Remember: This is the fun part

Oh hey one of the biggest games in Mariners history starts in a few hours.

Please win.

Please just win.

For the love of all that is holy and just in this world, win the baseball game.

Would you believe I feel oddly confident?

Something like the refrain above has been uttered by my internal dialogue every minute since Wednesday but there’s no way they lose this game. They can’t lose this game.

Right?

I sit here on the morning of one of the biggest games in Seattle Mariners history and it’s difficult to find the words for why the Mariners won’t lose this game.

They just can’t.

For a little help, I want to point you to an outstanding piece by David Gutman in today’s Seattle Times. It closes with the following:

…collectively, maybe there’s something there? Something to the pure karmic energy created by thousands of desperate fans putting everything into willing an outcome, summoning a hit, a run, an out. Tens, hundreds of thousands of people pushing, metaphorically, psychically, emotionally the same way. Could their force alter a ball’s flight? Give a pitch an extra mile per hour or an inch of dip? Cause a short hop?

Nah, that’s wishful nonsense.

And then you see Cal Raleigh hit home run 61, a number dripping in baseball history. And it lands, amid an absolute sea of blue and orange Tigers fans, precisely in the glove of the one guy in a teal T-shirt with “Dump 61 Here” printed across it. How does that happen?

A city — almost certainly — cannot will a team to victory. But you can try.

And that’s where I am.

This team can’t lose this game because we want it too bad. This season’s too good, this group of guys just right and the idea of losing a series in which you led halfway through every game is too cruel.

That’s the fear, of course. It’d be impossible not to worry. Impossible not to think of the worst possible outcome, to dread something like we saw last night in Chavez Ravine with the Phillies.

There will be folks out there who care so much about the outcome of this game that they choose not to watch it. Well, maybe not even “choose”—they feel as though they are physically incapable of enduring it. It’s crazy, but these people do exist.

I won’t knock ‘em. Not at all. Everyone follows their guys in their own unique way. Everyone does something a little differently.

I’m wondering if I should not only wear the t-shirt I wore underneath everything else for game two—because it depicted my Mom’s favorite bar, back in La Crosse—but do so without washing it, since I already washed the jersey I was wearing.

As we all stress every minute between now and 5:08 p.m., I’m gonna borrow a few more words for this piece, this time from perhaps the most even-keeled voice in all of Seattle’s online sportsdom.

Who else but Joe Veyera?

I flew back early this morning from Montana, where my wife and I were for a family matter. She’s still there, so it’ll be the first game we don’t go to together all year—after about 35 of ‘em.

It stings.

As such, I’ve been thinking a lot about why I felt I had to be at this game.

It’s just…this is everything, man. This is life. This is why we do all of this.

Joe mentions riding the highs and lows for six months, which is true, but it’s bigger than that. It’s the peaks and valleys not only of Mariners fandom, my own stretching back 25 years, but of existing as a human at all.

It’s so damn silly to invest so much in a baseball team—in this baseball team.

Before game four, Sarah Langs shared this:

So yeah, now the Mariners are 4-1. But that’s not the point—prior to Wednesday, the Mariners had only played in an absurd four games in which they had a chance to clinch a Postseason series.

Literally a third of their potential clinching games in franchise history come in this, the 2025 ALDS.

So forgive us if we’re pouring our hearts out over Division Series games. (Except for Saul Spady, who stinks.)

We follow this team, we go to work, we grind through life, we do everything we do so we can have nights like tonight.

And you gotta live while you’re livin’.

I’m going to tonight’s game with my brother Conner. Old heads might remember Con from our Twenty-Twos & Tridents days and maybe, if we’re lucky enough, we’ll get a live reboot postgame tonight.

We recorded 50 podcasts together before I headed off to work for the M’s. And when we recorded that last one, we could barely get through it, pausing to bawl our eyes out a little in between takes on, I don’t know, the incoming Jerry Dipoto regime and whether they’d go after that winter’s top free agents (they wouldn’t).

It’ll be the second ALDS game five we’ve done together, as we were there 24 years ago—with our dad and brother Eamon—when the 116-win Mariners squeaked by Cleveland before being bounced by the Yankees in the ALCS.

I was supposed to go to one of those ALCS games, if the Mariners made it back from New York after dropping the first two at home. They never did.

I have a work trip next week that exactly overlaps with the three potential ALCS games in Seattle. That’s life for you.

The hardest thing for the Mariners, for Mariners fans particularly, is that it feels so damn hard to escape the past. The letdowns loom like the gray blanket of clouds that hangs over Seattle today.

Things can change in a hurry, though. There’s no reason to pretend the past has any effect on tonight, certainly no more than someone’s lucky jersey or everyone sitting in the same spot they were for game three.

You know what does matter? This team is better than the 2025 Detroit Tigers.

There are MVP candidates in the middle of the lineup who you know, right now, are daydreaming on moments that will define their careers.

The roster is overflowing with role players who are anything but.

Who will be tonight’s Jorge Polanco? It could be Jorge Polanco. Or Randy. Or Geno.

They don’t have Tarik Skubal, that’s right.

But in an era defined by a deep starting rotation, it makes sense they will lean on that depth again tonight, starting with George Kirby—who’s no stranger to must-win playoff games at T-Mobile Park.

Last time: 7 IP, 0 R, 2 H, 5 SO

This is why we do it. This is what it’s all about—baseball and life.

You only get so many of these days. And no matter the number, it’s never enough.

So enjoy this one—as much as you can.

Here’s to the M’s making it one of the best of our lives. See you at the ballpark.

And let’s go to the ALCS.

Go M’s.