This baseball season has been defined, in part, by dismissals. In April, the Red Sox fired manager Alex Cora. Days later, the Phillies did the same to manager Rob Thomson. Both teams have recovered from early swoons to jockey into postseason position.The landscape stayed quiet for a while, until a series of upheavals in the American League West. The Angels, Athletics and Astros are all operating with interim heads of their baseball operations departments. And, as our latest mailbag shows, there is plenty of disquiet among fans of another disappointing A.L. West team, the Mariners.For this week’s round of questions, we dug into Hot Seat season. There is a month to go before the postseason. There are jobs on the line. Let’s talk about it.The questions have been edited for clarity.I’m always amused that nearly every fan base is convinced their manager and GM are the biggest idiots in sports. Are there any that are generally happy? I would guess Red Sox Nation is pretty happy given the last few months? — John P. And I would have suggested Dodgers fans were fairly pleased with how things are going. That was before Shohei Ohtani’s two-way ambitions were thwarted, the lineup turned frigid and the legitimacy of Mark Walter’s entire business empire came into question.The joy and torture of the baseball season comes from its length. A dedicated fan forms an intimate relationship with these strangers they watch on television every night for six months. You learn the quirks of all the players, you study the mannerisms of the manager, you stare at the same problems on the roster day after day after day. The proximity makes a team’s flaws so obvious, which is why fans sometimes fixate on the three or four major problems with their team rather than highlight the strengths of the group.Why won’t they move that guy up in the lineup? Why can’t they build a bullpen? Why couldn’t we find another starter at the deadline? What is wrong with our bullpen? Why don’t our guys run hard all the time? Seriously, the Brewers build a good bullpen every year, why can’t we just copy them?This is the joy and torture of being a baseball fan. Rarely does a team collapse for unforeseen reasons. You spend the entire year toting around your well-earned anxieties about your favorite club and hoping those anxieties do not prove to be accurate. Except for 29 teams each season, they usually are.No hotter seat than the one Dan Wilson sits on. He can’t light a fire under the Mariners whatsoever. He is actively terrible at in-game decisions. If the Mariners front office and ownership weren’t so milquetoast Wilson would already be gone. The fact that Seattle isn’t absolutely running away with the A.L. West is a sign of Dan Wilson’s incompetence. — Jonathan P. I wouldn’t hang the entirety of this woebegone season on the manager. Cal Raleigh regressed to a shocking degree. The injuries were bad enough that general manager Justin Hollander declared he had “really never seen anything like this.” Bryan Woo took a step back. Andrés Munoz has experienced extremely bad luck with homers. There are a lot of factors at play.But the job of a big-league manager is to help a talented group — which the Mariners were perceived to be after finishing a game short of the World Series last year — navigate the slings and arrows of the long season. And Wilson has not really been able to do that. Wilson received plenty of criticism for his bullpen usage in Game 7 of last year’s ALCS against Toronto. That heightened the attention on him heading into this year.The Mariners do not play a particularly crisp brand of baseball. Nearly a quarter of their at-bats end in strikeouts. They rank 27th in FanGraphs’ metric measuring base-running value and 30th in defensive value. The lack of fundamentals looks more problematic when the talent is underperforming. And that does reflect on the manager. Which is why he probably won’t be the manager next season.