In April we asked our Bay Area sports correspondent Bob Arkansas to preview the AL West, now he's back to give his thought on Sunday's NFC Showdown. Greetings my soggy friends in the Northwest Province! The last time I wrote something for the Seattlest it was a season preview for the Mariners and pretty much every prediction that I made was wrong. These brilliant insights included the Mariners losing more games than they'd win, finishing......

Your Seattle Mariners played their biggest series in four seasons this week. With a chance to overtake the first place Angels if they could win three games, the Mariners won zero games. They got outscored 24-8. Ever see that thing they do at the zoo where hippos eat pumpkins? It was like that. Much of the blame is gonna come down on Mariner manager John McLaren, who took the interesting step of using his worst......

Mariners with Felix Hernandez Record: 2-0 Payroll: $106,516,833 Mariners without Felix Hernandez Record: 3-9 Payroll: $106,096,833 Sometimes, words can't tell the story as well as numbers. Look at that--the $106 million of player that Mariners GM Bill Bavasi recruited to surround Felix Hernandez can't manage to win more than 25% of its games. To put it another way--0.39% of the Mariners' payroll is responsible for 40% of its wins. The blueprint for the season was......

Attention class, we have a pop quiz today. Whose fault is the Mariners' August collapse and .238 winning percentage vs. the AL West? Mr. Bavasi, I see you frantically waving your hand! Do you know who is responsible? You do? We're dealing with a lot of young kids that are overmatched, I guess, and some veterans that apparently are not performing up to their abilities. You mean, Bill, the young kids you decided were......

Chim Chim Cheree! The Mariners finished a three-game sweep of the hapless Diamondbacks last night, scoring two runs off Arizona closer Jorge Julio in the 9th for a 3-2 win. The win pushed them by Texas for second place in the AL West. They are two games behind Oakland. As the number-conscious boys at USS Mariner point out, the stats suggest that the M's are better than the A's. Though the A's have the better......

Something happened yesterday that hasn't since April 16th. No, not Dino Rossi waking up before noon, but the Mariners getting to .500. After an 11-7 victory over Arizona in their 78th game, the M's are once again treading water at 39-39. In yesterday's top of the ninth, the M's displayed in microcosm what they'll need to contend in the AL West--production from their highest-paid employees, Adrian Beltre and Richie Sexson. With one out and the......

Interleauge play begins again this weekend. In baseball stadiums all over the West geographical rivals will stare each other down: Oakland vs. San Francisco, Houston vs. Texas, Los Angeles of Los Angeles vs. Los Angeles of Anaheim, and Seattle vs. San Diego. Yeah, we know, the Padres again. While everyone else in the AL West will celebrate a weekend of, "We're neighbors so I hate you," we will end up dancing with the only girl......

Turns out that a low-fat diet doesn't reduce your risk of getting cancer or heart disease. Thank you, thank you, thank you, medical science. Cheer over your spilled skim milk and then make haste to the following former danger zones: Cave Man Kitchens: Melt-in-your-mouth barbeque that's worth the drive to Kent. This is the very barbeque that the Chicago White Sox ate after clinching the 1983 AL West division crown at the Kingdome, and at......

Another voice has joined KJR listeners, USS Mariner, and Seattlest in criticizing the 2005 Mariners. This voice comes from within the clubhouse--it belongs to closer Eddie Guardado. Guardado went off after yesterday's 6-2 loss to Oakland, the conclusion of a 1-5 road trip that dropped the M's 13 1/2 games back in the AL West. Today's P-I records Guardado's outburst: "I've never been through something like this, never," said Guardado, who pitched for some......