The Mariners are going to play for the American League championship
A quick note before we watch literally the 2025 Seattle Mariners in the ALCS.
Why can’t it be us?
That’s what I thought standing there in extras again, just like the last time the Mariners were on the brink. How did it feel exactly the same?
For everyone at home, judging off the national reaction, the game was epic for its length. Being there, it was the same as last time, time and innings being only a construct.
The second seventh-inning stretch comes around faster than you think when you’ve been hanging on every pitch for four hours.
All the while, as the game shifted to extras and coin-flip time—when all anyone needs is a bleeder at the right time, a wild pitch at the worst or someone just plain running into one—I kept thinking it, pleading:
Why not us?
Why can’t the coin land our way one time? Why can’t it plunk down, kick off a chair leg, spin on its edge and rest with the Mariner Moose’s face staring at the ceiling?
And then it did.
Or maybe it was Humpy’s face that ended up on top.
After chance after chance after chance, after year after year after year—your Seattle Mariners are back in the ALCS on a Jorge Polanco line-drive single to right.
It’s so funny, in the post before that game—the 100th on this blog, by the way! Les go!—I said “Who will be tonight’s Jorge Polanco? It could even be Jorge Polanco.”
With the following modifiers, saying rhetorically it could be anyone else as well, it wasn’t as good as my brother Conner on Saturday saying “Gosh, if he could just poke one down the line” literally seconds before Josh Naylor flicked a 100.2mph sinker five inches off the plate into the corner and up against the wall.
Then when Naylz stole third to set up the game’s first run, the initial clank around the glass from the straw that stirs the drink, the place came unglued.
And it stayed that way all damn night.
All the way, I kept thinking, we haven’t gotten to do this in so long in this ballpark. This wasn’t like 2022.
This was waking up the echoes of the early-aughts, shaking out the bones of the beautiful barn built with money from the country’s first tech boom.
It was an environment from that era, but a game that couldn’t have better underscored this one.
Naylz set the tone. Iffy transition into the bullpen, sure—but the pitching.
Man, look at the box score, those names, that group.
Kirby to Speier to Brash to Muñoz to Gilbert to Bazardo to Castillo.
What a world.
Three guys from the greatest rotation in Mariners history. The anchors for the bullpen going back years. The lefty we’re working some stuff out with.
They say the bullpen lab is dead and that may be partly true, but then there’s Eduard Bazardo doing the damn thing with the whole season on the line.
Why not, right?
There are many games left to play, with everything still to play for. But the way that ended, it makes all the optimism, all the faith, all the unwavering hope feel a good deal less foolish. It feels worth it.
Do people realize how insane it is to have the Seattle Mariners be the sports team you follow the most? To really obsess over?
It’s nuts. Bananas foster.
But whew. Whew—now we know, it can be us. This is possible.
It is happening.
I sit here in my office, just back from a walk around Green Lake with my wife and the dog, very much still in recovery mode from Friday night.
My voice is still mostly shot.
I can feel, right behind my eyes, what it was like to wake up in small-town Montana at 5:30am and close down Add-A-Ball on the same day.
But the American League Championship Series starts in 20 minutes. And your Seattle Mariners are in it, surely a bit bleary-eyed themselves.
It’s a mismatch in game one, for sure.
Weird stuff can happen. Good stuff can happen. The M’s have the bats, after all.
Steal this one and it starts to get crazy.
Might as well win the whole fuckin’ thing.
Go M’s.