Seahawks' recent sad-sack history

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There are 52 players who have recorded 10 or more sacks over the past five seasons.

None of them have done it while playing for the Seahawks, though.

Two have come close, though. Safety Jamal Adams had 9.5 sacks in 2020, and Uchenna Nwosu had 9.5 in 2022.

Still, no one has hit the double-digit mark. Is it significant?

Well, the Seahawks are one of three teams who haven’t had anyone hit the double-digit mark in that category. The other two are Atlanta and Denver.

OK. Let that marinate because we’re going to get back to it. But first, there’s a couple of things I want to get to:

1. I’m going to be writing for The News Tribune of Tacoma.

They even let me refer to Howard Schultz as a loathsome toad in my first contribution. I’ll be writing for them every other week, alternating with Jim Moore, who was my co-worker both at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and then at 710 AM, a Seattle sports station.

I’ll be linking to those columns here, but also feel obligated to warn you there is a paywall. This will not reduce the number of times I write here at The Dang Apostrophe. In fact, you’re going to see a more regular schedule here:

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Next, we’ve got baseball’s trade deadline:

The M’s added, but was it enough?

The Mariners could have done more at the deadline.

They’ve also frequently done less.

I mean, last year, last year the most significant move was trading away their closer, Paul Sewald.

The additions of Randy Arozarena and Justin Turner will certainly help the lineup while Yimi Garcia and JT Chargois have been added to the bullpen.

However, Mitch Haniger AND Mitch Garver were still in the lineup for Tuesday’s 10-6 victory in Boston, and Seattle is going to try and make-do at shortstop until J.P. Crawford gets back, which means the infield defense is going to be an adventure.

Bradford Doolittle of ESPN.com listed the Mariners among the “winners” at the trade deadline while former Reds GM Jim Bowden gave Seattle an ‘A’ for its deadline deals compared to the ‘C’ he hung on the A’s.

But what struck me most was a fact that Luke Arkins posted on Twitter after the Mariners beat Boston on Tuesday. (Side note: If you don’t follow Arkins, you really should, and his Mariners Consigliere newsletter is both awesome and FREE.)

The Mariners are in the same spot they’ve been for basically four seasons now entering the final third of the season. This time, however, the Astros aren’t out in front as they have been each of the three previous seasons.

It seems to me there are two ways to look at the risks the Mariners just took.

1. The risk to the Mariners future

Will the prospects Seattle dealt to get Arozarena and Turner undercut the team’s chances to contend in the future?

The two players Seattle gave up for Arozarena (OF Aidan Smith and RHP Brody Hopkins) were generally considered among the franchise’s top 15 players in its farm system. Both were drafted last year, Smith out of high school and Hopkins from college. Each is currently in Single A.

Seattle gave up R.J. Schreck to acquire Turner (along with some money to help pay for Turner). Schreck is not regarded as highly, but he is closer to the big leagues, playing in Class AA.

It’s not nothing, but I also think that Seattle is trying to have its cake and eat it, too. It wants to make the playoffs, but not enough to really hunker down and make a bet that could impact the future. They’re trying to get there with incremental, measured upgrades.

This is not like 2022 when the Mariners traded Noelvi Marte — one of the franchises’s top prospects — to acquire Luis Castillo. Of course, that was the one year the Mariners made the playoffs in the past 22 so maybe there’s a lesson in that.

2. The risk to the Mariners present

They fall short of the playoffs for the third time in fourth years, which will increase the restlessness of the villagers.

Add this to the previous two offseasons in which the Mariners’ spent most of their time rearranging the lineup, swapping out to-may-toes for to-mah-toes, and you get the feeling that this team is content to stay right where they are, on the margins of the playoffs, hoping that one year they catch lightning in a bottle.

I hope the Mariners make the playoffs, but if they don’t, I’m not going to spend any time urging other people to be more patient or to recognize the team is in a much better place than it was 10 years ago. While the Mariners are undoubtedly in a much better place than they were 10 years ago, the goal isn’t to be good enough that you could make the playoffs every year. The goal is to win a title and at some point I believe that requires gathering your collective courage — and perhaps some large bags of cash — and deciding, “We’re freaking going for it!”

The Mariners did not do that at the trading deadline.

Back to the pass rush

The single most frustrating fact of the Seahawks’ final five years under Pete Carroll was that the team failing to build a defense that was consistently average, let alone good.

There have been a variety of theories on why this was the case ranging from the fact that it took a transcendently superior secondary like the “Legion of Boom” to win with that scheme, and once those players aged out, and Seattle not longer had that transcendently good secondary, the warts and vulnerabilities became crippling.

Another theory was that Carroll’s general aversion to blitzing — his desire to make opponents work incrementally down the field — became a liability given the accuracy and consistently of today’s passing attacks.

I’m more inclined to believe it was the latter as opposed to the former, and the fact that the Seahawks didn’t have a single player reach 10 sacks in any of the past five seasons would be a stat that I would file as Exhibit A.

So is that going to change up Mike Macdonald?

Well, we only have two years to go on with Macdonald as an NFL defensive coordinator.

In 2023: Justin Madubuike led Baltimore with 13 sacks last season. Jadaveon Clowney finished with 9.5, Kyle Van Noy with 9.

In 2022: Justin Houston led the Ravens with 9.5 while Calais Campbell and Madubuike were tied for second with 5.5 apiece.

The Seahawks have a variety of pass-rush threats. You’ve got a trio of second-round picks the Seahawks have accumulated recently: Derick Hall, Boye Mafe and Darrell Taylor.

There’s the pair of veterans Seattle signed as free agents: Nwosu and Dre’Mont Jones.

Then there’s Leonard Williams, who had 11.5 sacks for the Giants in 2020.

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