It would be so nice to be done with this team.
You used to hear people throw around the idea that it’d be wonderful to move through life with no self awareness. It’s a very millennial thought, Lena Dunham-coded almost.
It’d be great to never think at all about anyone besides one’s self, and even when considering one’s own soul to do so at the absolutely shallowest level. You say you want to live without self awareness but what you really mean is it’d be nice to not have self doubt. Or at least ennui.
So it’d also be nice to be done with this team.
To be the guy at the bar saying “I’ve checked out. Mariners suck again, always do when everyone thinks they’re gonna go to the World Series.” and really mean it, having not been to the park since the year’s first fireworks night and not watched a game start to finish since at least last October.
Nah, instead it’s getting sincerely pissed, ornery with your whole damn heart when the most underwhelming Seattle Mariners team you have seen in your life loses a series on the road against the literal best club in baseball.
It is a sensical existence if there ever was one, surely.
You know you’re a real junky for a team when you cling to not only big relief pitching moments, but big relief pitching moments before the ninth.
Getting clutch outs with your closer is all fine and well. The real ball knowers savor your squad’s second-, third- or fourth-best reliever getting what feel like the biggest outs of the season.
Eduard(o) Bazardo had one of the best pitching moments of the year last night but parts of Seranthony Dominguez’s two outings this week—the bases loaded K vs. Houston and that 10th inning vs. the Cubs—would make a championship season DVD’s “here was the turning point” montage.
This year has been anything but special but the Cal homer felt like a moment that escaped the 2025 M’s timeline and ricocheted into this one. We’ve been looking for one of those for months, big AB after big AB, strikeouts and pop-ups galore.
Nah, not there. There was a tank. First pitch, letter high, vaporized.
Sitting at the game last night with my wife, splitting headphones and a handheld radio like I said we would, I half-seriously told her the Friday matinee we were at Wrigley Field for last year, Cal homering twice as we sat perched in the balcony above first, was not quite as good as our wedding day but it was close.
That night, the wedding reception, there was a mysterious and fully-professional fireworks show off the end of Bainbridge Island as we watched from outside the Golden Gardens bathhouse with the people who mean the most to us in the world—but in the ballgame, Cal’s second home run was a tomahawk-job all the way out onto Waveland giving the M’s a two-run lead in the 7th.
Again, it’s a real close comparison.
There’s something about these Cubs games. The Mariners took those two of three there at Wrigley Field last year but not that long ago, the Mariners’ first appearance on Sunday Night Baseball in forever, they lost on a walk-off Jon Lester suicide squeeze—a few innings after reliever Travis Wood made a great play on a fly ball to the ivy in left.
Yeah.
Same series as Sims’s “To the gap! To the gap!” call on a Leonys Martin double off Aroldis Chapman.
In a different lifetime, a rookie Mike Zunino rolled an 88 mph Shawn Camp sinker back up the middle for a walk-off single in front of a Safeco Field packed with Cubs fans.
The ballpark was flush with Cubs fans last night, too. Mariners fans as well. And plenty of people who probably weren’t really fans of baseball at all.
But for those of us who are, yeah, there’s still ball on.
There are still moments to rile you up and piss you off but also ones that make you high five the strangers behind you.
Bazardo got that strikeout and it was like the small group of dudes in the row behind us were lifelong friends, may as well have had a regular group chat where we talked M’s.
Nah, we’re just a few humans whose existences happened to intersect at exactly that time, marked with a series of “Let’s gooooo”s, and likely never will again.
That’s the good stuff.
The 2026 Seattle Mariners will probably not make the playoffs. They will almost certainly not win the World Series.
But while there’s still baseball to be played, I think I may as well see this team all the way to the end.
We all only get so many seasons anyway, something you really feel with each passing year, particularly as the cool evening breeze off the Puget Sound develops a little more bite with September approaching.
May as well savor this, even if we don’t have all we thought we would to savor.
Feel free to check in on me when we’re not coming off a dramatic win in front of a packed house on a pristine Seattle summer night.
Today though, we got Kade Anderson making his debut in a national prime time game vs. the Cubbies, the park damn near sold out.
So, for now,
Go M’s.