Felix Hernandez misses out on postseason berth yet again

Despite doing all he could, leading his club to a win in the season’s final game, Seattle Mariners right-hander Felix Hernandez fell just short of a postseason berth for the tenth consecutive season in what has become a troubling pattern for the dominant right-hander.

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Tossing 5 2/3 shutout innings in front of a packed house at Safeco Field, Hernandez did everything he could to pitch his team into the postseason. However, in the middle of the sixth, Oakland Athletics right-hander Sonny Gray put the finishing touches on a shutout win over the Texas Rangers, ending the Mariners’ hopes of ending a postseason drought that dates back to 2001.

It was at that point that first-year Seattle skipper Lloyd McClendon pulled the 28-year-old, ending his season – American League earned run average title in tow thanks to the solid outing in his final start of the year. Once again, Hernandez will watch October baseball from his couch.

"“You saw my face when I was pitching today,” Hernandez told the Seattle Times. “This was it. This was my game.”"

It certainly was his game. In fact, 2014 was the Venezuelan right-hander’s season. He heads into the next few weeks as the leading candidate for the American League Cy Young Award – which would be the second of his career – and with good reason.

Despite winning just 15 games, which is somewhat low for a Cy Young candidate, Hernandez made 34 starts, spanning 236 innings in which he posted a sterling 2.14 ERA. and 0.915 WHIP – both of which led the American League. His 248 strikeouts ranked fourth in the AL, trailing David Price, Corey Kluber and Max Scherzer. Hernandez’s 6.7 WAR ranked second amongst the league’s pitchers, behind the Indians’ Kluber and the .200 mark at which opposing batters hit Hernandez was a league leader – meanwhile opponents hit Kluber at a clip nearly 35 points higher at .233.

Hernandez’s control of his pitches has arguably never been better than it was in 2014. His strikeout-to-walk ratio of 5.39 was a career-best, up from an already-impressive 4.70 mark in 2013, when the righty finished eighth in AL Cy Young balloting and dwarfing the 3.31 clip from his Cy Young campaign of 2010.

The 2014 season marked a 17-game improvement for the Mariners from the season prior – a testament to the change in the organization that was largely attributed to the arrival of former New York Yankees second baseman Robinson Cano, who finished the year with the seventh-best average in the league. He added a veteran presence with winning experience – something that was sorely lacking in years’ past.

With a monumental step forward taken in 2014, the most dominant pitcher in the American League will have to team up with Cano to help snap the second-longest postseason drought in all of Major League Baseball. He carries the city’s playoff hopes on his back – it’s just a matter of time before he gets the job done.