CLEVELAND -- Those 116 wins by that team across the field don't seem to matter much to the Cleveland Indians.

They don't have Ichiro-mania. They're not worried about Bret Boone's MVP chances. They haven't even worked themselves into a froth over Arthur Rhodes' jewelry collection lately.

What the Cleveland Indians have noticed, though, is that when people talk about this fabulous American League playoff field, they tend to mention Cleveland in about the same tone of voice as comedy historians use when they get around to Zeppo when assessing the Marx Brothers.

	“	We had our best teams in '95 and '96 and '99 -- much better than the team in '97. But the playoffs bring a different kind of game. Any team that gets in is very capable of beating any other -- especially a club like this which has been there and done that. ”
		— Cleveland GM John Hart

"Everyone is giving Seattle a lot of credit, and Oakland a lot of credit, and the Yankees a lot of credit," said Ellis Burks on Saturday, after the Indians had finished hanging a 17-2 wipeout on the Seattle 116-Win Machine. "And they forget about the Indians. But look at our lineup, man, from top to bottom.

"We've got guys playing who are Gold Gloves, guys who have won MVP awards, guys who are home run hitters. We've got pretty much everything you'd want. If we play together, we can be a tough team to beat."

Hey, tell it to the Mariners. After hearing all week about how their 116 wins wouldn't mean squattola when the postseason started, they got that message delivered faster than FedEx on Saturday.

They gave up 17 runs and 19 hits and three home runs. They gave up more runs in one day to the Indians than they gave up all season to the Tigers (13, in seven games).

And when the Indians had finished running around the bases like little plastic men in an arcade game, the Mariners had become just the third team in history to lose a postseason game by 15 runs or more. The others were the '96 Cardinals, who lost Game 7 of the '96 NLCS to the Braves, 15-0, and the '99 Indians, who are still trying to figure out how they lost that 23-7 Division Series game to the Red Sox.

But those teams weren't the winningest baseball team of the last 95 years. The Mariners are. And now Seattle is down, two games to one, in a series in which three losses sends you home, with a whole lot of explaining to do.

"We just got crushed in every part of the ballgame," said Mike Cameron, in a shell-shocked Seattle clubhouse. "It's embarrassing. No one wants to go out and get embarrassed on national TV like that."

We know from watching baseball for many years that crazy things can happen to pretty much anybody this time of year. But this wasn't anybody. This was the Mariners, ladies and gentlemen.

This was a team that won 116 games. This was the first team since 1944 to lead the major leagues in most runs scored and fewest runs allowed. This was a team that became the second club since the '30s to outscore its opponents by 300 runs.

So these guys were in no mood to hear that "stuff happens" explanation. Even if it was about the only one that made sense.

"What we did in the season, that was a great accomplishment," Cameron said. "But not now. What stands out in our minds right now is that we've got to find a way to come back. We'll look back on our regular season when we get to the winter time, when all this is done. But right now, we've got to pick it up. We've got to find a way to win a ballgame."

If they don't, the historians will be calling this one of the most historic postseason upsets of all time. And if it would be, if you judge it by pure mathematics.

The Indians won 25 fewer games than Seattle this season. No team has ever won a postseason series against another team with that wide a win differential. The previous record was 23, established by the Mariners' 116-win cousins, the 1906 Cubs, in their World Series loss to the 93-win White Sox.

So if people want to call this an upset, it's tough to do anything except get out of their way. But if you take the mathematicians out of the debate and just judge the men that each team sends out onto the field, is it really that monumental an upset?

"If you just go around the field, position by position, you'd give the Indians seven of the nine positions, and maybe eight," said one AL scout a couple of weeks ago. "So how big an upset would it be, really, if that team won?"

Oh, you'd give the Mariners the edge in starting pitching. But that's based purely on depth. And in a best-of-5 series with two off days, that depth is a non-factor. What's a factor is that Bartolo Colon, who will pitch Game 4 Sunday, and Saturday's winner, 21-year-old superstar-to-be C.C. Sabathia, are more dominant than any Seattle starter.

"Look," said Indians GM John Hart, "that team over there won 116 games, and they're some club. I loved watching them play all year. But at the end of the day, we know we've got a good club, too. Realistically, our No. 4 and No. 5 starters kept us from winning 100 games this year.

"Charlie Nagy went down. Jaret Wright went down. Chuck Finley went down for a while. And those were guys this team was counting on. That put a heck of a burden on young guys like C.C. But in a short series, this club is extremely capable of beating anybody."

And what makes this so scary for Seattle is that the Indians seem interested in proving that point, too.

"That," Burks said, after this eruption, "is definitely what I envisioned in the offseason when I chose Cleveland to sign with."

The funny thing is, this game could have turned out verrrry different. In the first inning, Sabathia loaded the bases, walked in the first run of the game and had to squirm out of a bases-loaded, one-out mess just to hold the damage to one run.

But he did, popping up Jay Buhner and Dan Wilson on back-to-back 95-mph smokeballs. Then he raced for the dugout, took one look at pitching coach Dick Pole and busted out laughing.

"Everybody knew I was nervous," Sabathia said. "He knew I was nervous. I knew I was nervous. Probably all the other guys knew I was nervous. ... Those 30-odd starts I had during the year were nothing compared to the start I had today. I never felt like I felt today."

Asked to put that feeling into words, Sabathia reminded one and all he's closer to being 12 years old than he is to being 30.

"The closest thing I can put this to," he said, "is when I was a little kid and my mom would take me to Toys 'R Us. When you get that anxious feeling going into Toys 'R Us and you can pick out anything you want. That was what the feeling was like. I was like a little kid in a candy store. It was awesome."

Of course, it got a lot more awesome after the Indians disregarded the fact that Seattle was 88-8 this year when it scored first -- and began putting up more crooked numbers on the board than the Cavaliers.

They scored two in the first, two more in the second and four in the third. It was the first time Seattle had given up runs in the first three innings of any game since June 4, against Texas (in a game the Mariners won anyway, 11-6).

But this time that lead just kept on growing. It was 9-1 by the fifth, 12-1 by the sixth and a ridiculous 17-2 after Omar Vizquel had finished doubling in his fifth and sixth runs of the game in the eighth. Vizquel drove in as many runs in this game as he did in June and September combined.

And by then, this game had reached the point of absurdity. By the ninth, the 79 credentialed members of the Japanese media got to hear the announcement that Ed Sprague was being sent up to pinch-hit for Ichiro. And what else did anyone need to know?

So Sunday afternoon, the Indians try to finish this job, when Colon takes on Freddy Garcia. The heat is now squarely on Seattle, which needs to win two in a row to avoid those what-did-those-116-wins-mean discussions. And the Indians know better than anybody how difficult it is to be in that position -- when you're the team that's supposed to win and you're not.

"We've been in that position," Hart said. "Now they've got a great ballclub there, and these guys have to know what they've done all year. They came back and won Game 2 of this series after we beat them in Game 1, so they're not scared.

"But at the end of the day, I promise you it doesn't matter what happened in the season. We were the eighth seed out of eight teams in 1997, and we got to the ninth inning of Game 7 of the World Series with a one-run lead.

"We had our best teams in '95 and '96 and '99 -- much better than the team in '97. But the playoffs bring a different kind of game. Any team that gets in is very capable of beating any other -- especially a club like this which has been there and done that."

Well, they've been there, all right. But they haven't done that yet. They have to beat a team that won back-to-back games 84 times this year. So it ain't over. But never have all those Mariners wins from April to October 7 seemed to mean as little as they meant on a surreal Saturday afternoon by the shores of Lake Erie.

Jayson Stark is a senior writer for ESPN.com