THE CHEAP SEATS with STEVE CAMERON: From bad to worse to out of work

It’s such a goofy way to do business.

The logic, if you can use that word, is that Scott Servais forgot about how to run a baseball team.

Not last year.

Not last month.

Nope, Scott just went blank on a just-completed road trip, when his Mariners couldn’t hit a beach ball.

A total lack of offense turned into a 1-8 trip, and what might have been a run against Houston for the AL West turned into a disaster.

Now, exactly what Servais did — or didn’t do — between June 18 and Thursday strikes me as a mystery.

You DO remember June 18, right?

That was the day the Mariners topped out with a 10-game lead over Houston and Texas in the division.

Nobody was ready to compare the M’s with the 1927 Yankees, exactly, but a 10-game head start when you have the best pitching staff in baseball?

Amazingly, Seattle STILL has the best pitching in the game, with a staff ERA of 3.51.

The starters produce good stuff — winning stuff — almost every night, and yet between June 18 and this week, Scott Servais somehow botched his job.

Is that what happened?

NO, IT wasn’t.

Lower life forms crawling the desert have enough savvy to laugh at the “Servais lost his marbles” reasoning for the Mariners’ 20-33 record since that high-water mark in June.

But when teams begin to stumble, the guy at the top always winds getting tossed under the bus.

Owners don’t fire themselves.

Football coaches and baseball managers understand that if results slide into a sewer, they will be blamed — and pay for it with their jobs.

They know that, most of the time, it wasn’t entirely their fault.

In fact, they might not deserve any blame at all.

They can’t hold press conferences and tell the truth, though, not if they hope to pop up with another job in the industry.

Servais will go quietly and wish his guys well.

There are always internal relationships that fans don’t necessarily grasp, but they usually lead to the replacements that follow hard-working, experienced (nine years) servants like Scott Servais.

You wind up with Dan Wilson, a broadcaster who has never managed at any level, being given the manager’s office.

Normally, the word “interim” would be tangled up in here somewhere, but that’s not the deal.

Boss Jerry Dipoto, explaining that the team needed a new voice in the clubhouse (as reason for canning Servais), added a vote of confidence for Wilson — for this season and BEYOND, a strange decision that might have more to do with Dipoto’s own job than new voices directing the team.

Another odd piece of the Thursday pie was that Dipoto mentioned that Wilson will make his own calls on the coaching staff, which he’ll announce next week.

Except.

Hitting coach Jaret DeHart, who has absolutely nothing useful on his resume that suggests hanging around, was finally fired.

Presumably, the front office was willing to let Wilson decide on the other coaches, but wanted the public to know that DeHart’s removal came from the top.

THE M’S are not going to catch Houston.

Not now.

If they had started hitting seriously about 10 days ago, then you could say maybe.

But the Astros are simply a better team, even if the Mariners come to life, and five games will seem like a chasm.

The far bigger question now is what happens in 2025 and beyond?

Seattle will still have terrific pitching, and a farm system rated as high as any in MLB (with the prospects tilting heavily toward hitters, to boot).

During a Tuesday interview on Seattle radio, former Baseball America senior writer Kyle Glaser was asked what in the world had made the Mariners’ offense become so bad.

Glaser ran down the names of the M’s everyday lineup, added that landing Randy Arozarena and Victor Robles were both smart moves, and then turned to the question of how this team can’t score runs.

“These are guys with track records of being productive performers at the plate — (and) every single one of them has just cratered and had more or less a career-worst year all at once.

“And I think when you have all of these guys struggling this badly in conjunction, you have to look at what’s being taught —whether it’s approach-based, whether it’s mechanics-based.

“This isn’t a coincidence. Something is very, very wrong here.

“There’s a symptom here of a larger problem.”

The Cheap Seats will do a Sunday examination of what might be wrong with the Mariners. We’ve seen the symptoms, so what about the cause.

Email: scameron@cdapress.com

Steve Cameron’s “Cheap Seats” columns appear in The Press four times each week, normally Tuesday through Friday unless, you know, stuff happens.

Steve suggests you take his opinions in the spirit of a Jimmy Buffett song: “Breathe In, Breathe Out, Move On.”