Time is weird. If it even exists at all.
In life’s worst moments, when you’d rather be anywhere else than on this plane of reality, it is interminable.
When basking in the toasty warmth of this nearby star, enjoying life’s figurative calm waters and literal extended summers, the weeks turn to days and days to seconds.
That’s what the Mariners have in front of them. It’s a week and change, but in reality, it’s one day—one day after another, and another, and so on.
Ten days, nine games.
It’s supposed to be mostly sunny and 73 degrees out in Seattle on that tenth day, Monday, the rare and precious home off day.
The other night while falling asleep, I was listening to a podcast on why the universe exists. As one does.
They had this expert on and his best answer to the ultimate question was that the universe’s existence is just, well, what they call a “brute fact.”
You can move the brute fact up or down a level—“Okay if God made the universe, where’d they come from?”—but it’s always gonna be there, the name kind of explaining itself.
That’s time, too.
No matter what, these next ten days will transpire. And almost certainly, the Seattle Mariners will play nine games.
The month after that is coming and will pass, too. And so will the months after that, every anguishing week until pitchers and catchers report to Peoria.
Another season after this one will come. Many after that. Year after year.
The 2025 Seattle Mariners will almost surely still exist beyond these ten days. But how much after that?
How much space will the 2025 Mariners hold in our collective conscience as those years eventually roll by?
The next ten days have a lot to say about that. Every series, every game, every inning.
Time is also weird because it does these funny little loops. At least I think so. Maybe it’s a little hokey mystic mumbo jumbo mixed with confirmation bias but I feel like it’s there. It happens.
And much stronger than what I’m about to reference.
But as I said at least once earlier this year, the 2025 season has some 2023 echoes ringing around.
When I said that before, it was because it looked like it’d end up as a three-team race in the division. In that respect, things are a bit different now than they were then—the Rangers rolling over in Houston, their season all but snuffed out by the Astros.
In 2023, here’s how the standings in the AL West looked as the Mariners and the rest of the division woke up on the Friday of the season’s penultimate weekend.
The Wild Card status, compared to this year, was considerably less kind.
On that morning, a morning like this one, I wrote the following.
If you win a division, you’re so much closer to winning it all. You’re two series wins from playing for everything, not three. Just seven wins away, not nine. More home games, rotation lined up, bullpen ready.
The Mariners—the Seattle Mariners—wouldn’t be the underdogs anymore.
They could do it.
They can do it.
The biggest ten regular season games we’ve ever seen start tonight. They start now in 65 minutes.
Let’s have some fun.
They lost the first four games.
Swept in Texas, lost the homestand opener to Houston and that was a wrap.
It was all right in front of them until it wasn’t.
It was right there. They could’ve kept building.
The M’s ended the drought in 2022 and though Houston swept them aside, it felt like a series the Mariners should’ve had. And if they’d won that, won those first two games, they could’ve won it all.
That’s what happens sometimes, like the Hawks in 2012. They could’ve won that first one of the era a year early, perhaps fated a dynasty, had they just not let Matt Ryan push the Falcons into field goal range in 22 seconds. If Pete just hadn’t called timeout before the missed kick.
They did, though.
But the ascension across the street continued linearly from there.
It didn’t for the 2023 Mariners. Far from it.
That season, lost. Last year, too.
Time is weird because as much as one regrets the past or dreams on the future, the present is all we have. We cannot exist, as far as we know, in any other space.
Here we are.
And what a great spot to be.
For as much as we crack jokes about how these inevitable ten days will wear on us, how insane it is to see FanGraphs give your Seattle Mariners better odds to win a World Series than any team in baseball, it’s all pretty damn cool, too.
The Mariners have a chance, here and now, to change everything. Starting this weekend, in this same building, they can begin to undo the heartbreak of that 2022 Division Series.
They can go and take the West, course-correcting their stalled climb into the sport’s upper echelon.
You can’t do any of that in November. Not April or even July.
You can’t do it once it’s over. Or if it never even started.
The Mariners can do it now, though. Starting tonight.
Bryan Woo vs. Hunter Brown.
This is why we do all of this.
All these games, all the narratives and discourse. Following all the player development successes and cursing the free agent failures. The trade deadline—that trade dateline.
It’s all for this.
It can swing on every throw, every foul tip, every aggressive send, every bullpen choice and bases-loaded chance.
It’s going to feel like a lot because it is a lot.
Don’t forget to live it, though. For as much as it won’t feel like it the very next time the Mariners trail for even a single inning, this is the good part.
I say now, as I said then in 2023, the first year of this blog—
Let’s have some fun.
Go M’s.
I think you said it all with “The Mariners have a chance, here and now, to change everything.” It all comes down to this weekend…
Goms!