As general manager of the Seattle Mariners, Jerry Dipoto’s job description requires him to look at all things baseball in an objective, dispassionate way. So on an intellectual level, he recognizes that the first half of his team’s season makes absolutely zero sense.

The Mariners have emerged as perhaps the biggest surprise in the sport. They have a record of 55-32, seven games ahead for the American League’s second wild-card spot and just behind the first-place Houston Astros in the AL West. Their brilliant start puts them in prime position to snap the longest playoff drought in major North American professional sports, a miserable stretch of failure and disappointment that dates back to 2001.

But it isn’t what the Mariners are doing that makes them so bizarre—it’s how they’re doing it. The Mariners have already won a ridiculous 26 games that have been decided by one run, or more wins than the Baltimore Orioles have total. They have gone 8-0 in extra innings, the first squad to accomplish that since 2002. They have scored just 22 more runs than they have surrendered, yet sit at 23 games over .500. (By way of contrast, the Astros have a run differential of plus-170.)

Even crazier, Seattle has played its best without its biggest star, second baseman Robinson Cano, who tested positive for a performance-enhancing drug and was suspended 80 games on May 15. Since then, the Mariners have gone 32-14, the best in baseball.

Analytically minded front-office types, folks like Dipoto, look at numbers like these and have no choice but to conclude that the Mariners have benefited from a whole lot of luck. Considerable research has suggested that a team’s success in one-run situations comes down to randomness more than skill, like a coin flip turning up heads 10 times in a row.