Coming off a 4-6 road trip that was lowlighted by being swept by the Houston Astros, the Seattle Mariners, with an 11-17 overall record, return home tonight to face the Oakland A’s.  Given the high expectations for this season after the acquisition of Nelson Cruz to fill the much needed role of big right handed bat, some Mariners fans are starting to panic.

For his part, Cruz has not disappointed. He was named the AL player of the month for April and is currently sporting an impressive .333/.373/.757 slash line with a major league leading 14 HR. His 26 RBI accounts for a little over a quarter of all of Seattle’s runs thus far this season.

The rest of the team? Not so much.

Weak Hitting

The Mariners .289 OBP is the lowest in the American League and 27^th worst in all of major league baseball. Only the Philadelphia Phillies, Pittsburgh Pirates, and Milwaukee Brewers get on base less frequently.

And, as can be expected, when you don’t get on base, you don’t score a lot of runs.  Only the Tampa Rays and the Chicago White Sox have scored fewer in the AL than the 102 runs the Mariners have scored through 28 games.

The one encouraging offensive team statistic is slugging. The Mariners are slugging .402, tenth in the majors, but much of that must be attributed to the sick .757 slugging that Cruz has put up. Upon further inspection, only Seth Smith (.471), Logan Morrison (.412), and Kyle Seager (.402) boast slugging percentages over .400.

So, it may be safe to say that the offense is a little anemic so far. What about the pitching?

There’s Felix And…?

Felix Hernandez has been lights out. Through six starts, Felix is 5-0 with a 1.73 ERA and a 0.84 WHIP. He’s striking out a little over a batter per inning with 44 K in 41.2 innings. He also accounts for a third of the Mariners quality starts with five.

The rest of the staff? So, so, if you throw out one or two terrible starts.

So, should Mariners fans be panicking? I still say no.

A Thing About Sample Size

Nate Silver, the statistical whiz kid who correctly predicted every state in the past two presidential elections, has written on numerous occasions about the number of games it’s necessary to play in various sports until you get an understanding of exactly how good or how bad a team is. It’s not surprising then that an audience that is force fed 24 hour a day analysis of sports on ESPN and other outlets will fail to grasp the distinctions between a “bad start” in baseball compared to other sports, especially football.

In the NFL, even the casual fan knows that a 0-3 start in the relatively short 16 game schedule virtually dooms a team to missing the playoffs. It takes about five games in football to get a reasonable assessment of who’s good and who’s bad.

It takes a few more games, roughly 20, in the NBA to get a sense of which teams you’re likely to be watching in May and June, with the added caveat that the trade of a player or two can dramatically alter the chemistry of a team in a sport with only five on the floor at any one time, i.e. this season’s Cleveland Cavaliers.

In baseball, the magic number for regression to the mean, the point where most of the luck and most of the skill have been evened out, is 67 games. So, in most MLB seasons, it’s not until July that the standings begin to resemble what they’ll look like come October.

To test this out, let’s just look at last year’s standings.

Last Year’s Results

After 28 games last season, the Mariners record stood at 13-15. They were in third place in the AL West, four games behind Oakland.

This year is slightly worse, with the Mariners at 11-17, in last place in the AL West, and seven games behind an Astros team that is off to its best start in franchise history. But, they are only two games behind the second place Los Angeles Angels, who won the division last year.

Also of note, the New York Yankees were in first place in the AL East at this point last season, as they are today. But, the 2014 Yankees finished 84-78, in second place in the division, and missed the playoffs.

The Atlanta Braves were in first place in the NL East, only to finish with a losing record of 79-83.

The Milwaukee Brewers enjoyed a six game lead over the St. Louis Cardinals in the NL Central, only to finish 82-80 and out of the playoffs, while the 15-16 Cardinals went on to play in the NL Championship.

Perhaps the most “dramatic” turn around came from the Cleveland Indians, who were 13-17 and in last place in the AL Central, only to go 72-60 after, competing fiercely for the wild card right up until the last week of the season.

Plenty of Time

So, while it might be upsetting to see the Mariners get off to another slow start, it’s certainly not the end of the season before we’ve even gotten to Memorial Day. As bats start to heat up and the pitching staff rounds into shape, the Mariners should preform closer to the pre-season projections than the current 28 game sample. Let’s see what their record looks like in about 40 games and then see if panicking is still warranted.