Seattle Featured Column

Carlos Silva will be mysteriously injured soon. It may not be tomorrow, it may not be next week, but it will be soon.

In 1995 Randy Johnson was billed as a “stopper” because the team could count on the lanky lefty to stop any losing streak it may encounter, and Silva’s been exactly the opposite so far this season.

Ryan Rowland-Smith will be coming off the disabled list, and guys like Jason Vargas and Chris Jakubauskus have show enough promise to warrant the team keeping the more productive pitchers in the rotation as opposed to Silva.

As the Mariners end an unexpectedly successful month of April, with great contributions from unexpected players, taking inventory of the team’s success is a much easier process.

Jarrod Washburn, perhaps the most noted turnaround story, went 3-1 with a 3.42 ERA. Washburn has fared pretty well in April as a Mariner. In two of his three previous seasons he ended the first month of the season with a sub-4.0 ERA.

However, this is the first time he's also had a winning record. And that includes 2002, he went 18-6 with a 3.15 ERA and finished fourth in the Cy Young voting.

Last night I was faced with a dilemma.

I sat down to my computer to do some work, and put MLB Network on for background noise. As I’ve done with ESPN for years, I watched—rather, listened—to the same highlights at least a half-dozen times.

Then, much to my enjoyment, a baseball came on, and my attention, unintentionally, was pulled from my computer. Initially I was only comparing the MLB Network’s announcing team with those from the NFL network.

With Erik Bedard and Jarrod Washburn’s successes in the past week, a 5-2 record going into the Mariners home-opener, and both Endy Chavez and Yuniesky Betancourt hitting over .350, there is a ton of reason to be optimistic as an M’s fan.

In 2001 the Mariners came into the season with a lot of questions.