Let's have the greatest Mariners season of our lives again
The goal is simple—and grand.
How do you follow up the best season in franchise history? You do it again.
There’s no other choice, no other option—no outcome that’d satisfy besides the first pennant in franchise history and the second downtown Seattle parade of 2026.
In March, it feels a bit like a burden. That will happen when the prior year’s team put the champagne in champagne problems.
That was the most fun I’ve ever had watching sports. I know that’s not as good as it gets but it’s as good as it’s gotten for me—even with a couple Packers titles.
There’s nothing like baseball. No place like the ballpark.
While there’s nothing like baseball, there’s especially nothing baseball when you’re a Mariners fan and the Mariners are good. Great even.
Will the 2026 M’s be great? Who knows. We’re a long way from knowing that—and even further from when it truly matters.
A couple years ago on Opening Day I titled my post “Enjoy the enjoyment” and that’s what I’d say here had I not already written it there. Er—
Regardless.
With such grand aspirations for this team, the expectations as lofty as they’ve ever been, it’s more important than ever to reside in the present and move at a contemplative pace.
Enjoy the richness of it all.
In Field of Dreams, watching now as I do every Opening Day Eve, Doc Graham has this outstanding monologue on the richness of the game when he’s asked, in his doctor’s office in Chisholm, Minnesota, for his one baseball wish.
Like most and perhaps all the standout lines in the movie, it’s taken directly from W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe—the book the film is based on. As such, we’ll go with the OG version, should there be any differences.
Well, you know I never got to bat in the major leagues. I'd like to have my chance just once, to stare down a big league pitcher, to stare him down and just as he goes into his wind-up, wink, make him think you know something he doesn't. That's what I wish. A chance to squint at the sky so blue that it hurts your eyes just to look at it. To feel the tingle in your arms as you connect with the ball, to run the bases, stretch a double into a triple, and flop face-first into third, wrap your arms around the bag. That's my wish, Ray Kinsella, that's my wish. And is there enough magic out there in the moonlight to make this dream come true?
If you’re reading this, you never got to bat in the major leagues either.
But there’s still your first glimpse of the field when you get in the building on Opening Day. There’s the cold $5 beer and a Value Dog on a nothing Tuesday in May. Imagine the supreme joy of realizing, with the M’s holding a commanding mid-inning lead after Cal and Julio homers, the setting sun reflecting off downtown as it slides towards the Olympic Mountains, you are at the quintessential midsummer Friday ballgame.
And then there’s standing all night at the biggest Mariners game of your life. Multiple times in a week.
We’ll get there, when the games mean everything, but you do have to appreciate the parts when they don’t because those still mean a lot, too—if not World Series odds, in life.
Speaking of those odds, though—they’re pretty good.
I’m not going to specifically call up the details because the words on the page just look pretty tacky but at multiple big sportsbooks, the Mariners had more money on put on them to win the American League than anyone else.
It feels preposterous, in both the long- and the short-view.
The Mariners—our Seattle Mariners?—are broadly expected to go right back to the American League Champion Series and win it. Sure.
These things do happen, though. Teams reach the heights they do because they have good groups of players and when those good groups of players stay together, as they do in baseball more than most sports, they reach those heights again.
The weird one I always think of is the Kansas City Royals. Even the most flash-in-the-pan title team you can think of first lost the World Series in 2014—narrowly beating the Mariners for a playoff spot—before their run to a ring in 2015.
Since 2000, there have been ten teams who reached the World Series after losing the prior year in the ALCS or NLCS.
Houston has three of them, including one in the NL—following the monster Carlos Beltran 2004 playoffs with a pennant in 2005 behind Roger Clemens and Roy Oswalt. A decade later, they had it happen a couple times during their string of seven-straight ALCS appearances.
Still, I think more of a team like the 2016 Cubs—chasing their sustained Wrigleyville reawakening of a 2015 playoff run with going all the way in 2016.
This Mariners team is battle-tested and they have some of the best players in the game at or beginning their primes.
The bettors love them, analysts love them, the computers love them—we love them.
How many Mariners Hall of Famers are on this team? Cal, Julio and proooobably J.P., right? Perhaps Andrés Muñoz? Luis Castillo could be close. Josh Naylor had an idyllic start to what stretches out now, contractually, as a five-year stint in a Mariners uniform.
A title would tip scales for these guys and others.
Of course, they do already have one literal Mariners Hall of Famer—the skipper.
Where we last left off, he cost the Mariners their season. The best season they ever had.
To surrender the lead and the game and the whole damn year without your best reliever on the mound? Throwing the dude the other guys saw for two innings the night prior?
It’s not unforgivable—but there’s only one thing that will forgive it.
The Mariners can get there, they’re better-suited to do so than almost every team in baseball. But, like the one running through the manager’s office, there are fault lines that could either seal back up or crack wide open.
Go back and tell someone in November that Leo Rivas and Cole Young would be the up-the-middle tandem sandwiched between Cal Raleigh and Julio Rodríguez on Opening Day. They’re already down a starter and, by the sounds of it, won’t seen him for close to a month.
I know it’s not what folks are thinking too much about now—or maybe it is with the face value on those Opening Day tickets?—but the Mariners also went competitively backwards on payroll, sinking to 17th to open this year after starting last year 15th.
I know it’s tough to find true glaring holes with this roster but this team, in this era, should’ve had the resources available over the last few seasons to squeeze another bonafide star into this lineup. Or maybe signing an upside starter this winter would open the door to being creative and aggressive with an arm in or around the rotation?
Am I picking nits? Sure. Definitely.
I do so because this is a, perhaps thee, golden age of Mariners Baseball.
This is our moment in the sun—a moment that could and should last for years.
And that’s all the more reason to savor, to hold in your cheek like a fistful your favorite seeds, the small moments and memories that comprise this grander one.
In six months, the Mariners may play in the World Series. And I know where I’ll be before the first game played in Seattle—it’s the same place I’ll be tomorrow.
I’ll be at a go-to seedy dive bar with people I care about. Just as I was before my last game last year, Polanco’s ALDS winner.
I love baseball. I love it so much. Because it’s so much more than just the game, it’s everything around it.
I can’t wait to be at that bar tomorrow, I’ve been thinking about it all week.
Cheers to the 2026 Mariners.
96-77. Back-to-Back American League West Champions. American League Champions.
World Series Champions.
Go M’s.
I am so damn ready for tonight. Will be watching it at home in Oakland (I was born in Seattle and grew up in Puyallup), and as corny as it might sound, I actually Believe this year.
Do it for Dave. Do it for Rick. Do it for my mom, who loved the Mariners, but died in January 2025, and never got to see her team in the World Series. Do it for all of us. This is the time…