TJ Cotterill

The News Tribune

SEATTLE — Neither the Seattle Mariners nor Texas Rangers had a postseason game on the horizon. Neither had much of anything to play for in the 162nd and final game of the 2018 season, and many of the teams’ best players spent the day sitting on the dugout benches.

And this crowd of 21,146 on Sunday at Safeco Field was about half the total that was filling those seats when the Mariners were rolling in June and into July and sitting on what was a season-high 24 games over .500.

The Mariners 3-1 win pushed their season record to 89-73, which is well above most preseason projections for them, but still eight games back of the 97-win Oakland Athletics for the final wild card, 11 games behind the Yankees for the top wild card and 14 behind the Astros for the American League West.

Last year, the Minnesota Twins took the final wild card with 85 wins.

The Mariners acknowledged this — they certainly exceeded expectations, while also heading home for the offseason disappointed.

“It’s a strange thing,” Kyle Seager said. “Eight-nine wins — that’s hard to say it was a disappointing season. It’s hard to say anything too bad about that. But at the same time our goal was the playoffs. That’s something we felt we could accomplish and we certainly tried to.

“It’s bittersweet in that sense, but at the same time I think when you play as a group pretty well and then you come up short it puts a little extra drive in there.”

But baseball — it has a way of creating spine-chilling moments regardless of how the standings look. Certainly this one did, and not for anything in the box score or standings.Nelson Cruz trotted off the green grass from right field after an out in the fourth inning to a standing ovation from the Safeco Field crowd. He acknowledged them, hugged his teammates, and tipped his cap again to the still applauding crowd before retreating into the Seattle Mariners’ dugout.

The 38-year-old might have played his final game in a Mariners uniform with his four-year contract set to expire.

Then in the visiting dugout, Rangers 39-year-old third baseman Adrian Beltre walked to the plate for his final at-bat of not just the Rangers’ season but likely of his career with the Safeco videoboard displaying, “Thank you, Adrian.” He took off his helmet, acknowledged the crowd for a few moments and finally stepped to the plate.

The former Mariner and sure-fire future Hall of Famer was removed while at third base in the bottom of the fifth, received another standing ovation and hugs from all his teammates and walked to the dugout before third base was removed and replaced for safe keeping.

It was difficult not to remember back to Beltre’s five seasons with the Mariners from 2005-09, when certainly few expected he’d continue on to a Hall of Fame career.

Yes, Beltre was part of this, too, in what has since become 17 consecutive seasons for the Mariners without appearing in the playoffs — the longest active streak in North American professional sports.

Beltre was simply a signing that didn’t pan out. He was good, but not great like the rest of his career. The Mariners have had other moves, trades and disappointments since that have kept them in the mire of major league baseball.

They just though this, finally, might be the year to bust through all that frustration and futility.

For three months they were well on their way. But the past three months they tabled and the Oakland Athletics flipped a switch to go from .500 to the best team in baseball (record wise).

Their 89 wins is the most since winning 93 games in 2003 and this is the sixth-most wins in Mariners history. Their win over the Rangers on Sunday also means they finished with a winning record against every team in their division (10-9 against Houston, 10-9 against Oakland, 11-8 against the Angels and 10-9 against Texas).

Now Jerry Dipoto, Scott Servais and company have to answer for their three years here of falling just short of playoff berths and what’s next. They enter an offseason filled with myriad questions, like should they and can they bring Cruz back, for starters.

Then of course there’s what they do about 32-year-old Felix Hernandez after a career-worst season, where’s Dee Gordon’s position going forward and how that trickles down to others, like Robinson Cano, Ryon Healy and Daniel Vogelbach? What kind of players are Kyle Seager and Mike Zunino going forward? And is it time to tear it all down and rebuild — despite just about all of the American League jumping out to a head start on that?

The biggest question — is there still a playoff window in 2019?

“We got a great bunch of guys here,” said Cano, who missed 80 games for violating major league baseball’s joint drug agreement. “Guys have done a great job through the season. But for next year, that’s up to the GM. For now, my focus is to go back home and prepare myself for next season.”

Servais was asked before the game about when he’ll move past this season and on to next year. His answer: Sunday night, most likely during his drive home.

“I’m hoping I might be able to sleep a little bit,” he said.

He completed all his player wrap-up meetings over the past several weeks, with some of those discussions more pointed or terse than others.

But it all maybe most set him for him Saturday night, he said, when he called on brilliant closer Edwin Diaz to enter for the ninth inning for what would be his 57th save of the season, meaning there’s only one other pitcher in major league history with more saves than him in a season, and that was Francisco Rodriguez who had 62 saves for the Angels in 2008.

Diaz struck out the first two batters he faced and Servais said he looked around a crowd of more than 30,000 at Safeco Field, one of the more well-attended games of the past month. He couldn’t help but think back to how electric the place was a few months prior when the Mariners were still leading and in the thick of the playoff chase.

“You are looking around and everybody is on their feet and I couldn’t help but think, ‘Wow, what if this really meant something tonight?’” Servais said. “That was a gut punch. But it allows you to kind of dig down deep in the offseason and get back to work, make good decisions, figure out how our roster is going to be put together and what we’re going to do a little differently going forward.”

And he knows, much like all of Seattle, that 89 wins are all well and good, but it’s still a failure. Certainly since it’s without a trip to the playoffs and the Mariners were out of the running before the final week.

“We failed,” Servais said. “We didn’t get over the hump and we didn’t get to the playoffs. You get frustrated and some of that is out of our control. You look at what Oakland did and the pace they were on and what they continue to do — they just didn’t back off and you have to give them a ton of credit.

“We did a lot of things. We didn’t do enough. I guess that’s how I’ll look back on this season. We got tremendous performances from a number of guys and other guys had down years. I’m interested to see how those guys bounce back, and where we go from there.”