About two weeks ago, Kyle Kishimoto wrote about a turnaround in the AL West race when the Astros, who had trailed the Mariners all year, tied them in the division. Normally, I wouldn’t revisit a topic so quickly, especially since Kyle himself updated his earlier assessment of Seattle’s success. But between Kyle’s two posts, the Mariners blew a 10-game lead in the division to Houston. And in the two weeks since then, at the risk of drifting straight into stereotypes, let’s take a look at a graph.

On the morning of August 5, when Kyle’s second article appeared, the Mariners were slight favorites to win the AL West. Over the next 15 days, their odds of winning the division title dropped 43.4 percentage points to just 10.8%. Seattle’s chances of making the playoffs are now just 16.4%, a drop of 41.6 points. Only three other teams have improved their playoff chances by even 20 points in either direction during that time. One of those is the Padres. The other two are the Astros and Royals, two of the biggest beneficiaries of the Mariners’ ongoing decline.

The sailors behave in such a way that I’m going to have a stroke if I have to stop myself from peppering this entire post with nautical phrases. The voices in my head tell me that it wouldn’t be trite to say that the sailors are “taking on water” or “being lost at sea” or “adrift.” Those voices are wrong, but they are loud.

All the other teams in the AL playoffs had better hope the Mariners go down. (Sorry, I can’t help it.) Because if they do manage to drag themselves into the postseason, they have one unit that makes them inherently dangerous: their rotation.

Despite all this consternation, the Mariners still lead (albeit just barely) the majors in starting pitcher WAR. They also lead all 30 teams in innings pitched by starters and are second in K-BB% and third in ERA-. If you want to blame this losing streak on anyone, you can’t blame Seattle’s starters.

The high point of the Mariners’ season came on June 18, when they were 13 games over their .500 record and 10 games ahead of Houston and Texas, who were tied for second in the division. Since then, Seattle is 20-31, which is the second-worst record in baseball, trailing only the Chicago White Sox. (The White Sox, God bless them, have somehow won only 10 of their last 52 games.)

During this 20-31 streak, Seattle’s starting pitchers have the third-best ERA in baseball, the third-best K-BB%, and the best walk rate by a wide margin. Aside from Andrés Muñoz, the Mariners’ relievers have been pretty bad overall; the relief pitchers, excluding Muñoz, have one save and six blown saves in their last 51 games and a 4.59 ERA.

Now, six blown saves (nine of them, including Muñoz’s effort) in two months doesn’t explain everything that’s gone wrong in Seattle. For that, you have to look at the offense: .206/.299/.355 since June 19. That’s a wRC+ of 93, which is somehow still 20 points better than Chicago’s, but – more relevant to this topic – 20 points worse than Houston’s.

Worse, Seattle’s offense has been inconsistent and poor in key moments. The Mariners’ hitters have the second-lowest WPA since June 19, more than a run worse than anyone except the White Sox. In their last 51 games, the Mariners have scored two or fewer runs 23 times, which is second most in the league. They have been limited to one run or fewer 13 times, which is more than the Royals and Astros combined, and Seattle – as you can imagine – has a 0-13 record in those games. The Mariners have lost a no-hitter as many times in the last two months as the Phillies have in the last 12.

I didn’t want to spend so much space criticizing the Mariners’ offense — or more specifically, its weaknesses. But it’s important to point out that in an era where bullpen games are incredibly common in the playoffs, a team with five very good starting pitchers tends to be shut out of the postseason altogether.

Consider the following group of players: pitchers who have thrown 50 or more innings as a starter this season and are currently (i.e., according to RosterResource) in the starting lineup of an American League team that has at least a 10 percent chance of making the playoffs according to our playoff odds. This isn’t the complete list of potential playoff starters; the Guardians, for example, have only two players on this list and will definitely make the postseason. Gavin Williams fell just outside the innings cutoff, but you can be sure he’ll start for Cleveland in the playoffs if he’s healthy. The arbitrary endpoints have to end somewhere.

But the 36 (it was 37, but Zach Eflin was placed on the injured list as I was writing) who meet that criteria are representative of the pitchers who would start in the AL postseason next October. You can make your own list of where each of the Mariners’ five starting pitchers would land in a fantasy draft of the available rotation options for the AL playoffs, but here is their ranking among those 36 starters.

What has become a real burden to work with in baseball in recent years is the speed at which the role of the starting pitcher has changed, especially in the context of the playoffs. So much has changed so quickly that most fans and even most sportswriters don’t realize how rare it is for a team to assemble a complete five-man rotation of starting pitchers who can turn a lineup over more than twice in a playoff game. And then to keep such a rotation healthy over the course of the season.

Last season, all four teams that played a best-of-seven series had at least one bullpen game in the postseason. (I guess we can argue about the Astros in Game 4 of the ALCS, where Jose Urquidy was taken out in the third inning after allowing three consecutive baserunners and Hunter Brown threw three scoreless innings in relief. Does that count as a bullpen game, or was Urquidy just thrown out early?) Three of those teams – the Astros, Phillies and Rangers – spent more on their top three starters than the A’s spent on their entire 26-man roster. And yet they lacked reliable starting pitchers.

Building a rotation like the Mariners’ is arguably harder than making the playoffs. Certainly fewer teams will accomplish the former feat than the latter this season, so if they end up missing the postseason after building the hardest part of a postseason-ready roster, that would be astonishing. A team with a rotation that good should be (shrug) unsinkable.