Andrés Muñoz joins a hidden Seattle Mariners dynasty with his 100th save

Andrés Muñoz has 100 career saves to his name, and we are all better for it. You love to see all-time nice guys like Muñoz do cool things, and this particular thing puts him in special company with Kazuhiro Sasaki, J.J. Putz and Edwin Díaz among Seattle Mariners closers.

They're the only four pitchers in franchise history with at least 100 saves, and all four have gotten there just since the turn of the century. This is rarer than you might think, as only four other clubs have had at least four pitchers record 100 saves since 2000. As many teams have had zero pitchers do so.

I can already hear the fun police scoffing at the very mention of saves, and I get it. The worship of the save has always been a weird cult-like thing, and never more so than when closers started winning Cy Youngs and even MVPs between the late 1970s and early 2000s. Nowadays, MLB has come to its senses and largely moved past the save as A Thing That Matters.

Still, teams like having a good closer and it's hard to be a bad closer and rack up as many as 100 saves. The Mariners' foursome in focus today knows what's up. Out of Sasaki, Putz, Díaz and Muñoz, not one posted (or has posted) a career ERA+ below 138 as a Mariner. Out of the five cases of a team having four pitchers with 100 saves this century, that makes Seattle's foursome one of a kind.

Might as well throw more respect on their names, because why not? Lest anyone forget, Sasaki was the AL Rookie of the Year in 2000. Putz's 1.38 ERA in 2007 is still a club record. Ditto for Díaz's 57 saves in 2018. And at 2.61, Muñoz has the lowest ERA for any pitcher who has handled at least 200 innings in a Mariners uniform.

Andrés Muñoz might be the most reliable player on the Mariners right now

Further on the topic of Muñoz, his 4.27 ERA for the season might be the most misleading stat in all of baseball right now. It's more than double his 1.73 ERA from last year, but he is very much ascendant after a truly alarming start to the year.

He has a 2.45 ERA to show for his last 22 appearances, and a lot of what little damage there is comes from his meltdown in Houston last Friday. As much as there's no excusing the walk-off three-run homer he served up to Christian Walker, he was snakebit on back-to-back singles by Jose Atuve and Daulton Varsho that tied the game.

It's more telling that out of the last 85 batters Muñoz has faced, 36 have struck out, only 14 have gotten hits and only seven have walked. A fastball that averaged 98.3 mph in April is now sitting at 100.2 mph in August. The slider has a 49.3 Whiff% for the year, perfectly in line with his career norm.

All this is happening against a backdrop of the bullpen as a whole having a 6.41 ERA in the second half. Without Muñoz, the Mariners would be in an even deeper hole than seven games under .500.

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