The Mariners are getting alot of things from their personnel now that maybe they weren't getting earlier in the year. And when you start to add it up, you really feel like a 'glass half full' perspective is a defensible position:
1. First and foremost, let me say here that the M's have the best middle defense in baseball. Jojhima, Yuni, Lopez and Reed. There isn't another team in baseball that wouldn't take that on defense alone. And the offensive production from those guys has honestly been pretty good.
2. Ichiro is hitting like we expected him to. Compare that to the start of the year where he was hitting sub .200 for the first month or so.
3. Beltre has really come on - driving the ball to the opposite field, he seems like he has an extra base hit every night now.
4. Sexson is starting to swing the bat for a better average and not strike out so much.
5. Putz is handling the closer role now (and doing it very well) as opposed to when we had Eddie back there earlier in the year.
6. Ibanez could be MLB's Player of the Month for June.
7. We now get a nice stretch of home games AND the All-Star break before we go on the east coast swing to play the Blue Jays and Yankees (read as: we will be rested).
If we can get the starters on track ('sup Washburn and Piniero), this could be a really tough team. Hell, we are now two games over .500 - who here would've thought that was the case back when we were 10 games under? And I understand that we are getting hot against bad teams, but here is my perspective on that:
1. At least we are better than the bad teams
2. Slightly over .500 might just be good enough to win this division - especially now that the A's have leveled off. Definitely going to that series in August.
