The starting rotation is largely responsible. Among other things, the starting rotation’s great K/BB ratios early in the season suggested that Al Leiter, Glendon Rusch, Kevin Appier and Steve Trachsel were not likely to continue struggling all year. Indeed, while Trachsel hasn’t been good he has improved some, and the others have all pitched well. Here are the lines (all stats through Sunday’s action):

IP BB K
Reed 127.2 16 97
Leiter 106.2 22 84
Appier 124.1 37 111
Rusch 107.2 27 93
Trachsel 90 25 67

Trachsel, like Kevin Tapani and John Burkett, has long been one of those rare pitchers who is unable to translate consistently good K/BB ratios into good pitching. Some of that is a tendency to give up home runs, but all three have tended to give up an extraordinarily high number of hits per balls in play. Burkett’s success this season has come largely as a result of reversing that trend, but who knows if Trachsel ever will? (One might speculate that his tendency to give up hits is exacerbated by his slow pace on the mound, which puts his fielders to sleep).

Anyway, the staff overall has a remarkable 2.71 K/BB ratio, and I started wondering if this would be any kind of record. As it turns out, the Mets don’t even lead the league – that distinction belongs to the Diamondbacks, at 2.75, led by Randy Johnson (225/45), Curt Schilling (180/24), Byun-Hyung Kim (85/30) and Greg Swindell (26/4). And Arizona doesn't lead the majors; that distinction falls to the Hated Yankees at 2.80. The Yanks are getting great K/BB numbers from nearly everywhere on the staff:

IP BB K
Clemens 136 42 131
Mussina 139.2 25 125
Pettitte 123.2 23 100
Lilly 81 32 78
Stanton 56 18 59
Rivera 53 9 57
Mendoza 67.2 15 50
Witasick 13.1 6 20

But what’s the all-time record? For that, I don’t have a sortable database, so I hit the books, and while I may have missed somebody I’m pretty sure I got the answers. As so often happens with searches for records, the answer to this one was simultaneously staggering and unimpressive. The best K/BB ratio ever posted by a major league pitching staff is 10.69 (!) by the Milwaukee team in the Union Association in 1884.

As students of the game’s history will recall, the Union Association was a third major league (in competition with the NL and the American Association, which did business from 1882 to 1891) that operated for just one season, 1884. The league’s status as a “major league”, conferred retroactively by historians, is extremely dubious; in the late 1800s there were always a number of competing leagues filled with players of quality similar to the National League, but only the AA was able to consistently match the Senior Circuit’s overall quality. As an example, Fred Dunlap, a career .283 hitter elsewhere, dominated the UA, hitting .412 with power. The league had five teams with a collective .239 winning percentage (that’s 39-123 on a modern schedule). Anyway, the Milwaukee franchise was one of several that folded early in the season, but after 12 games the pitching staff had struck out 139 batters and walked 13 in 104 innings. This must have impressed somebody, because the 3 pitchers – Henry Porter, Ed Cushman and Lady Baldwin – all caught on to pitch successfully in the real majors (Baldwin went 42-13 for the Detroit Wolverines of the NL two years later) despite having minimal major league experience before this. So somebody got something out of it, anyway. Me, I’m left wondering how a professional ballplayer in the 1880s got stuck with the nickname “Lady”.

Not satisfied with the result, I looked at teams that played a full schedule. This, too, yielded a spate of Boston Red Caps/Beaneaters teams (later the Braves) from the 1880s, most headed by ace Tommy Bond but the capper being the 1883 team, with basically a 2-man pitching staff of Jim Whitney (a staggering 345/35 in 514 innings) and Charlie Buffington (188/51 in 333 innings) combining for a 5.98 K/BB ratio. Still, this was back when it took 7 balls to walk a man, so I kept on going to the modern ball-strike count (4 balls and 3 strikes became the standard in 1889).

The best team of the past 2 decades, entering this year, was the Expos of 1994 at 2.80, with (naturally) Pedro Martinez leading the way (142/45). Other teams above 2.7 included the 1996 Braves (2.76), led by Greg Maddux (172/28) and the 1988 and 1990 Mets (2.72, 2.74) led by Dwight Gooden (175/57) and Bob Ojeda (133/33) in 1988 and David Cone (233/65) and Gooden (223/70) in 1990.

But the kings of the mound, the only team I could find with a better than 3-to-1 K/BB ratio since the 4-ball rule came in in 1889, turned out to be an eminently logical candidate: the 1966 Dodgers, with three Hall of Famers in their 4-man rotation. The Dodgers struck out 1084 batters, an impressive total at the time but one that would be in the middle of the pack in the 1990s. But they walked just 356 batters, barely over 2 a game. Eight pitchers threw more than 97% of the Dodgers’ innings:

Player IP BB K
Koufax 323 77 317
Drysdale 273.2 45 177
Claude Osteen 240.1 65 137
Sutton 225.2 52 209
Phil Regan 116.2 24 88
Ron Perranoski 82 31 50
Bob Miller 84.1 29 58
Joe Moeller 78.2 14 31

Dodger Stadium or no Dodger Stadium, that’s a pitching staff. Osteen also had a long, successful career, and except for Moeller all of the relievers had several other good seasons. This staff carried a weak offense all the way to the World Series, although, unfortunately for the Dodgers, they didn’t score a run after the third inning of Game 1 of the Series.

To start with, the Mariners were a stronger team last season than most people realized. They allowed 780 runs (only one other AL team, the Red Sox, was under 810) while scoring 907 runs, fourth in the AL. Only three other major-league teams – the White Sox, A’s and Giants – finished in the top 4 in their league in both runs scored and runs allowed, and the Mariners were the only one of those four to make it out of the Divisional Series alive. And the pitching staff had to survive more than two months with Freddy Garcia on the shelf with a broken leg.

Still, the prevailing wisdom was that Seattle’s various offseason additions wouldn’t be enough to offset the offensive hole left by the departure of the game’s best everyday player. (Note to Barry Bonds fans: This is an offhand comment. Argue with me about it some other time). The Mariners were busy in the market, though; among other things, this has to be the least home-grown team since Wayne Huizenga’s Rotisserie team won the 1997 World Series. Other than the back of the bullpen, only three significant Mariners are products of the Seattle farm system: Edgar Martinez (who was signed by the Mariners when Tony Eason was in college), Bret Boone and Jeff Nelson, both of whom left town years ago and had to be re-signed on the free-agent market. While a lot of the contributors came as bounty for Griffey and Randy Johnson, the long list of free-agent signings should disabuse anyone of the notion that the Mariners, with their huge regional and international TV market and spankin’ new ballpark, are a “small market” team.

The source of the Mariners’ success has been a bit hard to pin down. The pitching staff carried the team for the first 28 games, posting a spectacular (in this day and age) 3.20 ERA on its way to a 22-6 record. That fit the popular image of the Mariners as a team remade around pitching and defense after the departure of Griffey and Rodriguez. After that, the offense kicked in.

THE HITTING

At this writing, the greatest share of the credit has to go to the offense. The Mariners are scoring nearly 6 runs a game (5.95) – not quite the 1927 Yankees (6.33) or 1999 Indians (6.23), but definitely in that neighborhood, and in a cavernous, pitcher-friendly park (they’re scoring 6.54 runs/game on the road, which if done over a full season would fall just short of the post-1900 record for runs scored).

Yet, it doesn’t look that impressive. Seattle has offensive holes at three positions: SS (Carlos Guillen batting/slugging/on base of .255/.351/.326), 3B (David Bell .268/.434/.309, even after a hot streak), and C (mostly Dan Wilson .261/.393/.313). Now, the 1927 Yankees had weak links at the same three positions plus a pitcher, but those Yankees also had Babe Ruth hitting 60 homers and Lou Gehrig having his best season. You will not see anyone on the Mariners roster who resembles Ruth or Gehrig; nobody’s hitting above .340 or slugging .600, and Bret Boone is the only Mariner on a pace to hit more than 30 homers.

The main reason the Mariner offense doesn’t get a lot of respect is Boone. The problem, image-wise, is that the best players on the team are having (by their own standards) ordinary years, while the one guy who’s having a huge year is a proven mediocrity with a consistent track record of not being anywhere near this good.

Boone has not been the team’s best hitter – that’s Edgar Martinez, who’s been the Mariners’ best hitter most seasons since 1995 – but he’s probably second. Boone is leading the team in slugging (.583), HR and RBI, on a clip to finish the season at 40 HR and 153 RBI if he keeps the pace. Those numbers wouldn’t jump off the page if they came from Alex Rodriguez, who slugged .582 and averaged 40 HR and 122 RBI his last three years in Seattle and is coming into his prime at age 25. But Boone is 32, and except for the strike season he’s never hit .270 or slugged .460 in a season. His career on-base percentage of .312 is bad even for a middle infielder. Freak seasons do happen – Norm Cash, a fine hitter but nobody’s idea of a batting champ, hit .361 once, and Miguel Dilone hit .341 – and Boone credits his improvement in part to adding 20 pounds of muscle in the offseason (a common enough story these days). But our long experience as baseball fans teaches us to mistrust veterans who are hitting 75 points above their lifetime batting average in mid-July. So Boone gets discounted, and we wonder how these guys score so many runs with three weak links and without a big-time power hitter.

(I had intended to write up here an argument on why Roberto Alomar, a great player having his best season, should have started the All-Star Game ahead of Boone, but Joe Sheehan of the Baseball Prospectus beat me to the punch. Note that Boone’s RBI edge comes from batting twice as often with men in scoring position than Alomar.)

The other guy who has stepped up is Mike Cameron. Let’s make the obvious comparison:

Player A is Cameron, Player B is Ken Griffey, both since The Trade. Cameron’s not as good as Griffey and never will be, but he’s certainly held up his end, hasn’t he?

Looking hard at the numbers, the Mariners are scoring with four particular weapons:

1. Balance among the team’s good hitters. The STATS, Inc. Runs Created formula, which measures how many runs a team of 9 of a hitter would score, has 5 Mariners at 6.4 or higher (Martinez, the equally silent-but-deadly John Olerud, Boone, Ichiro and Mike Cameron), but only one above 8 (Martinez at 9.2).

2. High on-base percentages -- .357 as a team, led by Martinez (.431) and Olerud (.426). In this regard, supersub Mark McLemore (.366) has been the stealth weapon, taking playing time from Bell and Guillen in addition to playing left field.

3. The team is hitting improbably well with men on base – see this rather dense Baseball Primer article for an in-depth look at how this affects the offense and why it’s less-than-likely to keep up. Ichiro is hitting .425 with men on base, .493 with runners in scoring position.

4. That old staple of managers everywhere, moving baserunners – but without losing them. The Mariners hit-and-run a lot, and steal a lot of bases; they’re second in the majors (behind the Yankees) in steals with 97 but have been caught just 20 times, the fourth-lowest total in baseball and an impressive 83% success rate. Partly as a result, even with guys hitting third and fourth who would struggle to beat Rod Beck in a foot race and despite having more men on base than any team in the majors, the Mariners have hit into 10 fewer double plays (55) than any other AL team (only the Rockies have fewer). Olerud alone has accounted for 11 of those. Seattle also leads the majors in sac flies with 43 (only the Phillies are even close), and is near the bottom in batter strikeouts.

Take a look at #3 & 4. You can scoff if you want at the virtues of “little ball,” and it remains true that the difference between good teams and bad teams is the big things, not the little ones. Teams that build a team around “little ball” as a strategy almost always come to ruin. None of this would matter if Seattle didn’t have all those baserunners to start with. But the Mariners have executed the “little things” so well across the board that it all adds up to a big advantage, big enough to help explain how a team that’s twelfth in the majors in home runs is leading the pack in scoring. It also helps explain a pattern that the Baseball Prospectus’ Keith Woolner examines in exhaustive mathematical detail: The Mariners are scoring in a higher percentage of their innings, and in a higher percentage of the innings following another team’s scoring, than any team of the last 20 years (since records of such things have been kept).

THE PITCHING AND DEFENSE

The Mariner pitching staff, like the offense, doesn’t look like a great staff. There are no superstars, yet when you look instead for superior depth you see that 56 of their 94 games have been started by 5 pitchers who collectively have a 5.06 ERA and have allowed 363 hits in 322 innings while striking out 188. There are two major elements to their success.

First is the much-vaunted bullpen. Jeff Nelson has surrendered 15 hits in 39.2 innings, 3.4 per 9 innings; I’m not sure if that would be a record pace for a low-inning reliever, but the record for starters is 5.26 (Nolan Ryan, 1972) and it’s rare for even the Wagner/Benitez/Percival crowd of relievers to go below 4.5. I wouldn’t say that Nelson has been the most important free agent signing of the offseason – there’s that Manny guy, for starters – but his impact on the M’s pen has been huge and the Yankees had to trade valuable prospects for two guys to fill the void he left in New York. Kazu Sasaki, Arthur Rhodes and Jose Paniagua have also all been unhittable to various degrees. This puts opponents on the flip side of Seattle’s offensive success: they can’t get the key hits when they need them. Mariner opponents are batting .199 after the sixth inning.

The other item is defense, specifically the outfield. Let’s recall that last season the Mariners had a famously indifferent 41-year-old with a wet noodle of an arm (Rickey Henderson) play over 900 innings in left field. They had a 36-year-old (Jay Buhner) play over 800 innings in right field with knees that weren’t up for shuffleboard. While both were once fine defensive oufielders, those days are ancient history now. Both those players are gone, Rickey permanently. In right field is Ichiro; with blazing speed and a great arm, Ichiro leads all AL right fielders in range factor (plays per inning) and is fourth in zone rating (plays per ball hit in his “zone”). Those figures are up 20% and 7%, respectively, from Buhner’s 2000 stats, which depending how you figure it may have saved the Mariners anywhere from 20-40 hits allowed already. At any rate it’s a noticeable difference, at least as noticeable as the loss if you replaced Ichiro with a .280 hitter. The left-field situation is less dramatic, but Al Martin, Stan Javier and Mark McLemore have all been clear improvements over Rickey in left in both defensive categories. They’ve also got 4 assists, not spectacular but Rickey didn’t throw out a baserunner all last year. Ichiro has also already matched Buhner’s assist total for last season. And playing amidst better help on all sides, Mike Cameron’s already impressive defensive stats have been much improved.

The net result of all this: it can’t be a coincidence that pitchers like Nelson and Aaron Sele are allowing so many fewer hits this season. Good defense may not show up in the box score, but like moving baserunners, if you do it well enough, when you add it all up over half a season the evidence is there.

TRIVIA FACTS: #1 Many fans know that Lou Gehrig, not Babe Ruth, won the MVP award in 1927. But did you know that Ruth didn’t get a single vote? Under the rules then in force, a player who had won the MVP previously was ineligible – so after winning the award in 1923, Ruth wasn’t even considered again until the award was discontinued and then revived by the BBWAA in 1931.

#2 The Cubs of 1906 lost the World Series – smack in the middle of a regular-season tear that may never be equalled. The Cubs finished the 1906 season 55-10, and started the next one 51-16, for a staggering 106-26 record, an .803 clip.