I’m old enough to remember when the reason we weren’t investing in high-priced free agents was so we could have the budget to go in big on Shohei when he became available....
Take everything you said and put it in a maximized historical context: I was 11 when I attended the second-ever game in Mariners history. I’m now 58, not in the greatest of health, and I find that something that bothers me about as much as the outcome of the 2024 elections is the idea that I might die while watching the Seattle Mariners still
spinning in their wheels in the mud, as they have for the last 46 years. That one really wrecks my sleep some nights. Every year, the same fresh hope and excitement. Every year, the same failings and the same excuses. It is a doom loop to rival climate catastrophe and tribal hatreds. And I am supposed to sit back and calmly accept that there are good, valid reasons Seattle can’t succeed while their expansion-mates, the Toronto Blue Jays, can get to the promised land over and over. Somehow I suspect Luis Urias is not going to make me feel better about that.
First off, health-wise, hang in there and I hope you start doing better.
Second, I know how you feel. I think the reason it’s so similarly exhausting is because it’s all the same thing. We don’t ask that much of the most well-off members of society, people who got there by being propped up by everyday folks—and even then, even in something that’s supposed to be an escape, they can’t clear that low bar.
Thanks, Colin. It feels like this: for the forty-seventh straight year, we’re being told that we can’t have the nice things everyone else has. And are being told that we should accept that there’s no better explanation than “this is not the organization’s approach.” It reminds me of growing up solidly middle-class on upscale Bainbridge Island and being shut down hard by my dad when I asked why the other kids were going to Whistler for the holidays and not us, or why I couldn’t get a new bike to replace my chain-throwing Sears three-speed. He’d often say, “That’s them, and we’re us.” And no more. And my job was to not just accept it but somehow find happiness within it.
I just wish John Stanton would tell us flat out why we can’t have what the other kids have.
I’m old enough to remember when the reason we weren’t investing in high-priced free agents was so we could have the budget to go in big on Shohei when he became available....
Take everything you said and put it in a maximized historical context: I was 11 when I attended the second-ever game in Mariners history. I’m now 58, not in the greatest of health, and I find that something that bothers me about as much as the outcome of the 2024 elections is the idea that I might die while watching the Seattle Mariners still
spinning in their wheels in the mud, as they have for the last 46 years. That one really wrecks my sleep some nights. Every year, the same fresh hope and excitement. Every year, the same failings and the same excuses. It is a doom loop to rival climate catastrophe and tribal hatreds. And I am supposed to sit back and calmly accept that there are good, valid reasons Seattle can’t succeed while their expansion-mates, the Toronto Blue Jays, can get to the promised land over and over. Somehow I suspect Luis Urias is not going to make me feel better about that.
First off, health-wise, hang in there and I hope you start doing better.
Second, I know how you feel. I think the reason it’s so similarly exhausting is because it’s all the same thing. We don’t ask that much of the most well-off members of society, people who got there by being propped up by everyday folks—and even then, even in something that’s supposed to be an escape, they can’t clear that low bar.
Thanks, Colin. It feels like this: for the forty-seventh straight year, we’re being told that we can’t have the nice things everyone else has. And are being told that we should accept that there’s no better explanation than “this is not the organization’s approach.” It reminds me of growing up solidly middle-class on upscale Bainbridge Island and being shut down hard by my dad when I asked why the other kids were going to Whistler for the holidays and not us, or why I couldn’t get a new bike to replace my chain-throwing Sears three-speed. He’d often say, “That’s them, and we’re us.” And no more. And my job was to not just accept it but somehow find happiness within it.
I just wish John Stanton would tell us flat out why we can’t have what the other kids have.