T-Mobile Park, Seattle (MLB #25 - Great Park, Great Fans, Now They Just Need a World Series)

 

 

 

The Seattle Mariners have a great park, an enthusiastic fan base, and a history of some great players. Yet they are the only team in the majors that has never played in the World Series. How is that possible?

T-Mobile and the fans

We've been to T-Mobile Park before (with our friends Bill and Connie Robey about a decade ago), and this game confirmed our first impressions. Some things about T-Mobile:

We’ve taken light rail when we've gone, and in fact, many, many people get to Mariners’ games that way. We’ve got a son who is an airline pilot who had a long overnight in Seattle a couple of weeks ago, and he and some of his crew went to a Mariners’ game, via light rail. I like public transit system that works, particularly in a metropolis where driving doesn’t work.

The stadium has a retractable roof, but even when the roof is closed, the sides of the stadium are open. That wouldn’t work in a place where you worry about the cold (Toronto, Milwaukee, and are you listening Minneapolis?) or the heat (Phoenix, Tampa Bay, Houston), but when the only concern is rain, it’s great. The roof was closed, it was pleasant inside, and we were surprised to walk out into a steady Seattle drizzle.

Although I don’t always eat at the ballpark, I think T-Mobile has some of the best food in the majors. I didn’t find the crepe place that I fell in love with last time, but they have more variety than most places.

They draw big crowds. On a night without a promotion, the Mariners drew 44,198, which is the biggest crowd we’ve seen at a game this year other than the home opener in Phoenix. Part of that is that T-Mobile has the third-largest capacity in the majors, but they drew a higher fraction of their capacity than either of the Cubs games we went to in Wrigley.

The crowd was also enthusiastic. They did do the standard tricks with the scoreboard to encourage crowd noise (like the amazingly clever “MAKE SOME NOISE”), but they didn’t have people running around trying to pump the crowd up. The crowd did do the wave once in the middle of a close game (while they weren’t looking, the Diamondbacks scored four runs to tie up the game), but other than that, I was impressed by how engaged the crowd was.

But they’ve never had a World Series game there.

 A bizarre, somewhat sad history

In one sense, it’s not surprising that the only team never to have played in a World Series would be one of the youngest teams, and in 1977, the Mariners and Toronto Blue Jays were the 25^th and 26^th of the current 30 teams to debut. When thinking about the Chicago Cubs, I calculated the odds of various kinds of failure based on the assumption that every game is a toss-up. The Mariners’ streak of 48 seasons without winning the league is not nearly as remarkable as the Cubs’ streaks of 69 years without a World Series appearance or 108 years without a World Series win.

But in another sense, I find it surprising, because the Mariners have had some great players, sometimes at the same time. In fact, of the 14 teams that have joined the majors since 1961, none is represented in baseball’s Hall of Fame by more players than the Mariners. By way of explanation, every player elected to the Hall of Fame is depicted on a plaque on which he’s wearing the cap of the team he’s most associated with. There are three Hall of Famers with Mariners caps, Edgar Martinez, Ken Griffey Jr. and Ichiro Suzuki. There’s another Hall of Famer, Randy Johnson, who spent a long chunk of his career with the Mariners. And Alex Rodriguez (“A-Rod”) started his career with the Mariners and had some great years there.  A-Rod is not in the Hall of Fame, but likely will be in a few years. By comparison, the Angels have been playing since 1961, and their cap shows up once in a Hall of Fame plaque (Vladimir Guerrero), and the Marlins and Rays, who have been playing since the 1990s, have none.

Three times, the Mariners have made it to the American League Championship Series (ALCS), needing only to win that series to make it to the World Series, but they’ve never won it.

1995

The team that looks like it really should have been the one is the Mariners of the mid-1990s. Many of those great Mariner players were playing together then. In particular, in 1995, Johnson won the Cy Young Award as the American League’s best pitcher. Martinez led the league in many batting categories. Griffey missed much of the regular season with injury but won league Most Valuable Player awards for the Mariners both before and after, and was healthy and playing like the best player in the league during the postseason. Rodriguez was only 19, but was only a season away from being a star.

That year’s Cleveland Indians were also very good, with players like Manny Ramirez and Hall of Famer Jim Thome in their prime. Hall of Fame pitcher Orel Hershier was past his prime, but was spectacular in the postseason, beating the Mariners twice in the ALCS.

The Mariners, with that same core, were again good in 1996 and 1997, but never even made it to the ALCS.

2001

By 2001, Griffey, Rodriguez and Johnson were all gone, but the Mariners had added Japanese star Ichiro. Martinez, though 38 years old, was an excellent designated hitter. They won a league record 116 regular season games. But they again came up short in the league championship series, this time losing to a fading New York Yankee juggernaut four games to one, although three of the losses were by one or two runs. The Yankees, with Derek Jeter, Andy Pettite, Jorge Posada and Mariano Rivera, had won three straight World Series (the last team to do so), and four of the last five, although they’ve only won one World Series since.

After setting a league record for wins in the regular season, you would have thought the Mariners would continue to be good, but somehow, they regressed, and while the made it to the playoffs a couple of times as a wild-card over the ensuing years, they didn’t win the division again until

2025

The closest the Mariners came to the World Series was actually last year, when they lost to the Toronto Blue Jays, four games to three, in the League Championship. They led in the final game into the seventh inning.

It’s not clear whether the current team has any Hall of Famers, but they have a good team. Cal Raleigh had a spectacular season last year, and Julio Rodriguez is very good and still young. Many of the rest of the starters are very good, but don’t look Hall of Fame level. The Mariners have won 85 or more games each of the last five seasons. The only other teams for whom that is true are the Houston Astros and the Los Angeles Dodgers, who have each won a World Series in that stretch. Winning enough to make the playoffs regularly is the best formula for making it to the World Series occasionally, so maybe one of these years the M’s will be playing in a World Series.

Their fans deserve it.

The game: Seattle Mariners 7, Arizona Diamondbacks 6 (10 innings)

The game looked like a rout at the start, but ended up with an improbable walk-off hit in extra innings.

J.P. Crawford, who has been playing shortstop for the Mariners for the better part of a decade, led off the bottom of the 1^st inning with a home run, and when Rodriguez hit a homer in the third and Crawford hit another in the 5th, it was 5-1 Mariners and looked like it wasn’t much of a contest.

But the Diamondbacks, who hadn’t been able to muster much offense against Seattle starting pitcher George Kirby, got three straight hits with one out in the 6^th inning, and Seattle manager Dan Wilson went to the bullpen. That’s when it became interesting. Later in the inning, after the crowd had missed some key plays during the wave, the score was tied, the Diamondbacks had the bases loaded, and Ketel Marte, who has been hitting well enough that he was named National League Player of the Week last week, was batting. It looked like Arizona could take over the game.

Marte struck out. Baseball can be that way.

Seattle’s Luke Raley got a homer in the bottom of the 6^th to restore the lead. Seattle’s pitchers kept allowing base runners, but Arizona couldn’t get the big hit, leaving two runners on base in both the 7^th and 8^th innings. Finally, with the bases loaded in the 9^th inning, Arizona’s Ildemaro Vargas hit a weak ground ball so softly that Seattle first baseman Josh Naylor had to try to barehand it and throw in one motion to get the runner at home. When he bobbled the ball, the score was tied, and the Diamondbacks still had the bases loaded with one out. But a pop up and a ground out later, the game was still tied.

In the bottom of the 10^th, Randy Arozarena of Seattle got the winning hit. The pitch that was so far outside and low that pitcher Juan Morillo was probably worried more about whether the catcher would be able to stop it than about it getting hit. Arozarena hit it hard, though, and the game was over. It was actually great pitching for the situation (two strikes on Arozarena, and trying to get him to chase a ball he was unlikely to hit) and better hitting.

Josh Naylor

Sports figures are often idolized, and often don’t deserve it (Pete Rose is a good example of that). Josh Naylor is a very good, but not great, baseball player, but if some little kid idolizes him, I don’t think they’d be disappointed to meet him.

Naylor played for the Diamondbacks last year, and was traded to the Mariners late in the season last year as they tried to make a run at the World Series. Naylor had a reputation as being a good guy and a good teammate, and my opinion of him hasn’t changed since he changed uniform. He was most obvious in this game for failing to make a tough play on a grounder that tied the game (it was a tough enough play that it wasn’t ruled an error) and getting thrown out at second after hitting a ball off the top of the wall earlier (it took a good defensive play to get him), but I remember him for little things.

In a game we saw in Toronto last year, Naylor hit one to the centerfield wall and the centerfielder sprinted back at full speed, leapt at the wall, but a) failed to catch the ball, and b) was injured in the process by the high-speed crash. After another outfielder retrieved the ball and threw it in, and time was called, the trainer sprinted out to check on the centerfielder, and Naylor ran out from second to do the same thing. I thought it was a class act.

Tonight was the first time Naylor played against the Diamondbacks since being traded, and while he’d only played for them for part of a year, he clearly had made friends. When he went into the field to play first base for the first inning, he gave the first base coach a hug.

In the 10^th inning, just before Arozarena’s game-winning hit, the Diamondbacks decided to walk Naylor intentionally (it was an obvious strategic move, despite the fact that it didn’t work). In the modern MLB, the manager just has to tell the umpire that he wants to walk a player intentionally, and it happens, rather than the pitcher having to throw four wide pitches. Arizona manager Torey Luvollo gave the signal to walk Naylor, and Naylor immediately looked at Luvollo while tapping his helmet and smiling. This is a gesture that wouldn’t have had meaning in the majors before 2026. Now, if a player wants to challenge a ball-strike call, he taps his helmet. In other words, Naylor was challenging Luvollo’s call. It wasn’t an official challenge, but just a little joke with his former manager, in the middle of a tense, tense game.