This is the new standard for Mariners Baseball
Same as it was supposed to be
When I was a kid, you’d go down to the movie theater to get Mariners playoff tickets. Or, I should say, hoping to get Mariners playoff tickets.
The last time the Mariners were here, rolling into the ALDS as favorites, it felt like the whole town was down at Bainbridge Pavilion, lined up out into the parking lot and under the Bainbridge Cinemas marquee, it probably then listing out showtimes for Zoolander.
I don’t remember the finer points, just how we got raffle tickets, all seven O’Keefes because being Irish Catholic was actually a perk here, and were sorted into one of the theater’s five screening rooms.
And then, if you were lucky, they drew your number and you got to go to Mariners playoff games.
My first two years in the Pacific Northwest were 2000 and 2001. I assumed this was a regular occurrence—or minimally, with the new ballpark, the beginning of it being a regular occurrence.
Going to the Postseason, beating an AL Central team in the ALDS and playing to go to the World Series was just what the Mariners did.
I’d seen it with my own eyes, up in the View Level on that sunny Seattle day, the tail end of my first season as an M’s fan.
When you’re in your early teens, two consecutive years constitutes a sizable percentage of your conscious life.
There’s been a whole lot of conscious life since the Mariners early-aughts heyday. Some unconscious, too.
I’ve surely used this anecdote before so, apologies (and thanks!) to longtime readers, but some of my earliest memories of online baseball discourse were in AOL chatrooms called things like “Baseball 1” and “Baseball 2.”
For context, AOL was like a combination ISP and, I guess, social network? You could access the broader internet and also their profiles and message boards and whatever.
But anyway, if you were teenager who had minimal to no friends because they moved across the country in eighth grade and watched their baseball team win 91, 116, 93, 93 and then 63 games, you could jump on there and talk shit about how the Mariners were going to be right back on top after signing Adrian Beltre and Richie Sexson on consecutive days.
Especially if Gil Meche took a step forward as expected.
The Mariners were not right back on top. Not the way I envisioned.
Not until now.
A lot has changed with the O’Keefes since. We lost our matriarch, for one. We’ve added some beautiful souls, too.
But our lives still revolve around sports.
More-so, they’re intertwined with sports. On this sublime and cruel plane of existence, the Mariners and Packers (and Zags) are an ever-present backdrop.
So when the M’s made the playoffs and me and my wife’s low-level Flex plan got us a line on tickets not just for us, but a couple extras, it was same as it ever was.
“Okay, who’s going to game one?”
“And y’all got the next one? Alright.”
“Yeah, we’ll do the one after that.”
Last year, more towards the end of the season, I got my nephew Joseph and his cousin Casey caps at their first ballgame.
You can see his here.
Little Joey, named in part for the Driftless rural ridge my grandparents and Scott Servais’s elders grew up on, is going to his second Mariners game today. He’ll be right next to us with his mom and his dad.
Even at only 18 months old, he’s closer in age to my teenage self than I am now.
And I hope he never has to say or even think, “When I was a little kid, the Mariners used to be really good.”
This week, with the Mariners as the center of the known universe or at least the Pacific Northwest, should be the norm.
This is what we want. It’s what we expect.
It’s what’s possible.
Bryan Woo and Josh Naylor news aside, the vibes are too good to do a bunch of brow-beating here.
I’ve just had this thought in my head nonstop, looking forward all week to these two days as I watch edits on TikTok, see photos of the crew at the Kraken game, watch the bunting go up and the POSTSEASON paint go down—
It should always be like this.
It should always be like this because this is too good.
The Seattle Mariners won the division, they got a bye into hosting the ALDS and oh hey they have eight of MLB Pipeline’s most recent Top 100 prospects.
And with a playoff pricing strategy bordering on extortion, they should be able to bump their payroll into the realm of respectability.
That’s all in the future, though. Like I said few posts ago, before the Houston series, all we have is the present.
That present, now, because of what they did then, is so damn great.
This team can rise to the moment. It can control their circumstances and ruin those belonging to others.
They’re built for this.
Eleven wins to go and your Seattle Mariners have the talent to notch ever single one of them.
It’s sunny-but-crispy fall day in Seattle, I’ve got a couple Miller Lites in the freezer and a Gary/Aaron ALDS preview MarinersPod to listen to on the bike ride down.
Let’s go get Game One.
Go M’s.
Hey, what would you like to see from Postseason coverage? What sounds fun? Don’t hesitate to holler.
Exactly