It's after midnight on the East Coast: Do you know where baseball's best closer is? J.J. Putz is in Seattle, saving games with near-historic efficiency

	Putz has the menacing look of a closer -- not to mention a team-record 28 consecutive converted save chances. Robert Seale/SI

By Michael Farber

The first bars of AC/DC's Thunderstruck came at precisely 9:54 p.m. PDT, Putz Domination Time, which on the East Coast, where J.J. Putz is little more than a name at the bottom of a box score, was almost one in the morning. Like the old-fashioned milkman or the vacuous Hollywood party girl, the Seattle Mariners' closer starts his day when much of the country is asleep. He emerges from the Safeco Field bullpen in leftfield at a steady, almost stately, jog until he reaches the mound to pitch the ninth. Heavy-metal accompaniment aside, there is no faux air of menace about him. The hulking Putz is genuinely scary.

He stands 6' 5", weighs 250 pounds and throws both an industrial-strength fastball and a burrowing splitter. When Seattle's resident sandman tosses his magic dust in a hitter's eyes, it's usually at 96 mph. Mariners manager John McLaren calls him a "lights-out closer" -- Thunderstruck apparently being Brahms's Lullaby for a different century -- a baseball cliché perhaps, but one that addresses a geographical truth.

With Seattle leading the Detroit Tigers by a run last Thursday, Putz gave up a one-out double to Marcus Thames but retired the dangerous Gary Sheffield on a fly to right and then, in a confrontation between baseball's best closer in 2007 and its leading hitter, got Magglio Ordoñez to swing through a 1 and 2 fastball to end the game. Mariners 3, Tigers 2. The digital scoreboard clock read 10:05. All the games were over, and it was time for a nation's night owls to turn in.

J.J.'s work was done. Another day, another collar.

The name is Joseph Jason Putz although no one, except for one college teammate, ever calls him Joe. The surname is pronounced puts as in "puts up numbers so spectacular that they border on the implausible". Through Sunday, Putz had converted all 26 of his save chances, the last of which -- a four-out, strike-out-the-side-in-the-ninth outing to nail down a 6-4 win over the Tigers last Saturday -- set a club record for consecutive saves (28) and earned him a postgame beer shower. ("There was Bud," Putz reports. "And I definitely tasted Bud Light."). His streak is impressive but not necessarily unusual; there have been 14 longer streaks since 1990 according to the Elias Sports Bureau. But in a specialized line of employment former Seattle manager Mike Hargrove once characterized as "three days of boredom followed by 15 minutes of sheer terror," Putz's mastery has been staggering. The statistics tumble like his splitter. At week's end he had allowed only one more runner (27 in 43 1?3 innings) than he had accumulated saves. His ERA was 0.83; in save opportunities, it was a microscopic 0.30. His strikeout-to-walk ratio was nearly 7 to 1 and on the road, away from the AC/DC adrenaline, he had yet to give up a run. His walks and hits per innings pitched, or WHIP, was 0.58.