No team with a $111 million budget should be thin, but the Seattle Mariners are – and among a handful of irreplaceable players on their roster, Felix Hernandez may have topped the list.

While awaiting word on Felix’s right elbow, this team seems much less formidable than 24 hours ago.

First, the concern has to be about a 21-year-old ace who learned the value of hard work last winter and had translated it into two victories. Elbow ‘tightness’ could mean anything from a mild strain to a tear, from a few weeks out of the rotation to potentially

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The pressure for an ace doesn’t end once the season begins, and good as he’s been – which is close to perfect – Felix Hernandez is just beginning to realize that.

When he starts tonight against Minnesota, what Hernandez does will impact his teammates, the Seattle rotation and Mariners fans.

If he wins, he iniates another five-day cycle in which Jarrod Washburn will give Seattle the chance to win and the three other starters – Miguel Batista, Horacio Ramirez and Jeff Weaver – try to either win two games

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As they go about discovering what kind of team they are, the Seattle Mariners are learning what kind of teams dwell in the American League West – and so far, so good.

Oakland is a team built on pitching, and the Mariners took two of three games from them in the opening series of the season. That team is good, but hasn’t yet intimidated anyone.

Texas? The Mariners may have caught them on a bad weekend, but pitching wasn’t great – and the Rangers defense was abysmal.

This week in Southern California, Seattle will get its first

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I have been stealing a line here and there from Kurt Vonnegut as long as I can recall, and the only consolation was that he knew it and found it a bit amusing.

Somewhere in college he burst into my consciousness as a writer with a vivid style, a man who used humor and punctuation in ways I’d never seen them used.

One of the first books of his I read was Slaughterhouse Five, and Vonnegut opened a chapter with this line: Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.

I was hooked.

Years later, I

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Sitting in the bowels of Fenway Park, the Seattle Mariners huddle like nervous

animals and think to themselves, ‘Not again.’

Yes, again. The rain is falling sideways at noon, and the wind chill is already below freezing – almost four hours before the Boston-Seattle game is supposed to start. Almost no one expects it to start then.

Instead, weather-readers say there is a ‘window of opportunity’ to play this game about 7 p.m. EST this evening.

In Cleveland, it was snow. In Boston, it’s expected to sleet some time today.

In the five games

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Arthur Rhodes, the 37-year-old left-hander the Seattle Mariners hoped would recapture his best in the bullpen this season, has a torn ulnar collateral ligament and is almost certainly lost for the season.

A career-threatening injury, Rhodes has two options – undergo ‘Tommy John’ surgery or try to rehabilitate the injury without surgery and come back.

"We can fill the role Arthur would have had, but we can’t replace Arthur," manager Mike Hargrove said. "We were a better team with Arthur than we’ll be without him."

Any one who saw Tuesday’s game now knows what a long layoff from baseball – and the ability to even practice on the field – can do to a major league team.

The Mariners pitched poorly, hit poorly and couldn’t catch or throw well. Some of that almost certainly will bleed over into tonight’s game, when Felix Hernandez takes the mound for the first time in nine games.

The Trip That Wasn’t is creating havoc for a team that took two of three games from Oakland a week ago. That team has played one game since then, and

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Arthur Rhodes hadn’t thrown a pitch this season, and now he won’t until the Mariners y determine how serious the inflammation in his left elbow is.

As Rhodes went on the disabled list – retroactive to April 1 – the team recalled left-handed pitcher Jake Woods who, oddly, had not yet thrown a pitch this season for the Tacoma Rainiers.

Woods was at Fenway Park before the start of Seattle’s first game since a snowed-out 4 2/3-inning affair in Cleveland on Friday.

Oh, and keep this in mind. For the trip’s final game on Thursday, the forecast

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