“Why do you still give them your money?”

On that theme and whatever else this is supposed to be now.

via @OhLookRain on Twitter

Do you know what FanGrams are? They’re the messages fans can pay $115 to have up on the big board at Mariners games. Birthdays and anniversaries are only $40, but the FanGrams are better because the real estate is bigger and the message can be anything. Thus the higher cost.

I’ve come to love the FanGrams. I never paid much attention to them before this year, in the hundreds of games I watched at the ballpark as a fan, an employee and then a fan again—just because something felt funky, overly transactional, about paying for what amounts to a text message on a screen for 20 seconds.

They are that, but also these abstract text-form dioramas of lives intertwined. They’re tiny stories about families, coworkers, friends and, always, fellow Mariners fans there at the game that night. Once you start reading them, these meaningful moments cued one after another like a PowerPoint thrown together in five minutes, you start to picture these people and their lives.

I have a few saved on my phone from earlier this summer.

To Aiden K
Happy 11th Birthday!
Love Mom
Go Mariners!!!

Happy Birthday Kylee
Can’t wait to marry
You in a week!
Love Taylor

Happy 18th Birthday,
Zachary! I’m so
incredibly proud
of you! -Love Mom

On Friday night, as moroseful a Fan Appreciation Night as there ever was, I was dazed by how many of them were about or for someone no longer with us. It wasn’t the majority by any means, but there were at least three or four.

I didn’t save any of them but my wife remembers a couple bits and pieces. They were stuff like

Big Bass Bill,
Keep slaying fish
at the lake in
the sky! Go M’s!

We miss you, Mom!
Know you’re watching
the game, too.
Rest In Paradise!!!

For the groups there in the ballpark, people who did pay $115 to have their message on a screen the size of a six-bedroom house, it was briefly everything. Baseball is baseball and the Mariners are the Mariners—and for a lot of people, both are the backdrop to some of the best parts of their lives. The hard parts, too.

As I sat there Friday night, my first time out in a few weeks due to a trip abroad, I was thinking about my relationship to the ball club and the increasingly boisterous sentiment pleading for some kind of a formal boycott.

If you’re upset with this team but still spend money on them, the thought goes, then you only have yourself to blame.

And it’s true. Sure. It’s not not true, that the team continues to behave the way it does because it remains quite profitable to do so.

Yet, as I’ve said a lot and will continue to say—life is short.

One other thing I’ve said a couple times now here on this blog is that this was my least favorite Mariners season ever. And I don’t think that’s wrong. I guess it can’t be wrong when it’s subjective, though perhaps there’s some recency bias at play.

What’s funny then is that as I was reflecting on the most recent calendar year in the relationship with my now-wife—the trip to Italy was to celebrate our anniversary—maybe my favorite part about this year was that it was the year we both got the most into the Mariners, together.

We’ve always followed them, as long as we’ve been together. We drove to Opening Day in Oakland in 2013, from Montana. We loved when Félix starts lined up with a picturesque Friday night in Seattle. The work trip to Tokyo was unforgettable.

But this year was the year she started to keep score. Something just flipped, went to another level. Enjoying (and not) the M’s together was good before but it was so much better this year. She was hooked. And I’m hooked on us both being hooked together.

I don’t love Fan Appreciation Night because when the game is meaningless, the prizes and pageantry feel a bit patronizing, but I felt glad to be there on Friday night. We had seats in the first row of the upper deck, right above home—our Diamond Club. She kept score as we split a bag of seeds and a pair of old headphones. We laughed and reacted together to Rick, Aaron and Gary’s winding broadcast. We saw Cal homer again.

It was good to be back.

It was our last game of 2024.

I understand both sides of this boycott/no boycott debate. Is there even a debate? Probably not. The world is never this binary. I’m reticent to say “Twitter isn’t real life!” because usually people say that to subvert very well-intentioned messages but Twitter isn’t real life. Sports radio isn’t real life, either.

This is going to be a ridiculous set of four words but you know what’s real life? FanGrams are real life.

People can’t and won’t flip off their fandom. And certainly not to a degree that The Baseball Club of Seattle LLLP has no choice but to course-correct. Like autumn in Seattle, there’s a lot of gray.

That doesn’t mean temperature and sentiment go unchanged. The vibes are worse now than maybe they’ve ever been and fans can’t help but feel that.

Going into the weekend, my wife was more enthusiastic than me, she wanted to go to all three games. I was up for it, too. We enjoyed Friday. But then Saturday came and simply not going sounded better than attending, even though we already had cheap SRO tickets. So we didn’t, we did something else.

We used to always go to the last game of the year, because it’s the last chance to see the boys for a while and because we’re big Cheetah Time appreciators. We didn’t last year because it just didn’t feel good to be a Mariners fan with the team coming up short—in a predictable way—after a dud of an offseason.

Then this year, yesterday, my sister was getting family together for brats and football. We still thought we might go to the game, my wife and I, but something else sounded better. I have a niece and nephew now, born nine days apart earlier this year, and a solemn, meaningless—but still, I’m sure, quite fun to be at—game 162 wasn’t better than chilling with them and other loved ones.

If game 162 meant something, I’d probably be at the park. It didn’t.

And ideally someday it doesn’t mean something because they have the West locked up. Not this year.

Fans feel that. They feel it to different degrees depending on what volume the Mariners are playing at in the soundtrack to their lives, but they do feel it.

For some, it’s feeling the anguish and borderline betrayal as you watch the final out of another fruitless season. For others, it just may be being shocked when they ask “So the Mariners are for-sure in the playoffs, right?” and someone answers “No. They’re done.”

Seattle loves the Mariners. We love the Mariners.

But do we even like them? Ehhh.

I swear I’ve written it before and I’ll probably say it again but the Mariners desperately need to care whether or not people like them. They need to do things that make people like them. They need to not do things that make people dislike or loathe them.

They need to care.

The people at the very top need to care and they need to care as much as we do—because if they don’t, why do this?

I’ve been going through some random Mariners ownership lore lately and I had someone fire a quote my way I either hadn’t seen before or had and blocked out because it so egregiously confirmed priors.

Here is an excerpt from a Seattle Times column praising the Mariners for their financial discipline in 2002, the first year of what would be a 21-year Postseason drought:

"If you don't operate as a business," said Howard Lincoln, the Mariners CEO, "all sorts of bad things happen."

The goal of the Mariners is not to win the World Series. It is to field a competitive team year after year, to put itself in a position to win a World Series, and hope at some point that happens.

"People want us to do something exceptional," said Lincoln, "but what we want to do is have the discipline to stick with our plan."

The Mariners are making money.

"We absolutely have to make money," Lincoln said. "No question, end of story.”

The second paragraph there got aggregated up into a book and back down into articles and, in the process, got misinterpretated as a direct quote. You can see the original here.

Based on the follow-up article, it sounds like the Mariners clubhouse at the time read it as a quote as well. It could’ve been that the sentence was sandwiched between two other quotes, or it could’ve been that every other direct quote said basically the same thing.

Even when Lincoln attempted to clarify his remarks a few days later, the underlying thesis remained.

"You can go to the Series two ways; first, go for it regardless of the financial risk or consequences, the way Cleveland or Florida has; or go for it with a competitive team that plays for championships on a continual basis. The objective of the Seattle Mariners is not to go to the World Series regardless of the financial consequences, that is irresponsible." […]

"I have an obligation to the people who own this baseball team, an obligation to make money, to operate in a profitable fashion. Doing that, we expect to put the best product we can on the field, and I think we have accomplished that over the last two years."

It’s an ethos that runs deep, even with Lincoln receding from a day-to-day role. The owners he’s referring to above, the ones he was running the team at the direction of, include the same people who own the team today—most prominently, John Stanton and Chris Larson.

Fans still sense this deeply today. They don’t feel it because they remember this quote or that guy—though some do—they feel it because the Mariners haven’t done enough to dissuade them of the notion.

It felt fitting, even a little eery, to have the last game ever played by the Oakland Athletics be against our Mariners, a team similarly stricken—although less terminally—with the ill of uncaring ownership.

I was surprised the SELL flags were able to stay up right behind home plate for the final outs. It made a good picture.

As this final week of the Oakland A’s unfolded, with many a soliloquy on the intersection of baseball and late-stage capitalism, a thread from the Cespedes BBQ boys stuck with me.

This segment hit home:

Pro sports rely on the emotional connection between team and fan. It's a pact. The fan buys in, caring deeply about 26 souls wearing the same laundry. The fan makes it all matter, makes it mean something.

In return, the team is supposed to uphold their end of the bargain. Spend money on good players. Be a positive, active institution in the community. Treat fans as people and not just customers because if the fans don't care, it all falls apart.

We have a deal.

You own a community institution. It may be a business, too—but it’s a whole lot more than that first.

Mariners fans are holding up their end of the bargain. We packed the park for the final meaningless weekend—more than 115,000 fans total. We tried to hang tough when the team faded, accounting for the second-best annual attendance number since 2007.

We’re paying Seattle prices, too. On tickets, on beer, on parking (admittedly, not me) and cable TV.

We’re doing what we’re supposed to do. This is one of the best fan bases in baseball.

We may not like you, but we do love you.

It’s your turn—it’s been your turn—to be in this to the level we are.

Feelings fade. It can happen.

Go M’s.

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Editor’s note: Thanks for the patience on a lack of posts the last couple weeks or so. I’m aiming for an uptick in content in the weeks and months ahead. Next up: What did we learn about the Mariners in 2024?