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This is OT for this thread, but you don't have any recent posts in the last week on the Mariner offense - which is IMHO a far more important story than Stephen Pryor, as fun as he is to watch.
I'm looking at the Mariners' team totals in various offensive stats that generally are good predictors of performance. For example:
Team BABIP: .276 vs.
Team xBABIP (assuming normal BABIP on trajectory types): .306
Some of this difference may be park related, but not all 30 points of it. That gap, BTW, would be larger if the Mariners didn't pop the ball up so much. In dialing up the aggression, they've increased their LD% from last year's abysmal 16.8% to this year's 20.5%, but also increased the pop-up rate from a more normal 11.0% last year to 12.1% now (!!).
Or, we could try:
Team HR/Fly: 7.5%
SAFECO all time average HR/Fly: 9.4%
And it should be intuitively obvious that our line-up is better suited to Safeco than that historical average and that we have at least normal power potential this year. Even with the unlucky HR/Fly, the team is middle of the pack in longballs and XBH thus far...that's without the maximized performance of Montero, Ackley, and Smoak (though Smoak is coming around)...not ot mention Carp.
Team SW-S%: 9.1% (league average is 9%)
Team K-rate: 21.4% (league average is 18.5%)
With a normal whiff rate, the Mariners continue to be in the top third in K-rate...this won't likely continue now that their power numbers are increasing and likely to continue to increase.
To compliment this fact:
Team O-SW%: 28% (6th best rate in the game)
Team P/PA: 3.85 (dead on league average)
Those two things don't mesh except that we're still getting too many strikes...a fact that changes the more our power numbers improve.
This offense looks primed, IMHO, to break out in the second half as the weather warms. If we can fix the back of our rotation and maybe add one more quality reliever, it could be a lot more fun and very soon.