Your Seattle Mariners are 2025 American League West Champions

A magical night from Cal Raleigh puts the perfect stamp on a historic season for the franchise.

I used to think the go-ahead multi-RBI clutch double in the late innings was the best play in baseball.

Especially when you can see it coming, when it feels inevitable—like Josh Naylor on Tuesday night. They let it get to him with the bases loaded? Come on now.

Naylz blistered one like you knew he would. From where we were sitting, out above left field, I couldn’t quite tell if it was going to be in the gap and out of reach. Not like the broadcast, which had the high-home view of it headed for wall from the millisecond bat met ball.

When it touched down, in that moment, bases loaded and down two, there’s only one thought: “THREE.” They can get all three.

And they did—Julio flying around third as the go-ahead and winning run.

That’s as good as it gets, I thought. That’s the play. Baseball at its finest.

And then you’re sitting up in the View Level the next night, above the first base line and you see Cal Raleigh’s 59th home run arch across the Seattle skyline and the hazy twilight sky behind it, dropping perfectly into the first row of the third deck—and maybe that’s it.

Then, hours removed from a first inning that had Gary Hill Jr. saying “the party’s getting started early” on the broadcast, it happens. You’re there and it happens.

Sixty

60.

It was a perfectly Cal homer. It was gone the whole way—a line-drive shot that broadsided the seats in right, bouncing off someone’s hands and 15 feet away, into the grasp of a saint who handed it down to a kid.

Sixty home runs.

The homegrown switch-hitting catcher and should-be MVP matches Babe Ruth with his 60th home run in the game your Seattle Mariners clinch their first American League West title in 24 years.

I used to think the clutch go-ahead multi-run double was the best play in baseball.

And I still do but—borrowing from Mitch Hedberg—I used to, too.

Those home runs were pretty damn great, though.

Over the years, I would think about what tonight might be like, what I’d be doing, how I’d celebrate.

My wife and I hung around for a while, we got our pictures as we watched the celebration almost directly beneath us.

I could see a lot of folks I used to work with, some closer than others. There were people down there—and all over the building—who’d grinded for endless hours, season after season, for years.

Years and years and years of hoping for this day, and having faith it would come. I hope they’re still out celebrating as I write this at midnight, and I hope the same is true, for them, a little bit longer.

For us, my wife and me, the celebration was a little more subdued, but no less enjoyable.

Gary, Rick, Shannon and Aaron (plus Mike Lefko on the ones and twos) put together a postgame show that made our bike ride from the ballpark, through downtown, over the Fremont Bridge, up Phinney and home as enjoyable as its ever been.

And that’s tough to do. We’ve had some good ones.

I think it was somewhere around that old blue bridge that Aaron joined the radio side, to which I audibly said “Ayyyy, Aaron!” as the real-life diorama of the I-5 bridge framing the entrance to Lake Union floated by on the right.

“What do you make of, not just that they did it,” Gary Hill Jr. asked his longtime co-conspirator, “but how they did it?”

“Oh, what do you mean,” Aaron said with a chuckle, “just one of the best nights this franchise has ever seen?”

It really was.

It was so great to see the Baseball Ops people celebrate, working on this project for so long.

I’ll remember looking down and—as the on-field celebration began to wind down and disperse a little, guys savoring the moment in their own unique ways—seeing Justin Hollander meander his way out to the mound with his family.

This is the stuff they do it all for, those moments. He looked around, shook his head, probably had quite a grin—though my prescription isn’t that good.

Shannon managed to snag Jerry in the clubhouse for the postgame show.

He said the club grew up a lot this year, reached a point where they understood that nothing was going to be given to them, that they had to go out and take it.

It took me back.

Those media hits have grown quite a bit more infrequent but it’s the same rhythm, the same savviness, the same memory and penchant for Inside Baseball anecdotes as the 60 Wheelhouse episodes we sat down for.

When I was last there, that 2019 season, a lot of the communications thrust turned to prospects as a Major League roster built around Tim Beckham and Daniel Vogelbach and Domingo Santana faltered.

The names “Logan Gilbert” and “Cal Raleigh” and “Julio Rodríguez” appeared on a lot of Wheelhouse show sheets that season and here they are now, Jerry Dipoto talking about how far they’ve come in the corner of a Miller Lite-soaked clubhouse.

As we were nearly home, almost the same spot we were when we hooted and hollered at J.P.’s slam the other day, Mike Lefko cued up two calls from the game.

I hadn’t heard them since, despite a new portable AM radio arriving just in time for the game, headphones split between two people tend to fly out during the excitement of a big moment at the ballpark.

Rick’s call for 60 was as good as it gets.

The chants of MVP, MVP—

SWING AND A DRIVE! DEEP TO RIGHT FIELD!

THERE IT IS—NUMBER 60!

THE MODERN DAY BAMBINO

Rick’s one of those guys you really feel for.

He’s been here a long time. His pantheon of calls stretches back to those magical days in the Kingdome. He was here well before those heydays, though. Before Junior and Edgar and even Alvin.

The best position player on the M’s the first year Rick Rizzs called a game was a 24-year-old Dave Henderson in 1983.

And until tonight, Rick had never called a division clincher.

Of course not, because Dave was here to call the last one—and the two before that.

Did you know it took longer for the Mariners to win their second division title in the ballpark that opened as Safeco Field than it did in the old concrete barn across Royal Brougham?

On the postgame show, Rick talked a little bit about his dear friend, even mentioning and presumably pointing to the very spot Niehaus sat in the same radio booth they were chatting from then.

Rick’s most poignant comments, though, were on something else.

Of all the voices I heard tonight, interview after interview with a whole lot of banter in-between, nobody spoke as strongly on a subject that seemed to be on the tip of many a tongue.

The World Series.

Rick wants it. He can see it. You can hear in his voice he can almost taste it—calling a pennant clincher, a title-clincher.

Probably heading a parade float, too.

The way this team is playing, the way the crowd sounds as it shakes the bones of a ballpark that hasn’t felt vibrations like this in a long time, it’s impossible not to dream.

We’re taking the dog tomorrow (today) and maybe, with some luck, she can get in the hangover lineup with Harry Ford and Leo Rivas—but I really can’t wait for next week.

Game One and Game Two of the American League Division Series, Saturday and Sunday, right here at T-Mobile Park.

That’s the next step in this progression of a season that stands to propel this organization forward to places its never been.

But the next step isn’t here yet, and even after it and all the steps that may or not follow after that one, we can’t forget to appreciate this.

American League West Champs.

That’s a big deal. That’s a great season.

On to October.

Go M’s.