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I don't have data to do anything more than speculate...
That said, I theorize that the Mariners are hitting the ball hard a lot, but not hitting it BLISTERINGLY hard for one. They're catching a lot of the ball but because they aren't going with the pitch as well as they should, they're hitting a blizzard of 85-90 mph deep fly outs instead of 90-105 mph homers and fence-denters. This will look like they're hitting the ball really hard when you take averages and add up counts of "hard hit balls" and may even fool the batted ball metrics...but won't maximize your offensive output. Again though...just a theory.
Another theory is that even if they're hitting the same number of 100 mph balls...they're hitting them to predictable locations because pitchers are too easily able to figure out how they'll react to various sequences and pitch types - all of our luck estimates assume a somewhat random distribution of landing spots for the hard hit balls...but if the distributions aren't random...if there are players with severely biased spray charts, then the end result will be fewer hits than the predictive models say.
And a third hypothesis...they're could be feasting on certain pitchers while being mauled by others...if their successful hard hit balls are bunched, teams have a chance to play back to adjust (I've seen this happen a few times this year...where we crushed a SP for 5 runs in the second or third inning and then failed to score again because we hit a bunch of warning track outs that were caught the next time around).
All just theories, sadly.