Soon—probably early next week—the Seattle Mariners will be eliminated from the American League playoff race. The lights will fade. The 2021 Mariners will dissolve into the ether. And they’ll do it with a winning record.
With their win last night in Oakland, the Mariners clinched an above-.500 mark, one that defied expectations, sure, but also defied results.
There’s a formula called BaseRuns. You can read more about it here. Relying on everything from home runs to sac flies, it breaks the game down to a semi-atomic level, then reconstructs it to see how well each team should have done based on their raw performance and that of their opponents. If that sounds too out-there for you, we can talk about Pythagorean Win-Loss, which is just a conversion of run differential into winning percentage. Each tells the same story.
By BaseRuns, the Mariners should be 68-83 right now, three games worse than both the Marlins and the Nationals should be and only one game better than the Cubs actually are. By Pythagorean Win-Loss, the Mariners would be 70-81, half a game better than the Tigers should be and half a game worse than the Rockies actually are. By these broad indicators, the Mariners are not this good. They’re nowhere close to this good. They’ve overperformed by an absurd number of wins.
How have they done it? The bullpen, one might assume. Seattle has the fourth-best bullpen in the bigs by fWAR. By FIP, it’s the second-best. By Win Probability Added, it’s again fourth, with a “Clutch” rating better than that of every bullpen save the Tigers, the Red Sox, and the Brewers. The Mariners’ bullpen has come through. And it hasn’t just been the bullpen. Though the Mariners’ rotation ranks just 22nd in the game in fWAR, it’s second in “Clutch,” implying it’s split its good and bad performances in an opportune manner. At the plate, it’s extreme: The gap between the Mariners’ and the next-most clutch team is nearly as broad as that between that second-most clutch team and the 19th-most clutch team.
This might seem like a good thing. In terms of results, it’s been a great thing. But coming through with the game on the line is a hard thing to reproduce, which at the benign end means false impressions for this Mariners roster will set next year’s expectations unreasonably high, and at the damaging end could mean the Mariners will be less aggressive in the offseason than they would be if they hadn’t experienced such…well, luck.
Maybe they’ll sustain it. The Royals’ bats did something like that, finishing in the top four in the metric for four straight seasons from 2014-2017. In 2018, though, the clutchness departed, and a franchise that only won 90 or more games once over the four-year period preceding ’18 crashed to a 58-104 record. Not all of that was the departure of timing, but some of it was, and an argument could be made that it masked many of the Royals’ flaws.
Be wary, Seattle.
Be wary.
