On Saturday, August 8th, 2026, the Seattle Mariners celebrated 50 seasons of franchise history.
The event, like any Mariners event like this, was top-notch. I’ve seen other teams celebrate things; I’ve seen other teams honor their legends and retire jersey numbers, and no one does it like the Seattle Mariners. The events feel like true celebrations, instead of what they are: true money grabs. It’s hard not to get caught up in them for the sheer quality of their presentation, but the more you see them, the more you realize what they are: a substitute for winning baseball.
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In my longtime Mariners fandom, I’ve often felt like an outsider. I don’t live there. I don’t go to the games. I don’t see the local commercials in between the half-innings. I don’t have to deal with the weird preacher guys outside the stadium with their bullhorns, and I don’t get to eat the hot dogs in the streets outside the stadium. I don’t even have friends who like the Mariners. Yet as the team celebrates fifty years, I can’t help but notice I’ve been there for half of it, and looking back, I have to say: it’s mostly kinda sucked.
But let’s go back to the event, and a more recent event where the Mariners unveiled a new statue.
The Mariners, despite never winning a thing, have one of the greatest legacies in baseball history. Ken Griffey Jr., the definitive player of the 90s and one of the coolest players to ever play the game, is synonymous with the Mariners. Randy Johnson, one of the greatest lefties in the history of baseball, is synonymous with the Mariners. Ichiro Suzuki, the all-time hit king and the actual coolest player to ever play the game, is synonymous with the Mariners. Throw in Edgar Martinez, the greatest designated hitter ever to play the game, Felix Hernandez, Nelson Cruz, and whoever else, and we’re talking about not only one of the best collections of players, but all fun, cool dudes. Any event that celebrates this group is going to be a good time. It just is.
The event celebrated all that came before, with some awkward forcing of today into it. They always do this. When I went to Edgar Martinez’s jersey retirement ceremony, there were lines in Edgar’s speech about how this is the year for the Mariners to break through and make the playoffs. (They didn’t.) Last season, when the Mariners retired Ichiro’s jersey number, there were lines about how the current team had a chance to do something Ichiro never got to do: go to the World Series. (They didn’t.)
This was more of the same. In addition to including some players from the current roster in the 50 Greatest Mariners, Mr. Mariner Alvin Davis gave a little ra-ra speech about the current team. It’s always the same. We’ve never made it to the World Series before, but you can. This is your time. Blah, blah, fucking blah.
I’m not trying to shit on the legends of this team; I think that they probably mean it, but the message is obviously being directed at the wrong people. The message should be sent to the people who paid them to be at this event: the owners, of course.
The powers that be for this team love these events. Whether they owned the team when Griffey was on the team doesn’t matter. They are the ones that get to hold events honoring him. They are saying he’s great, that Edgar is great, that Ichiro is great, that Randy is great, but what they are really saying is: aren’t we great for bringing them here? And when they name the Top 50 players of all time, maybe skipping over some deserving players from the past to include some players from the present, the message is even clearer: aren’t we great? We have new legends on the roster. We did that.
I’m not trying to shit on the stars of the current team either. Bryan Woo is great. Julio, despite it all, has done things that nobody else has ever done. He’s great, maybe not capital G great, but great nonetheless. Cal had the greatest catcher season in baseball history; he’s great. They are all great.
They are also not enough.
The Mariners broke a 20+ year playoff drought in 2022. I sat on the floor and cried when they clinched. It was meant to be the beginning of a new era. Despite the success, despite having extra playoff revenue for the first time in two decades, the Mariners didn’t spend. They traded their closer midseason and missed the playoffs.
Two steps forward, two steps back, and then an unforced step back in 2024 as the team traded multiple players to save money. The key save-now-lose-later move, Eugenio Suarez, hurt especially badly and created a hole at third base that remains open to this day.
In 2025, they filled that hole via trade with… Eugenio Suarez, and made a deep playoff run. The deepest in team history, but he was merely a rental. The hole opened up once again.
It’s worth noting that the Mariners have lost games this season where Alex Bregman hit a home run against them. The Mariners have also lost games this season where Kazuma Okamoto hit a home run against them. These are third basemen who signed contracts over the last two offseasons. Not even “these contracts are breaking baseball” contracts. Just regular contracts.
The Rays swept the Mariners in their 50 Seasons Celebration weekend. This would not be their last celebration of the past, nor their last embarrassment.
On Thursday, September 5th, the Mariners unveiled a statue that was described as a tribute to 2001. For those who don’t know, 2001 was the greatest season in Mariners history. The year they tied the all-time wins in a single-season record. 2001 was also the year in which a terrorist attack took place on American soil. You would be forgiven for thinking that this statue was a tribute to the latter. It was actually a tribute to both.
After 9/11, everything shut down, including MLB. Play resumed on September 18th, and the Mariners clinched the division the next day. At some point during the celebration, the Mariners brought an American flag onto the field, and Mike Cameron and Mark McLemore held it up. It was a sign that the Mariners won, but more importantly, that America was BACK. Or something like that.
I won’t get into how problematic I find celebrating that particular moment in history. I could, but then we’d be talking about jet fuel and steel beams and Pennsylvania, and I’d rather complain about some different powerful people that have tried to ruin my life.
I also won’t get into how this statue and celebration of the greatest season in Mariners history is being used to celebrate cops for some reason at this particular moment in history.
Additionally, I will also not get into the geographical distance between Seattle and the Twin Towers because… You know what, we better move on or I’ll do this all day.
Anyway, the Mariners lost the game where they unveiled this statue. And the next one, and the one after that too, for good measure, which effectively ended their slimmest of slim hopes of turning this wasted year into something.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the Mariners looked to the past again in a year they retired Randy Johnson’s number and celebrated their fiftieth season, because it’s what they always do. As the team fell from the enormous heights they reached from 1995-2001, they have leaned on those years like a crutch. Here are some promotions the Mariners ran in 2005, ten years after they made their first playoff appearance.
- Dan Wilson T-shirt
- Edgar Martinez Collectible Statue
- Jay Buhner Collectible Statue
- Ken Griffey Jr. Collectible Statue
- 1995 Retro Cap Night
They finished 69-93 in 2005, btw.
In 2011, a year the Mariners lost 95 games, they gave away this bobblehead:
Huh.
In their respective in-game interviews, McLemore and Cameron both expressed shock when hearing that the Mariners would create a statue dedicated to them. It’s a great honor and something both should be proud of, but should they really be surprised? Probably not. They are from the past, and the Mariners value the past above all. Every bobblehead of the past will become a statue. Every old star will become a God.
Book your seats now for 10 years of Cal’s 62 home run bobblehead in 2035. Maybe the lockout will be over.
I moved to Seattle in August of 2001. I wasn’t watching baseball that summer, so I can admit that I didn’t even realize what was happening at the time. I attended one game, quickly realized it, and, combined with my love of the area and my affinity for the 90s Mariners, decided that I was just going to be a Mariners fan for the rest of my life.
In 2002, I engaged with the team from beginning to end for the first time, even as I left the state and never came back. I saw them start hot, continuing the good times from 2001; then I saw the teams around them get hotter than ever, and I watched as they missed the playoffs. Everyone got old fast and the Mariners wouldn’t return to the playoffs for over 20 years. That’s been my fandom. I started caring about them right in the middle of their existence, and the good times were already over.
In the years between, I’ve adopted some of those older memories as my own. The 1995 clinching game against the Angels- I actually watched that live, and I remember it fondly as one of the first times that baseball really made me feel something. I saw exactly 1/116 wins live in 2001. Still, all this time, this nostalgia has kind of worked on me.
However, unlike the people who run the Mariners, I never thought that was as good as it gets. I’ve always believed that things could get better. I’ve always believed that reliving these memories was just something that we’d do until the new ones kicked in.
I was watching the Little League World Series recently, and they had this chyron where they asked kids their favorite actor or athlete, then displayed it when they came to bat. It was, honestly, infuriating. Why is a 12-year-old’s favorite athlete Michael Jordan? Why is a 12-year-old’s favorite actor Tom Cruise?
But it also makes perfect sense. It’s the end of history. These kids don’t have their own Tom Cruise. They don’t have their own Michael Jordan. Everything in the world is there to tell you that the past was better. LeBron James will never be as good as Michael Jordan; don’t even ask about Anthony Edwards. The world isn’t designed for a bright future. It’s designed for the future to be more of this: nostalgia for the better days, because there are no better days ahead.
The Mariners, or the people who run them, believe this. They think that because their lives are over, ours must be too. The players don’t. Cal Raleigh absolutely wants to win. I would even say that Jerry DiPoto wants to win. You know, the guy who only signs bad free agent hitters? I believe he would sign a real free agent who can if he could. I believe he would operate differently than he has for almost his entire tenure if that meant he could be the guy who brought the Mariners to the World Series. Everyone here understands what that would mean. They’ve seen how Griffey, Edgar, and everyone else are treated. They know they wouldn’t just be legends; they would replace the ones we have.
I don’t think the people in charge of the Mariners truly care about that or are willing to do what it takes to make it happen. If a 2025 happens, where a bunch of homegrown talent performs well, and they add a rental at the deadline who helps the push, that’s great. They will cash our checks, but they won’t put the extra money they make on the line to do it again. They will only go so far, and that distance will never be far enough in an actually competitive industry. (If only there were a way to make it non-competitive…)
In 2025, we saw what it could be, and it was honestly magical. The Polanco walkoff in the 15th, the Geno grand slam, Dump Here, and everything else. It was so close it hurts me to even write about it, and in the end it was robbed from us by what else? Nostalgia. Dan Wilson, an unqualified manager, failed the team in the biggest game in team history, and the only reason he had the job was that he was from back then.
If there were justice in this world, the people in charge of the Mariners would lose control of the team. For them to get to that height, to come so close with a full stadium and fans all over the world losing their minds, to see that happen, and then make the decision not to do whatever it takes to get over that hump, to reload and do it all over again. To choose the safe, easy money over the unlimited money glitch that a World Series win would bring them. It’s disqualifying. There is not a place in hell hot enough for them.
But this is what they are. This is what they’ve always been, and worst of all, this is what the league wants them to be. For MLB’s dream of a post-lockout future, the Mariners are the dream franchise. Sell tickets whether you try to win or not. The record is secondary as long as people show up to a baseball game. Spend, but not too much. Just enough to give the illusion that this is all on the up-and-up. Don’t win. Don’t lose. Profit. Keep the hogs coming back for more.
You want a salary cap? Every team is now the Mariners. Welcome to hell.
One of the things that not only built my fandom, but made me the baseball understander and enjoyer that I am, is a blog called USS Mariner. It was mostly run by two guys, Dave Cameron and Derek Zumsteg. I learned a lot from this blog, and much of what I learned about baseball outside it came from their recommendations. It was extremely influential to me, and I still think of things from that blog. Like this, posted after the Mariners lost their eleventh game in a row:
Dave Cameron went on to be a big part of the early days of Fangraphs, a site I’ve visited daily for years. Now he works for the Mariners. He’s not the enemy, but he is paid by them.
Cameron was great, but Derek, or DMZ, was always my favorite. Dave was more serious. Derek had a voice, a sense of humor. As a baseball writer, I wanted to be like him. I couldn’t be. He wrote a very good baseball book, The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball, which every baseball fan should read. Eventually, he left the blog to pursue other things. As far as I can tell, he’s not into baseball anymore. A lifetime of Mariner fandom does that to a person. I’ve followed him on Twitter ever since those days, and the last thing I ever saw him say about the Mariners was this:
T-Mobile Park, as a humanitarian gesture, should offer suicide booths so we Mariner fans can end our life-long suffering without having to get home first.
— Derek Zumsteg (@milhous) July 7, 2021
He posted that on a day of a particularly bad Mariners loss, but it could’ve been posted at any time in any season of the past twenty-five years. It is particularly fitting today.
One thing this blog taught me is the difference between wanting to win and being bad at it. The Howard Lincoln/Nintendo era Mariners wanted to win. After they got a taste of 2001, they spent years chasing that high. You don’t sign Richie Sexson unless you want to win. You don’t trade for Erik Bedard if you don’t want to win. Those moves, and others like them, ultimately cost the Mariners the chance to win because they were bad at this, but their heart was in the right place.
This group does not have that mindset. Their heart is blacker than space. Their plan is, seemingly, to start the season with an imperfect roster, hope things go well, and add to that roster during the season. It’s why the same holes exist year after year. It’s not about building the best team. It’s about 54% forever. It’s patching a team together from spare parts, and seeing what happens. The only goal is good enough, and good enough never is.
I have tried three times to write this blog, wasting thousands of words. Sometimes it was too in the weeds, talking too much about specific moves. Sometimes it was too forgiving, almost hopeful. I didn’t want to do that. I wanted my words to be very clear, so let me say this:
What has killed the Mariners over the past twenty-five years is not luck. It is not the powerful teams in the league outspending them. It is not a lack of a salary cap. It is, and has always been, a lack of ambition. An inability to put their money where their mouth is and create a truly great baseball team. They are doing exactly what the league wants them to because they are good little soldiers in the fight against labor. They will gladly waste what could be the final season of this contention window, and then raise their hands when it’s time to vote for a lockout. They do not care about you, me, their fans, this team, their city, or anything else. It’s only profit. I want to believe that holding a big flag outside T-Mobile Park that says 1995 or 2001 won’t get it done anymore because, until it does, things will never change.
The last five years should’ve been the golden era of Seattle Mariners baseball. Everything that has gone wrong, from trading Geno to hiring Dan to not signing any meaningful help in this window, is only the fault of the people at the very top. Things won’t change until they do, one way or the other. The good news is if they ever decide to sell, they will get unimaginably richer than they already are, and the grass won’t necessarily be green on the other side. At least we have that going for us.
The Mariners are very good at a lot of things. They have recently been good at developing prospects. They are good at drafting. They are good at honoring their history. They are good at throwing big celebration events. They are good at creating events that bring fans to the ballpark. They are good at not fully messing things up.
They aren’t good at winning.
It’s too bad because that’s all I ever really want them to do.
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