There is one sure thing you can count on in baseball, a statistical truth best heeded at moments like this, when the Ms have won eight of their first ten games... the regression effect. It works like this: whenever you observe an extreme result in events that are normally distributed, like games or weather or most naturally occuring phenomena, future outcomes will surely tend to the average. Future occurrences will "regress to the mean," be more average than extreme.
Teams average .500 baseball. If a team is hot, as the Mariners have been, playing .800 baseball, you can be sure they will regress toward the mean of .500 fairly soon. Not always, there will be anomalies, but in the long run, for sure. As much as that thought may disturb M's fans, if you root for the Red Sox, who are playing .200 ball to start the season, you can take comfort that, over time, their winning will improve as they regress to that .500 average.
I point this out not to rain on the Mariner's exciting, winning parade, but to prepare ourselves for the inevitable. When the regression sets in, and it will, being prepared means we can do two things: not lose heart and try to counter the effect by doing things that may offset the pull back to average. The latter means to really understand the team's strengths and weaknesses.
Something is causing the M's to play .800 ball. They haven't won 8 of 10 by accident. I'd argue that their really hot bats coupled with good starting pitching and relatively weak opponents explain their winning ways. It helps the M's opponents are 12-16 excluding their games against Seattle.
Even with a good start, defense and relief pitching have been exposed as weaknesses.
So, I put it to you. If you are Scott Servais, what can you do to counteract the gravitational force pulling the team back to .500 (or worse) ball? The right answer will make the difference between a winning oe losing season.
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