Seattle Mariners looking at former MLB catcher as new manager with Scott Servais on the way out: Reports

The Seattle Mariners watched a 10-game division lead evaporate as manager Scott Servais is expected to be fired as a result. Servais got them to the playoffs in 2022, breaking a two-decade-long drought. They missed the playoffs in 2023 and are poised to suffer a pretty dismal collapse and miss out once again in 2024.

Servais hasn't officially been fired, but the expectation is that the Mariners will make the move soon.

In his place, the Mariners are expected to promote former catcher Dan Wilson, according to Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic. He will serve as the coach on an interim basis, and unless he wins the job outright, a search for the long-term answer will begin in the offseason.

On June 19, the Mariners held that 10-game lead in the AL West. Since then, they've gone 20-32 for a .385 winning percentage. That is MLB’s lowest win percentage, not including the Chicago White Sox, who are setting records for being this bad.

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Are the Seattle Mariners still in the playoff race?

The Seattle Mariners have shockingly fallen out of a division lead. They had the good fortune that both the Texas Rangers and Houston Astros, the two teams that did make the playoffs last year, got off to horrible starts.

The Rangers are still struggling mightily, but the Astros caught fire. Their slow start afforded Seattle some room, but that room is gone. They now trail by five games. That's hardly an insurmountable deficit in the middle of August, but it's significant in the grand scheme of their downfall.

They are 7.5 games behind the final Wild Card spot, with both the Tampa Bay Rays and Boston Red Sox in between them and that third spot. That figures to be a much harder path, but again, it's not an insurmountable deficit.

Fangraphs is giving them a 12.6% chance of making it to the postseason, a far cry from early-season numbers. Conversely, the Astros currently stand a 90.3% chance of making it.