It’s all over now, baby blue

Great song, not a great baseball team.

A season that doesn’t go all the way to the end does not have a moment when it’s all officially over. It just fades. 

Another season, another group, another slog, another set of hopes. They’re gone. The 2024 Seattle Mariners still have games to play but in my mind and in the odds of them playing in October, it’s over. 

I hate to say it or think it because it’s honestly regretful to ponder the hours therein—but I’d followed in some capacity almost every game this year before last road trip’s Monday afternoon loss to the A’s. 

If you follow me on IG, you know I’ve been traveling a bit the last week. My wife and I started doing that with our honeymoon now two years ago. We missed Cal’s historic tomahawk shot and I thought, just a couple months ago, I’d miss another clincher during our two-week trek through Italy.

Nah.

Thinking about how much time I’ve spent on the 2024 Seattle Mariners, not only the in-season hours but also the minutes-turned-days leading up to it, it reminds me of being a kid and wandering into the settings of like NHL 03 on our Gateway PC, accidentally glancing at my playtime in the game and reading, gasp, 27 hours. 

Suddenly I could see myself on my deathbed, wishing I had one more day instead of guiding cyber-Pavel Datsyuk, Chris Chelios, Brett Hull and the Detroit Red Wings to a Stanley Cup. 

This season is so much more regretful. And that’s without weighing all the others that have come before it.

This season, of course, is not unfamiliar, but it’s been a while since we’ve had one quite like it. 

The Mariners competitvely played at least into the final weekend every year since 2020. And even in that early-pandemic-shortened sprint, you had folks clamoring for giving guys like Logan Gilbert and Jarred Kelenic a call-up because the door was cracked open to earn a playoff berth deep into September.

The Mariners may yet competitively play into 2024’s final weekend, since the margin for doing so is only three games. But if one of the teams they need to pass goes so much as .500, the Mariners will need to play better ball than they’ve played all year to catch them.  

It’s not happening.

So it’s been since 2019 that we’ve had a true dud of a season—where it wasn’t even close. That’s five years ago. 

And if you want to really get down to the last one of these, the last time a season started with legitimate hope and concluded before the campaign’s final series, you’d have to go to 2018. 

Nellie, Jean, Robbie, Edwin, Mitch, Marco, Seags and so on. Six years. Six years since the end of that and the start of the step-back.

Where’s the time go? 

I guess it blends together a bit when most of the seasons feel the same. Though, again, this one’s a little different.

Previously, I said this season echoed the sojourn slog that was 2015. The parallels ended last week when Ryan Divish and Adam Jude reported Jerry Dipoto would return for a tenth season running baseball operations for the M’s. 

As fans debated the decision, with the gap between “Jerry’s gotta go”  and some level of staying course growing wider than ever, I’ve been thinking a bit about what leads one to staunchly defend an organization or front office under fire. 

Not just this one now, but last year, and in general. 

I have been there. And I’m not even going to take a position on the Dipoto decision now, as I’ve said I won’t with him a former colleague, but I have been there—I was the guy fleshing out why the Mariners should give Jack Zduriencik a little more time now a decade ago. 

Before the teens were giving the D&B boys hell and vice versa, before there both was and was no longer a D&B, I was unilaterally publishing a piece on LL backing Jack Z and sparking an email thread on editorial oversight and staff-wide unity with a tone not too dissimilar from your standard Twitter exchange with someone like @JKelDaGawd69420 during the pre-2023 offseason. With the same people, too.

And I was @JKelDaGawd69420! 

Why do we do that? Why do we cling to hope when people in power don’t give us reason to do so? Why, here, are we quick to curate evidence and craft arguments more MLB fleshed out than even they themselves are willing to present? 

It goes back to those hours. A single front office administration—especially stretched across multiple contention windows—spans a lot of hours. A lot of hours. And we don’t want to feel foolish. 

It sucks to feel foolish and it sucks to feel, as I’ve said before, like a mark.

So like trying to negate a slice by aiming further left, you pretend you’re not a mark but instead a true ball-knower—and end up an even bigger mark, looking for his lost ball behind a tree on the right after it started over the left side of the fairway. 

Here we are. Both punching and checking out on the way to “Give me a six.” 

We avoid it for as long as we do, or at least I do, because we don’t want this all to be like everything else. We don’t want this to be another aspect of our lives governed by the shortsighted greed of people with so much more than us. 

I don’t want this to be more oligarchical capitalist bullshit.

It’s baseball. 

[Extreme James Earl Jones as Terrence Mann voice] Base. Balll.

And yet—

I’ve thought it before, though perhaps not written it here, but the Mariners are the perfect ball club for Seattle. 

There is no ambition. There’s little to no foresight. There’s no progress. 

You sit here thinking, “what am I missing?“

If they invested in this team like the world-class operation it could be, really gunned it for a title or at least a period where they went to the Postseason on a regular basis and provided all the memories and heroes that come with it, wouldn’t they make that money back? 

Wouldn’t making this a top ten organization in baseball, a world champion, dramatically boost its valuation when it comes time to sell—which is when sports owners make their money? Doesn’t getting the maximum number of people watching your games unquestionably benefit you? Don’t you think creating more Mariners fans would make you money?

It’s like—don’t you think if we provided a house for everyone, treatment for everyone, public goods and basic human needs for everyone, we’d have much less homelessness and crime? That everyone would be better off? Don’t we all want the same thing, something that works? 

And a World Series? 

No?

Dammit.

There’s such a match between Seattle and the Mariners. Of course, there should be—it’s the same old-tech blood coursing through each. We’re guided by people who rose to wealth and power during a time when Seattle and the world were much different places. 

The Mariners bought a cable television station in 2013.

They don’t want to push forward. They’d rather go back or, at the very least, stay right here, backing status quo candidates and status quo acquisitions. 

We’ve got a true talent 83-win baseball team and, globally, a city to match. Could it be a lot worse? Oh god yes. But avoiding that cannot be the only goal. 

I’ve written this post so many damn times. But it’s both encouraging and depressing to see someone make a similar point, as longtime lefty baseball blogger Marc Normandin did for Baseball Prospectus:

With the right executives, the right choices, the right scouts and players and mission, it can be done. Does Seattle have any of that? What is the goal? Is it to win, or is it to win just enough games that maybe sometimes a season isn’t so disappointing? […]

The Mariners are better than they used to be, but are they markedly better? Are they so much better in 2024 than they were in 2015 that keeping Dipoto around is a no-brainer, instead of something the team should think a lot harder on? It depends on what the goal of M’s ownership is. If it’s to win around 54% of their games without entering the top 10 in payroll, in the hopes they get into the postseason thanks to the expanded format we’re now stuck with, then yeah, Dipoto has done some good and can probably do more. If it’s to win more games than that, to give themselves a better chance… well, that can still be Dipoto. But he’s going to need some help from ownership in the form of cash to spend, to help get some of the pieces that he’s been unable to bring in without it. And there’s no proof that’s actually ever going to be incoming.

As we’ve heard for a couple weeks now and will for months going forward, people note, correctly, that teams with fewer resources than the Mariners contend on a much more consistent basis.

The Mariners last clinched a division title a week and a day after 9/11. The Oakland Athletics have won six AL West titles since then. 

It’s true and it sucks. It is a damning indictment on not just this front office but multiple others that have come since, every one after Hall of Famer Pat Gillick.

Here’s the thing, though: I don’t want to be the Oakland Athletics. 

I don’t want, when times are good, to be the West Coast version of the Minnesota Twins or the Milwaukee Brewers. 

I want more, a lot more. I want someplace like Gillick’s last stop, Philadelphia—where ownership and Dave Dombrowski have pushed relentlessly towards the pinnacle of the sport. 

Is it greedy? Is it foolish? Am I being a mark for much of what I loathe to beg for some well-intentioned billionaire to take over this club?

Yeah. Because it can’t all be this. It just can’t. 

There has to be more to this than pocketing a few million every year on the backs of deluded fans and an increasingly gutted-out organization, hoping to one day find the front office who does just enough with less. 

Maybe we’d all be happier with someone who’s better on the margins, who’s more efficient with resources and leads this club to regular contention. 

Maybe they just do a better job of taking the prospects and young players who have given a sizable chunk of their lives to this organization, some signing up for it when they were in their mid-teens, and shipping them off for prime players making just the right amount less than they’re worth.

And they also sign the right semi-busted reclamation projects. They find the best red balloons on the waiver wire. 

And they get swept out of the playoffs a couple times before, finally, making it back to the ALCS. 

It could happen. I will not debate it whatsoever. It’s just how this game works, it’s about what most organizations are going for. 

But I’ll keep on thinking it, here and elsewhere—there could be more. 

There’s got to be more. 

Maybe next year. 

Go M’s.

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