‘Somebody’s gotta stand up for ‘em’ — time for another heartbreaking Mariners season

For reasons I won’t get into here, I currently find myself living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in what is known as a pre-war building (i.e. it’s old enough that the bathroom sink has separate spouts for hot and cold water).

One of the other residents in the building is a Mets fan. He lives three floors below us, and is quite friendly for a New Yorker, which means he’s actually willing to say, “Hello,” when I greet him in the lobby. While he usually wears a fedora to go outside, every month or two he’ll put on a pro-fit Mets hat which he invariably pairs with a matching warmup jacket.

“You look very official,” I said the first time I saw the get-up.

“Somebody’s got to stand up for ‘em,” he said. “I mean how hard is it to root for the Yankees? They crank out championships on accident.

“But the Mets? Rooting for them takes heart. They’ve only won two titles. Ever.”

I must have audibly snorted because he looked at me with a slightly quizzical expression. I pointed to the navy blue Mariners hat resting atop my sizeable noggin.

“They’ve never even been to the World Series,” I said.

“Who’s that?” he asked.

Another snort. The Mariners.

If rooting for the Mets takes heart, being a Mariners fan requires that and a decent chunk of your self-respect. I willingly fork over both of those things every year at this time when the baseball season starts.

Honestly, it would be easier if the Mariners had remained the losers they were for the first 14 years of their existence. Ineptitude provides its own strain of humor. The Cubs became beloved not in spite of their chronic futility but because of it.

And while there have been seasons in which the Mariners were laughably awful—like that 2008 team that lost 100 games with a $100 million payroll—the real problem is that the Mariners are no longer bad enough to be funny.

They’re actually kind of good. They’ve finished with a winning record in each of the past four seasons, they have one of the very best starting pitching rotations in the entire league and despite their reluctance to do anything of consequence this offseason they very well still may make the playoffs.

In other words: this is the kind of team that is just good enough to really break your heart, and that is the one area where this stupid franchise truly excels.

Every year there are 29 teams that fail to win a World Series. There’s only one franchise, however, that’s failed to do it while having Ken Griffey Jr., Randy Johnson, Edgar Martinez and Alex Rodriguez on the same roster. That’s three future Hall of Famers – all in the prime of their careers – and a fourth who would’ve gotten there had he not been chemically enhanced and enduringly phony.

Then there was that magical 2001 season when Seattle matched a league record with 116 regular-season wins, and Ichiro became the second Mariner to be named MVP of the American League. I was at Yankee Stadium that year at each of the three games Seattle played in the American League Championship Series, the season petering into a disappointment so profound the franchise needed a 21-year break before it could recover sufficiently to reach the postseason.

Over the past 20 years, Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck have been engaged on two separate occasions while the Mariners have reached the playoffs only once, giving Bennifer a 2-1 lead if you’re scoring at home.

Seattle has come close to getting back in each of the past two seasons, finishing two games out of the final playoff spot in 2023 and a single game back last year. That proximity is what made it particularly frustrating that Seattle didn’t do more to upgrade the lineup this past offseason, which is exactly what I meant by saying the Mariners are just good enough to break your heart.

Yet I keep cheering for them, and I don’t even pretend to be embarrassed about it. I suppose it constitutes proof that I am not irredeemably selfish. No one who insists on putting themselves first would keep their wagon hitched to a team such as this one.

I blame this partly on my father. No, he wasn’t a Mariners fan. He was raised in Southern California where he rooted for the Dodgers. But as an adult, he moved to Klamath Falls, Ore., where he became a logger. I was the oldest of his three kids, and we were raised with a specific strain of Pacific Northwest fortitude: You don’t get to quit something because it’s hard or unpleasant or it isn’t as much fun as you hoped.

As a kid, this meant you had to eat your lima beans. As an adult, it means you don’t cheer for your team just because it wins. You cheer for your team because it’s your team, and if your team doesn’t win, well that builds character or something.

So I’m going to keep wearing my Mariners hat in public here on the opposite side of the country, and I might even go find a matching warm-up jacket to add to the ensemble.

As my neighbor would say, “Somebody’s got to stand up for ‘em.”

It takes heart to root for the Mariners, but I’ve found it also helps if you don’t think about it too deeply.

Danny O’Neil was born in Oregon, the son of a logger, but had the good sense to attend college in Washington. He’s covered Seattle sports for 20 years, writing for two newspapers, one glossy magazine and hosting a daily radio show for eight years on KIRO 710 AM. You can subscribe to his free newsletter and find his other work at dannyoneil.com.

This story was originally published March 26, 2025 at 11:27 AM with the headline "‘Somebody’s gotta stand up for ‘em’ — time for another heartbreaking Mariners season."