The 2021 Seattle Mariners have played 162 games during the regular season, won 90 games and lost 72 games. Whether it lasts into the second half of the schedule or not, Seattle’s run has been one of the most pleasant surprises of the season so far.2021 Seattle Mariners Roster | Research by Baseball Almanac (In reality, its playoff chances are more like 5 percent.) But the mere fact of being in the conversation is more than anybody expected from the Mariners going into 2021, particularly given the injuries they’ve faced. Even if every remaining game were a coin-flip, Seattle would have only a 22 percent playoff probability. This year’s team faces even longer odds to make the playoffs, despite the impressive start to the season. That team ended up missing the playoffs by eight games to a 97-win Oakland Athletics team, so the inability to maintain its first-half pace cost Seattle a postseason berth. And Seattle’s other entries on the list can be instructive in that regard: While the mighty 2001 Mariners kept chugging along, winning at a 113-win pace in the second half of the season, the 2018 version dipped from a 98-win first-half pace to an 80-win second-half pace after its luck began to even out. The bad news is that, on average, the other 19 teams on the list saw their winning percentages drop from. The Mariners have joined a lucky club this seasonīiggest positive gaps between actual and Pythagorean winning percentages through the first 79 games of a season (with winning percentages over the remainder of the regular season), 1969-2021 In fact, Seattle has the 20th-largest gap between its actual and Pythagorean winning percentages through the first 79 games of a season by any team since 1969: They’re 18-7 in one-run games - meaning they’re 23-31 in all other contests - and no team has exceeded its Pythagorean expectation more than Seattle so far this season. (Even this weekend, outfielder Taylor Trammell - who was hitting a buck-fifty-eight going into the action - helped Seattle upset the Chicago White Sox with a two-homer game.) But of course, the Mariners have also benefited from quite a bit of luck to get to where they are. It’s been refreshing to see something of an unheralded cast of characters power these Mariners’ winning ways. 450 OPS) as he’s wrested away most of the team’s closing opportunities from Rafael Montero this season. And reliever Kendall Graveman has been unhittable (opposing batters have a. On the mound, starter Yusei Kikuchi has been excellent - with a 121 ERA+ and 3.65 WAR per 162 - after struggling to a mere 80 ERA+ over his first two seasons following his posting to the U.S. *To qualify, a player must have played at least two-thirds of his games as a batter at shortstop. Most wins above replacement (WAR) per 162 team games for 2021 MLB shortstops* Player But this year’s run might be the most surprising, simply because of how it has - and, more importantly, hasn’t - happened.Ĭrawford’s bat and glove rank him among the best Seattle flirted with the playoffs in 2014, 20 despite modest preseason predictions, and even last season the Mariners hung around closer to. 2 Simply put, this is one of the most unheralded teams to put together a winning first half in modern memory.įor a club that hasn’t made the postseason in two decades, the Mariners do have the capacity to surprise every now and again. 500 through the first 79 games of a season. If we expand that list to look at the entire divisional era (since 1969), the 2021 Mariners also had the 23rd-lowest preseason Elo of any team that was better than. Lowest preseason Elo ratings for 2021 MLB teams with winning records Team Seattle is MLB’s most underestimated winning team Out of the 15 clubs with winning records right now, Seattle is easily the one that overcame the humblest of opening day expectations: 500 and tied in the AL wild-card race with the New York Yankees ( of all teams) as we near the halfway point in the schedule. Though the Seattle Mariners started the year looking like one of MLB’s worst teams on paper, 1 here they are, above. Unlike those more prestigious peers, the third-most-impressive club might be one that nobody gave even an outside chance - and one that almost never catches a postseason break. (Both have won multiple World Series in the past decade both also rank among the top 10 in payroll this year.) This kind of hey-we’re-good-again season is always at least possible in places like Boston and San Francisco. But while both teams missed the playoffs last year and appeared to be in periods of relative retooling, the Red Sox and Giants are not exactly long-suffering, low-budget franchises. Relative to preseason expectations, the two most impressive teams in baseball so far this season have probably been the San Francisco Giants and Boston Red Sox - a pair of clubs few thought would be headlining baseball’s two toughest divisions.
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