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Mariners are going to need to find that ‘extra 2 percent’ if they’re going to contend

It’s been six years since baseball author Jonah Keri wrote “The Extra 2 Percent” chronicling how the Tampa Bay Rays became a repeat playoff team with Major League Baseball’s lowest payroll.

As the book’s title implied, the Rays and general manager Andrew Friedman were finding hidden value others overlooked. It was similar to the Oakland Athletics in the “Moneyball” book from 2003, only by 2011 so many teams employed statistical numbers-crunching that any advantage gained was more modest — the hypothetical “Extra 2 Percent.’’

During a conversation last week with Keri, who now writes for Sports Illustrated and CBS Sports, I asked whether the key value-finding premise of his book still applies.