M’S Mix Seems To Be Working

Back to back shutouts?

Joltin’ Joe Oliver?

The Seattle Mariners beholden to stingy pitching and steady defense? More likely to win with the aid of a booted ball than with a batted one?

Is this really SoDo Mojo, or actually LouCrew Voodoo? Just how are we to reasonably comprehend these M’s, who wrapped up the best first half - OK, a little more than half - in club history on Sunday with a lineup stripped of the conspirators behind the franchise’s rise in the mid-1990s?

We looked around for them on Sunday. Jay Buhner had a day off. Alex Rodriguez still had a headache from his head-on with the Dodgers’ Alex Cora on Friday night. Dan Wilson had a few more days to go on the disabled list with a pull of the oblique muscle, which sounds more like a sportswriter’s injury. Randy Johnson and his scowl had split a long time ago. Ken Griffey Jr. had another hissy fit in Cincinnati - this time over balls and strikes - but he did phone in his regards.

True story. Lou Piniella dashed into his office for a smoke between innings during Seattle’s 2-0 dispatch of the Los Angeles Dodgers on Sunday afternoon and one of the clubhouse attendants was on the phone with Junior.

“I asked him, `What the hell are you doing getting thrown out of a ballgame for?”’ said Piniella. “He said the pitch was bad.”

No doubt ESPN will be doctoring its replays to show the pitch was down the middle. You know how they always try to make Junior look bad.

It is baseball’s way to turn logic upside down, and heading into this week’s All-Star break it’s obvious that the happiest victims are the Mariners. At 51-35, they’re three games up on Oakland in the American League West and a solid 2,000 miles from the great Griffey kvetchfest in Cincinnati, where his new team is under both siege and .500. Even the most dogged Griffey hater could not have predicted this turn of events - hoped for, perhaps, but not predicted. Nor could we have anticipated one delicious, if temporary, irony - that rather than getting too little from the Reds in return for Griffey over the winter, the M’s actually got too much, what with pitcher Brett Tomko, a starter almost any place else, currently desperate for work in Seattle.

The embarrassment of riches in the pitching department - rather than simply the traditional embarrassment - has become so pronounced that Piniella shuttled Gil Meche down to Tacoma on Sunday to get in some innings.

Naturally, this has led to suggestions that the M’s peddle one of their excess arms for a left-handed bat, and that’s certainly reasonable.

But so’s this: Ya dance with the one what brung ya.

And what’s brought the M’s to their current celebrity is good pitching, good defense and a new ballpark that rewards both.

“Losing Junior really has nothing to do with it,” Piniella said. “What it amounts to is that we’ve pitched well and played well defensively. Look at the stats. We’re second in the league in pitching and first in the league in defense. We knew our infield was going to catch the ball coming out of spring training, and our pitching has depth. We lose (Jamie) Moyer for seven or eight weeks and (Freddy) Garcia for almost 10, but we’ve been able to mix and match and hold it together until we got our alignment back.

“That’s why we’ve won. Teams that can catch the ball and pitch are going to be in games. Now, at times we lose heartbreakers - but that’s part of it, too.”

One of those heartbreakers came Friday night, when the M’s left 16 runners on base in an 11-inning, 3-2 loss to the Dodgers - though more hearts were broken at the time when Rodriguez suffered a concussion in his collision with Cora.

Drowned out by all the civic hand-wringing was the fact that the M’s allowed only Eric Karros’ lousy opposite-field home run after the first inning. With Aaron Sele and Moyer throwing - with bullpen help - consecutive shutouts, the Mariners have now allowed just one run in the last 28 innings.

Did last year’s M’s ever have back-to-back shutouts? You bet - sandwiching around games in which they gave up 20 runs. Only twice this year have the Mariners given up 20 runs back-to-back - and that thanks to one 18-run aberration against the White Sox; in 1999, it happened 11 times.

If the first game of the series turned on a Seattle weakness - having no one on the bench to turn to for a clutch base hit - Sunday’s game underscored the flipside: flexibility in the field. With Rodriguez unavailable, the M’s plugged Carlos Guillen in at shortstop - and his spectacular play on Karros’ ground ball deep in the hole was the game’s telltale play.

Oh, that and catcher Joe Oliver going 3for3 with a home run, double and single.

Oliver, of course, was the third catcher the M’s carried as a luxury through April. Now, with Wilson and Tom Lampkin injured, he’s the starter - trying to stave off calamity until Wilson can contribute again. So elated is he with his chance to play that he all but demanded to be back in the lineup Sunday afternoon after catching a Saturday night game.

He acknowledged that the M’s have received a lot of production from players who may not have been expected to be in uniform, much less produce.

“Guys are just trying to do what they’re capable of doing,” he said. “Guys at the bottom of the lineup aren’t trying to hit home runs - they’re hitting behind runners and moving them along. And pitchers aren’t trying to strike everybody out - they’re control-location guys.

“And everybody’s playing with a lot of confidence.”

But now, here be dragons.

The M’s open the second half of the season with eight games on the road, six at National League parks. Piniella must wrestle with the dilemma of what to do with the hottest brand going, Edgar Martinez - a particularly thorny issue for the M’s offense if Rodriguez’s concussion keeps him out for any length of time. The manager toyed out loud with the notion of playing John Olerud in the outfield and Martinez at first, and almost as quickly gave it a vote of no-confidence.

“We’ve created some momentum for ourselves and we’ve got to carry it into the second half,” said Moyer. “Now there’s going to be more expectations, we’re leading the division, we’re not supposed to give up the lead, everybody’s chasing you, games get tighter, they get more important - you have all those things out there that are prominent in everybody’s mind.

“But we’ve done this in the first half. There’s no reason we shouldn’t be able to do it in the second half.”

As if reason has anything to do with it.