Rock bottom

MINNEAPOLIS – An uneventful trade deadline passed with the Mariners sticking to the same old story.

The same players, along with Triple-A addition Matt Tuiasosopo, turned in the same anemic effort on offense and took a 4-0 loss to the Minnesota Twins on Saturday night, finishing July with a 6-22 record that equals the worst month in franchise history. Answers were few and uninformative afterward, with the Mariners simply shrugging in helpless fashion, trying to explain a four-hit effort and how they’re going to turn this free fall around.

With an off-day coming up Monday, it remains to be seen whether the team will keep running the same manager out to the dugout, as Don Wakamatsu watches the Mariners come up empty night after night.

“I’m not going to sit here and make excuses,” Wakamatsu said. “We have to play better.”

But the performance has remained consistently bad all season long. It’s worsened since Cliff Lee was traded, leaving the Mariners with one legitimate ace pitcher in Felix Hernandez and even he can’t win with zero offense.

Hernandez gave up all three of his runs allowed in the first of his seven innings. Triples by Alexi Casilla and Delmon Young, a double by Jim Thome and a run-scoring single by Joe Mauer gave the Twins all the offense they would need. Mauer doubled and scored off Jamey Wright in the eighth inning to close things out.

“Words don’t really describe what’s going on right now,” said Michael Saunders, who had one of three hits off Twins starter Kevin Slowey, after the Mariners equaled their worst monthly mark first set in August of the expansion 1977 season. “Obviously, we’re not winning ballgames right now. We’re doing our best to keep what’s past in the past and trying to move forward.”

But instead, like “turning the page” on a bad novel, the plot keeps getting worse.

Seattle has scored just seven runs in Hernandez’s eight defeats this season. The loss dropped Hernandez to a sub-.500 record at 7-8 despite a 2.90 earned-run average that remains one of the best in the American League.

“It’s unfortunate,” Wakamatsu said. “We keep saying it. You have a pitcher who goes out there and battles and we can’t get anything offensive for him. Again, it was that case tonight. I think we had two hits through seven and four total. I don’t know if we threatened at all, all night.”

Mariners general manager Jack Zduriencik has continued to say that Wakamatsu is his manager.

But Zduriencik also has not commented on Chone Figgins clashing heatedly with Wakamatsu after the second baseman was taken out of a game just more than a week ago.

Instead, Zduriencik met with both the following day and Figgins has been in the lineup since, declining to apologize for or even discuss the incident in public.

The front office has yet to make any statements affirming that Wakamatsu will remain on as manager the rest of the season. Instead, it continues to take actions that appear to leave Wakamatsu twisting in the wind.

One of the more positive moves made by Wakamatsu in his managerial tenure was calling out Hernandez in May 2009 for not doing enough. Hernandez has been a different pitcher since.

On Saturday, after the Twins attacked his fastball for the three runs, he began throwing his breaking ball earlier in the count for strikes and battled to keep his team in it with just four hits allowed the rest of the way through seven innings.

Hernandez admitted after the game that he likely would not have been able to adjust like that so quickly earlier in his career.

“It’s a lot different between me right now and when I was younger,” he said.