ESPN Chalk's Joe Peta is sharing his season win total projections for every MLB team, including a reason for optimism and pessimism.
Plus, he recommends an over/under play, or a pass. This is the entry for the Seattle Mariners.
Seattle Mariners
Reason for optimism: Holes were patched on offense and the right balance now exists to take the division -- and home-field advantage for the playoffs.
Reason for pessimism: Year-to-year bullpen variance can be very kind ... or very cruel.
If you used only one indicator to reveal the possibility of a large swing in a team's fortunes from one year to the next, one of the best places to turn would be bullpen ERA in the prior season. Due to the nature of small sample-size results occurring in high-leverage game situations, bullpen ERA has an outsize effect on a team's results but doesn't correlate nearly as well from year to year as starter's ERA, offensive production or even team defensive prowess. There is no better poster child for this phenomenon than the Seattle Mariners in 2013 and 2014. With an ERA of 4.58, the Mariners had the 28th-ranked bullpen in terms of total runs allowed in 2013 (273 runs in 505 innings pitched.) Last year, they turned into the stingiest bullpen in baseball, allowing just 156 runs in nearly the same number of innings (498). That jaw-dropping decrease of 117 runs allowed accounts for roughly 13 games of the 16-game improvement the Mariners posted -- 87 wins last year versus 71 in 2013. (Approximately nine runs equal a win in the current MLB scoring environment.)
The problem with having the best bullpen in baseball is that regression to the mean cuts both ways.