Go 2 Guy: Mariners destined to win AL West

The 2006 American League West champions should forget the preseason predictions written here, those that said the Mariners would finish 73-89 and Ichiro Suzuki would not hit .300.

Steve Pool gets to revise his forecast, so I will too -- the Mariners are going to win the division and face the Yankees in the first round of the playoffs.

Mike Hargrove will replace his hot seat with the AL manager of the year award. GM Bill Bavasi will exchange letters to the editor demanding his dismissal with letters of praise and a contract extension.

CEO Howard Lincoln will not be criticized anymore, and president Chuck Armstrong will lower the price of beer -- all things are possible now with the surging Mariners.

I get the feeling that their fans are still unconvinced, as cynical as scribes, yet they will begin to come back. More than likely, the 2006 AL West champions will play in front of 100,000 fans this weekend against the Colorado Rockies.

Are you back on the bandwagon? Feel sheepish about shortchanging this team?

Me too.

Their lineup is suddenly solid. Their defense is good. Their pitching is more than adequate. And the other teams in the division are beatable aside from Oakland in Oakland, but the 2006 AL West champs will end that jinx in August.

Ken Schram has known most of these things all along. Depending on your point of view, you know him as an entertaining editorialist or controversial blowhard on KOMO-TV and radio. But he's also a devout Mariners fan who predicted a 91-71 season.

"That was my optimistic, ever-faithful, every-season-is-abright-new-light prediction," Schram said.

He liked a lot of things about the Mariners that everyone else wondered about. Among them, he thought Adrian Beltre would rebound, knew Kenji Johjima would be a hit. Plus, he appreciated the way Hargrove handled pitchers.

I tried to reach Lincoln and Armstrong through Mariners spokeswoman Rebecca Hale, but was courteously blown off. I wanted to be a management suck-up because they deserved it. Each has been prophetic.

Almost two months ago, Armstrong said he thought the Mariners would win the West and expanded on those remarks at an FSN Stars Night Out gala on June 1. The Mariners were 23-32 and coming off another miserable road trip.

"We have the talent to do that. ... I don't know if we're going to, but we have the talent to," he said.

At the same event, Lincoln said: "I still have faith in the guys. ... Let's just be patient and remember this is baseball. Strange things happen in baseball."

On Thursday they declined comment, Hale saying: "It's not time for them to start talking about this yet. It's a little turnaround that's still in its infancy."

Bavasi echoed his superiors when he said: "It's not the time to boast or gloat. That's not the way we want to approach it.

"We're playing well right now. Ever since I've been here, the guys have never done anything but play real hard. We've got some ability, we're getting experience. We're still pretty inexperienced up the middle, and we're still trying to figure things out in center field, but the key is to stay after it. We're still very much a developing club."

I asked Bavasi if he felt relieved about the team's progress, especially when it appeared his job was on the line. He said he didn't feel relieved and that the hot-seat thing is "part of the job."

"I don't listen to sports-talk (radio) or read about our team," he said. "I can tell you this, none of us in baseball are as dumb as we're made out to be, or as smart."

"Even that Beane guy?" I asked.

"Even that Beane guy," Bavasi said.

At the start of the season, Bavasi thought the Mariners could be competitive. But what about now, can they win the division?

"We're taking that approach," he said, adding that the Mariners, as of today, are buyers, looking to strengthen themselves before the trade deadline on July 31.

The Seattle Mariners, 2006 AL West champions -- strange things are about to happen.

P-I columnist Jim Moore can be reached at 206-448-8013 or jimmoore@seattlepi.com. His columns appear Tuesday, Thursday and Friday.

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