seattle Mariners are currently in third place in the AL west (1.5 GB) and have a 16-16 record.

New general manager Jack Zduriencik said this offseason that the Mariners front office wants to acquire players than can have the team competing now and long term.

Until Monday, the Mariners were rolling.

They were coming off a comeback-riddled series with Oakland, in which they came out on top. Wakamojo was at full force.

Since then, the Seattle Mariners have lost four games in a row, and in a very disheartening manner.

Half of these losses came in the form of a 2 game sweep at the hands of the now division leading Texas Rangers. During the Texas series, we also lost one of our top performing relievers in Sean Kelley. It's looking like he's going to be on the DL for an extended period of time.

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4/29/09 – The Seattle Mariners finish season series No. 7 in slight disappointment, losing the series 1-2 to the Chicago White Sox. 13-9 is our record heading into the Oakland A’s series after a day off.

Cheer! – Rain outs mean double headers and the White Sox even switch up the rotation to give us a better pitching match up, M’s Chris Jakubauskas vs. the Sox Bartolo Colon and moving John Danks to the night cap to face off vs. M’s Felix Hernandez.

The 2008 Seattle Mariners had the second-worst record in baseball (61-101); it was a campaign of no power and no pitching.

They paid a Carlos Silva $12 million over the season to lose 16 games—almost $1 million per loss.

They gave up five promising prospects for an ace—Erik Bedard—who pitched just 81 innings. GM Bill Bavasi probably thought he was buying job security when he swung the deal, but he was actually ringing up his own ticket out of town.