The history of the Seattle Mariners is an unkind one. Long known as a team of mediocrity, misfortune, and misery, their Wikipedia synopsis reads more like a Shakespearean tragedy than the rich history of a storied ballclub. Jon Bois and Alex Rubenstein of Dorktown even created a fantastic documentary which details just how much pain and suffering this organization and its fans have endured in its forty-plus years of operation.
Now, though, it may finally be time to write a new chapter in the story of Seattle baseball. At long last, the Mariners have officially qualified for the MLB postseason, ending what was the longest active playoff drought in all of American professional sports (that distinction now belongs to the Sacramento Kings of the NBA). And even more improbable still, this Mariners team has the makings of a ballclub that could be contenders for years to come, and the joyous, infectious culture to go along with it.
The Mariners qualified for the playoffs for the first time since 2001. Photo from: Seattle Mariners via Twitter.
Let’s run through a crash course of Mariners history for those unaware. Founded as an expansion team in 1977, the team has made the MLB playoffs just five times and only won their division three of those times. Most successful during the late 90s and early 2000s, the M’s once made the ALCS three times in a seven-season span, but never once advanced to the World Series; they are one of six teams to have never won a World Series and they are the only active franchise to have never even appeared in the Fall Classic. This is despite having employed some of the all-time greats such as Ichiro Suzuki, Ken Griffey Jr., Alex Rodriguez, Edgar Martínez, Randy Johnson, and Félix Hernández over the years.
The last season in that glorious seven-year run from 1995-2001 -- a time period that encapsulates all of the Mariners’ playoff appearances except for 2022 -- was one in which Seattle won 116 games, tying the MLB record previously set by the 1906 Chicago Cubs. The Mariners led the majors in both runs scored and runs allowed, and Ichiro Suzuki won both the AL Rookie of the Year and AL MVP awards. Seattle then went on to lose in the ALCS to the Yankees in 6 games -- who themselves did not go on to win the World Series -- and thus the Mariners’ playoff drought began.
Suffice to say, it’s been rough. In the over twenty years since that brutal 12-3 Game 6 loss to New York, the Mariners always seemed to take (at least) one step back for every small step forward. Between 2002 and 2019, in the only three years in which they were within even 10 games of winning the AL West -- 2003, 2007, and 2016 -- they followed those seasons up by finishing 29, 39, and 23 games behind the division leader the next year, respectively.
After every promising stretch and right before each accompanying crushing setback was an increasingly miniscule, but nonetheless pronounced hope across the Pacific Northwest that maybe this year will be different, but it never was.
Until now, that is.
The Mariners bucked that two-steps-backward trend in 2021, following up a pandemic-shortened 2020 season in which they were 9 games behind an AL-West-winning Oakland squad with a 90-win season -- their best win total since 2003 -- and missed the playoffs by just 2 games.
But Mariners fans have seen fool’s gold too many times, and so optimism was tempered despite a strong offseason. They won 90 games, yes, but their Pythagorean win total was just 76; per Baseball-Reference, their +14 difference between actual W-L and Pythagorean W-L made them the luckiest team in the majors by a wide margin, with the next-luckiest team having just a +6 such difference. They also had the MLB’s third-best record in one-run games and the most wins in such games, which while exhilarating is often unsustainable year-to-year. All of this signaled that some regression could have been on the way.
The Mariners made multiple quality moves in the following offseason, but their biggest was a five-year, $115 million contract with the surprise 2021 AL Cy Young winner, Robbie Ray. Before 2021, Ray had only posted a sub-3 ERA just once in his career, back in 2017 with Arizona. And continuing with the topic of regression, some had even talked about Ray as one of the biggest regression candidates for 2022, so Seattle handing him that contract heading into his age-30 season raised eyebrows here and there.
Seattle acquired Cy-Young-Winner Robbie Ray from Toronto over the offseason. Photo from: Brace Hemmelgarn/Getty Images.
These new-look Mariners, though, unlike some of the doomed squads of decades past, had already shown resilience in the face of adversity. At the 2021 trade deadline, Seattle traded away their star closer, Kendall Graveman, to the rival Houston Astros -- a move which reportedly made players so angry that they smashed locker room equipment in the aftermath and repeatedly expressed that they felt “betrayed” by the team’s brass. And yet, the squad rallied to have a strong second half of the season, and ended up coming agonizingly close to the playoffs. They could have fallen off -- maybe they should have -- but they hung around in the playoff picture and fought to the bitter end.
So maybe it makes sense that these Mariners battled statistical regression and emerged victorious; with 4 games still to play, the Mariners have actually improved their Pythagorean wins total by 10 and are now locked into an AL Wild Card appearance. Pretty much all of their savvy offseason moves and in-season acquisitions panned out, and they enjoyed breakout seasons from multiple of their young stars. In a year where everything could have gone so wrong, everything has seemingly gone right.
Ray, in truth, has regressed a little, but is still posting a serviceable 3.71 ERA. The Mariners have the fifth-best runs allowed in the MLB as a unit, and quietly boast one of the deepest rotations in baseball. Logan Gilbert (13-6, 3.20 ERA) and George Kirby (8-4, 3.21 ERA), who are just 25 and 24 years old, respectively, have enjoyed breakout campaigns, and the midseason acquisition of Luis Castillo (4-2, 3.17 ERA) has been a masterstroke. Chris Flexen (3.64 ERA) and Marco Gonzales (4.14 ERA) are fine options that round out the six-deep rotation.
Seattle hasn’t just done well this season because they’re plucky-- although they certainly are. General Manager Jerry Dipoto has assembled a talented squad with just the right amount of veteran know-how and youth talent to fill in the gaps. All of Seattle’s starting pitchers are age 30 or younger, and the pitching staff as a whole is ninth-youngest in the MLB; their batters, for that matter, also are ninth-youngest in average age in the majors.
High-profile off-season acquisitions Adam Frazier, Jesse Winker, and Eugenio Suárez are also all 30 or younger and have been regular starters in the batting order. Holdovers J.P. Crawford and Ty France, both 27, have been solid with 3.1 and 2.7 WAR figures, respectively, and France was selected to his first All-Star game this year as an injury replacement to Mike Trout. 25-year-old catcher Cal Raleigh has the starting lineup’s second-best slugging percentage and has mashed 26 homers this season, including the walk-off which clinched a playoff spot for Seattle.
The story of the Mariners’ season, however, has been the ascent to superstardom from the 21-year-old Julio Rodríguez.
Julio Rodríguez has burst onto the scene this year with a 20-20 season and a Home Run Derby appearance. Photo from: ESPN.
The call-up of Rodríguez to the big leagues was hotly-anticipated, as the young outfielder from the Dominican Republic was ranked as high as the #2 prospect in all of baseball. “J-Rod” started a little slow (mostly due to sheer bad luck), but got hot in May and never looked back. He won AL Rookie of the Month for May and June, and quickly became one of the game’s most marketable stars with his flashy skills and killer smile.
Rodríguez made the 2022 All-Star Game -- becoming just the sixth rookie in Mariners history to do so -- and participated in the Home Run Derby where his electric run to the finals thrust him into the national spotlight. He’s shown rare five-tool potential all year, slashing a mightily impressive .280/.342/.502 and currently stands at 27 home runs and 25 stolen bases. Even going for 20 HR/20 SB in a debut season is remarkable, as Rodríguez is just the fourth rookie in MLB history and just the sixth Mariner ever to accomplish that feat, but he now stands as only the third rookie in the history of the majors to notch a 25-25 season.
He’s currently the heavy odds-on favorite to win AL Rookie of the Year, at -3000, and would be just the fifth Mariner to win the award (his teammate George Kirby currently has the third-best odds at +6600, interestingly enough). Not only is he an immensely talented outfielder with potential to become one of the game’s top-tier players, Rodríguez has also helped set the culture of the locker room and seems to truly be at home in Seattle.
You’d be hard-pressed to find many other players with more passion for the game than Rodríguez, and his love for baseball and for Seattle shines through so effortlessly in both his play and the way he talks. In one of the Mariners’ biggest wins all season, an 8-7 victory over the Atlanta Braves -- a 100-win team this year, mind you -- Rodríguez was reportedly the vocal presence in the dugout whose confidence and enthusiasm inspired the ninth-inning victory after Seattle had previously squandered a 6-2 lead to be down 7-6. He then backed up his talk, as his solo home run knotted the game back up at 7-7 before Eugenio Suárez ultimately walked it off.
Eugenio Suárez hit a walk-off home run in an 8-7 victory over Atlanta in September. Photo from: Stephen Brashear/AP Photo.
Rodríguez is one of the most fun follows on sports social media, and is always posting support for his team and for his city. He’s fully embraced Seattle, and the fans have embraced him right back. It’s beautiful to see:
Rodríguez was just eight months old the last time the Mariners made the playoffs, a team which was led by a rookie Ichiro Suzuki; after inking a monster 14-year contract extension in August, he has a chance to be the leader of Mariners baseball for an entire generation-- and maybe to become the face of Seattle sports as a whole. Together with a young and rapidly-improving team, as well as with the assets to fill out the deficiencies in the roster, the Seattle Mariners, after two whole decades, have an actual chance to become true contenders again.
Now, though, it may finally be time to write a new chapter in the story of Seattle baseball. At long last, the Mariners have officially qualified for the MLB postseason, ending what was the longest active playoff drought in all of American professional sports (that distinction now belongs to the Sacramento Kings of the NBA). And even more improbable still, this Mariners team has the makings of a ballclub that could be contenders for years to come, and the joyous, infectious culture to go along with it.
The Mariners qualified for the playoffs for the first time since 2001. Photo from: Seattle Mariners via Twitter.
Let’s run through a crash course of Mariners history for those unaware. Founded as an expansion team in 1977, the team has made the MLB playoffs just five times and only won their division three of those times. Most successful during the late 90s and early 2000s, the M’s once made the ALCS three times in a seven-season span, but never once advanced to the World Series; they are one of six teams to have never won a World Series and they are the only active franchise to have never even appeared in the Fall Classic. This is despite having employed some of the all-time greats such as Ichiro Suzuki, Ken Griffey Jr., Alex Rodriguez, Edgar Martínez, Randy Johnson, and Félix Hernández over the years.
The last season in that glorious seven-year run from 1995-2001 -- a time period that encapsulates all of the Mariners’ playoff appearances except for 2022 -- was one in which Seattle won 116 games, tying the MLB record previously set by the 1906 Chicago Cubs. The Mariners led the majors in both runs scored and runs allowed, and Ichiro Suzuki won both the AL Rookie of the Year and AL MVP awards. Seattle then went on to lose in the ALCS to the Yankees in 6 games -- who themselves did not go on to win the World Series -- and thus the Mariners’ playoff drought began.
Suffice to say, it’s been rough. In the over twenty years since that brutal 12-3 Game 6 loss to New York, the Mariners always seemed to take (at least) one step back for every small step forward. Between 2002 and 2019, in the only three years in which they were within even 10 games of winning the AL West -- 2003, 2007, and 2016 -- they followed those seasons up by finishing 29, 39, and 23 games behind the division leader the next year, respectively.
After every promising stretch and right before each accompanying crushing setback was an increasingly miniscule, but nonetheless pronounced hope across the Pacific Northwest that maybe this year will be different, but it never was.
Until now, that is.
The Mariners bucked that two-steps-backward trend in 2021, following up a pandemic-shortened 2020 season in which they were 9 games behind an AL-West-winning Oakland squad with a 90-win season -- their best win total since 2003 -- and missed the playoffs by just 2 games.
But Mariners fans have seen fool’s gold too many times, and so optimism was tempered despite a strong offseason. They won 90 games, yes, but their Pythagorean win total was just 76; per Baseball-Reference, their +14 difference between actual W-L and Pythagorean W-L made them the luckiest team in the majors by a wide margin, with the next-luckiest team having just a +6 such difference. They also had the MLB’s third-best record in one-run games and the most wins in such games, which while exhilarating is often unsustainable year-to-year. All of this signaled that some regression could have been on the way.
The Mariners made multiple quality moves in the following offseason, but their biggest was a five-year, $115 million contract with the surprise 2021 AL Cy Young winner, Robbie Ray. Before 2021, Ray had only posted a sub-3 ERA just once in his career, back in 2017 with Arizona. And continuing with the topic of regression, some had even talked about Ray as one of the biggest regression candidates for 2022, so Seattle handing him that contract heading into his age-30 season raised eyebrows here and there.
Seattle acquired Cy-Young-Winner Robbie Ray from Toronto over the offseason. Photo from: Brace Hemmelgarn/Getty Images.
These new-look Mariners, though, unlike some of the doomed squads of decades past, had already shown resilience in the face of adversity. At the 2021 trade deadline, Seattle traded away their star closer, Kendall Graveman, to the rival Houston Astros -- a move which reportedly made players so angry that they smashed locker room equipment in the aftermath and repeatedly expressed that they felt “betrayed” by the team’s brass. And yet, the squad rallied to have a strong second half of the season, and ended up coming agonizingly close to the playoffs. They could have fallen off -- maybe they should have -- but they hung around in the playoff picture and fought to the bitter end.
So maybe it makes sense that these Mariners battled statistical regression and emerged victorious; with 4 games still to play, the Mariners have actually improved their Pythagorean wins total by 10 and are now locked into an AL Wild Card appearance. Pretty much all of their savvy offseason moves and in-season acquisitions panned out, and they enjoyed breakout seasons from multiple of their young stars. In a year where everything could have gone so wrong, everything has seemingly gone right.
Ray, in truth, has regressed a little, but is still posting a serviceable 3.71 ERA. The Mariners have the fifth-best runs allowed in the MLB as a unit, and quietly boast one of the deepest rotations in baseball. Logan Gilbert (13-6, 3.20 ERA) and George Kirby (8-4, 3.21 ERA), who are just 25 and 24 years old, respectively, have enjoyed breakout campaigns, and the midseason acquisition of Luis Castillo (4-2, 3.17 ERA) has been a masterstroke. Chris Flexen (3.64 ERA) and Marco Gonzales (4.14 ERA) are fine options that round out the six-deep rotation.
Seattle hasn’t just done well this season because they’re plucky-- although they certainly are. General Manager Jerry Dipoto has assembled a talented squad with just the right amount of veteran know-how and youth talent to fill in the gaps. All of Seattle’s starting pitchers are age 30 or younger, and the pitching staff as a whole is ninth-youngest in the MLB; their batters, for that matter, also are ninth-youngest in average age in the majors.
High-profile off-season acquisitions Adam Frazier, Jesse Winker, and Eugenio Suárez are also all 30 or younger and have been regular starters in the batting order. Holdovers J.P. Crawford and Ty France, both 27, have been solid with 3.1 and 2.7 WAR figures, respectively, and France was selected to his first All-Star game this year as an injury replacement to Mike Trout. 25-year-old catcher Cal Raleigh has the starting lineup’s second-best slugging percentage and has mashed 26 homers this season, including the walk-off which clinched a playoff spot for Seattle.
The story of the Mariners’ season, however, has been the ascent to superstardom from the 21-year-old Julio Rodríguez.
Julio Rodríguez has burst onto the scene this year with a 20-20 season and a Home Run Derby appearance. Photo from: ESPN.
The call-up of Rodríguez to the big leagues was hotly-anticipated, as the young outfielder from the Dominican Republic was ranked as high as the #2 prospect in all of baseball. “J-Rod” started a little slow (mostly due to sheer bad luck), but got hot in May and never looked back. He won AL Rookie of the Month for May and June, and quickly became one of the game’s most marketable stars with his flashy skills and killer smile.
Rodríguez made the 2022 All-Star Game -- becoming just the sixth rookie in Mariners history to do so -- and participated in the Home Run Derby where his electric run to the finals thrust him into the national spotlight. He’s shown rare five-tool potential all year, slashing a mightily impressive .280/.342/.502 and currently stands at 27 home runs and 25 stolen bases. Even going for 20 HR/20 SB in a debut season is remarkable, as Rodríguez is just the fourth rookie in MLB history and just the sixth Mariner ever to accomplish that feat, but he now stands as only the third rookie in the history of the majors to notch a 25-25 season.
He’s currently the heavy odds-on favorite to win AL Rookie of the Year, at -3000, and would be just the fifth Mariner to win the award (his teammate George Kirby currently has the third-best odds at +6600, interestingly enough). Not only is he an immensely talented outfielder with potential to become one of the game’s top-tier players, Rodríguez has also helped set the culture of the locker room and seems to truly be at home in Seattle.
You’d be hard-pressed to find many other players with more passion for the game than Rodríguez, and his love for baseball and for Seattle shines through so effortlessly in both his play and the way he talks. In one of the Mariners’ biggest wins all season, an 8-7 victory over the Atlanta Braves -- a 100-win team this year, mind you -- Rodríguez was reportedly the vocal presence in the dugout whose confidence and enthusiasm inspired the ninth-inning victory after Seattle had previously squandered a 6-2 lead to be down 7-6. He then backed up his talk, as his solo home run knotted the game back up at 7-7 before Eugenio Suárez ultimately walked it off.
Eugenio Suárez hit a walk-off home run in an 8-7 victory over Atlanta in September. Photo from: Stephen Brashear/AP Photo.
Rodríguez is one of the most fun follows on sports social media, and is always posting support for his team and for his city. He’s fully embraced Seattle, and the fans have embraced him right back. It’s beautiful to see:
get close by the dougout, I got to make sure I sign it for her!🤞🏽🥹💙 she’s the best! https://t.co/dTcAunBIsB
— Julio Rodriguez🇩🇴🦁 (@JRODshow44) September 5, 2022
Rodríguez was just eight months old the last time the Mariners made the playoffs, a team which was led by a rookie Ichiro Suzuki; after inking a monster 14-year contract extension in August, he has a chance to be the leader of Mariners baseball for an entire generation-- and maybe to become the face of Seattle sports as a whole. Together with a young and rapidly-improving team, as well as with the assets to fill out the deficiencies in the roster, the Seattle Mariners, after two whole decades, have an actual chance to become true contenders again.
The road ahead for the Mariners, while rosy now, isn’t a sure thing to be easy. Outside of their division, the AL field remains tough with the Yankees’ talented core (and a bankroll that will always keep them relevant) and with other plucky young teams on the rise like the Blue Jays, the Rays, and even the Orioles to compete with. Even within the AL West, the Astros aren’t poised to fall off a cliff any time soon, though some of their stars are starting to age. And while Rodríguez’ contract is a major win now, massive long-term contracts to young stars after just one breakout year can sometimes turn sour quickly.
But nothing has ever been easy for the Seattle Mariners. This team has endured enough hardship after 45 years to know that much. There will be growing pains, disappointment, and any number of setbacks-- but they wouldn’t have it any other way. If everything was completely on-course, it just wouldn't be Seattle baseball. And after all, if the seas were always smooth, what need would we have for Mariners anyway? ■
But nothing has ever been easy for the Seattle Mariners. This team has endured enough hardship after 45 years to know that much. There will be growing pains, disappointment, and any number of setbacks-- but they wouldn’t have it any other way. If everything was completely on-course, it just wouldn't be Seattle baseball. And after all, if the seas were always smooth, what need would we have for Mariners anyway? ■
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