I Love this Garbage Team with All of My Stupid Heart

A love letter to the Seattle Mariners

With the start of another MLB season upon us, I feel like I need to defend the dishonor of my beloved Seattle Mariners. I know every baseball fan thinks that their team is the worst possible team that can still be worthy of fandom. The White Sox are coming off a season so bad it made the record books. The Athletics have so little to spend on salaries that they could probably get another pitcher by scouring the stadium seating for loose change.

I, however, am in love with the true wearers of the All Time Worst crown. The Mariners are the shittiest fucking team in the game. This is not merely my opinion. I can prove it with science.

First off, the Mariners started life as a consolation prize. The only reason Seattle got an expansion franchise was that we had sued the league after our previous team, the Pilots, went bankrupt after only one season. They literally gave us the Mariners to settle a lawsuit, not because having a team in Seattle was ever a good idea.

But beyond their ill-fated beginnings, the Mariners have a truly dishonorable record. They are the only team in the game to have never made it to the world series. We're so bad we can't even lose the Big One. We’ve had a few good cracks at it, but we’ve always managed to completely fall apart.

When I was a young kid, just developing my perverted love for this incompetent club and its litany of failure, Ken Griffey Jr. was the cornerstone of the team. We also had future hall of famer Edgar Martinez and a deep bench to back them up. Then, in 1994, the Mariners debuted the 18-year-old Alex Rodriguez. A-Rod. He was the youngest player in the league that year and immediately seemed destined for greatness. With a well-rounded squad led by two future hall-of-famers and a third great player that has only been kept out because of a minor love affair with performance enhancing drugs, the late 90s seemed like our era.

We had a few strong seasons, including a couple of post-season appearances, but we always managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Even with all those incredible players at hand, we could never keep our shit together long enough to get to the World Series.

Then, in 2000, we traded away A-Rod who eventually landed at the Yankees where he played his best ball. That same year, Ken Griffey Jr. left for Cincinnati.

During my high school years, we had one last, brief chance at glory. In 2001, just when it looked like we were turning into a mere feeder team for wealthier clubs, we managed to hire the God King Ichiro Suzuki who led us to an unbelievable 2001 season. We basically swept the league and set an American League win rate record.

It’s hard to overstate how incredible Ichiro’s first season was for Mariners fans. His MLB rookie year (he played 9 years of pro ball in Japan, so “rookie” is maybe the wrong term), he led the league in batting average, hits, and stolen bases. After the bench-clearing losses of the previous year, it felt like a miracle.

We still flamed out in the post season and never even came close to that performance again. Martinez held out until 2004, but his best days were behind him. He retired a true soldier to the cause, having played an incredible 17 seasons for the Mariners. Ichiro eventually left for the Yankees, but we’ve mostly forgiven him.

We went 21 years (the majority of my adult life) after that 2001 season without getting back to the post season again. It was, at the time, the longest post-season drought of any team in any major American sports league. We sucked so hard we were record setting even outside of baseball.

In the mid-2010s things started to look up for a bit. We had a deep bench with an offense led by the mighty Robinson Cano. He was a solid, consistent hitter who took us to a respectable (for the Mariners) .537 win rate his first season. He was signed to a 10 year contract and we seemed to be at the start of a new, dominant era. The best part? We’d actually hired him from the Yankees this time. We even won a bidding war for him.

His second season he was plagued by, of all things, acid reflux, making him possibly the first player to be put on the injured list for a dodgy tummy. (Rumors that he got it from a bad bowl of Ivar’s chowder from concessions are pure speculation, but I personally find them likely.) After a brief uptick, he was caught juicing in 2018, missing most of the season.

We traded him away to the Mets after only four of his ten contracted seasons.

This brings us to last year, when the Mariners staged one of the worst collapses in baseball history. By mid-June, we were ten games ahead of our division and flying high. The glorious Seattle summer was just a couple weeks ahead and I had given in to foolish optimism. Surely, after all the darkness of the past few years and 50 seasons of almost unbroken failure, this could be the year.

Then, a witch in a bog somewhere near Aberdeen burned a lock of J. P. Crawford’s hair and cursed our offense to completely fall apart. They proceeded to lose almost two thirds of the remaining games that year and finish near the bottom of the league.

So I am well versed in disappointment and I am ready for psyche-shattering defeat. I will buy cheap day-of tickets and work from the beer garden while my Mariners ground out at first over and over again. I will get friends together for a game on my birthday and, as I have every birthday for years, watch them blow it in the 8th. I am ready for boring pitching battles that we lose by one crushed home run in the 12th.

I will wallow in the disappointment and still be an enthusiastic fan.

Why? The same reason anyone is a fan of any shitty team. Because as a franchise, we’ve got great fucking vibes. I love taking Seattle’s one useless little subway line down to the stadium, drinking watery Rainier beer ("Vitamin R"), and eating six thousand calories of stadium food. I love the industrial chic of T-Mobile Park, a stadium named after a corporation even more incompetent than Mariners management. I love the working class, grunge music schtick that Seattle hasn’t been able to live up to since the 90s.

The actual vibe of being a Mariners fan watching a team put up performances that would embarrass most triple-A feeder squads is fantastic. I mean, we all collectively agreed to call Cal Raleigh "Big Dumper" because we decided that his incredible ass helped him hit better home runs.

I love this dogshit team.