SEATTLE — I first started covering the Mariners at the end of the 1985 season, when the manager was Chuck Cottier (but not for long), and the modest hope of fans was pinned (futilely, it turned out) on the likes of Mike Moore, Mark Langston, Phil Bradley and Spike Owen.
I headed to the Bay Area from 1987-96, but returned in time to feel the afterglow of the 1995 miracle playoff run. And I’ve been here ever since, chronicling the ups and downs — but mostly the downs and down-farthers — of this organization.
That’s a long way of saying not just that I’m old, which Seattle Times Mariners beat writer Ryan Divish has already told you ad nauseam, but that I’ve been around for a lot of incarnations of Mariners baseball. And I feel fairly confident in saying that I don’t think I’ve seen a Mariner team that has inspired the level of vitriol of this one.
Which got me thinking, why? It’s certainly not the worst Mariners team we’ve seen, not by a longshot. But there are a variety of factors that make it arguably the most disliked, exemplified by the boos that rained down on Wednesday.
Here they are:
— 1. Expectations. This is the obvious one. Coming off such an exhilarating 2022 season, hopes were sky-high. And the Mariners didn’t back off, declaring that the goal now was not just make the playoffs, but win the division and see if they could finally land that elusive pennant.
And so it’s jarring to see them so far removed from that goal, flailing even to stay on the outer fringe of playoff contention. Rather than taking a leap forward, they appear to have taken several steps backward, which is highly demoralizing to a fan base that felt that this could — and should — be a special year. And that makes it far more galling than your run-of-the-mill 95-loss season when everyone knew from the first day of spring training the team had no chance.
— 2. Perception. I think this is the big one: There is an undeniable feeling of, well, betrayal that the Mariners didn’t take the necessary steps to fill the team’s holes and maximize their chances to move beyond a second-round playoff ouster.
Never mind the various explanations for why they didn’t go harder into the free-agent market. The strong belief is that the Mariners had promised that they would go all-in at the point at which it became viable to do so; and that they reneged on that pact at the precise moment when they had all the positive momentum in the world and merely needed a push to get then more firmly on a championship path. And as we all know, perception becomes reality.
— 3. On-field persona. If you saw the emotional release after Cal Raleigh’s playoff-clinching home run, from both the Mariners and their fans, and again after rallying to beat Toronto in the wild-card series, you’d have thought that this was the dawning of a golden era of Mariners history.
They had a likable group of players, including the wunderkind Julio Rodriguez, declared in a Sports Illustrated cover story to be the face of baseball and “the new star MLB needs.” It was a team full of zest and fun, dancing their way into our hearts.
That was then. This is now: a team that appears lifeless, as all offensively challenged teams do. The antics that were once so enchanting — dancing after wins, the home-run trident — merely irk now. They strike out far too much and seemingly have an aversion to situational hitting. Rodriguez is among the biggest disappointments in baseball so far.
Suffice it to say, the fondness factor is waning rapidly. They play a brand of ball that is immensely frustrating.
— 4. History. Everything with the Mariners must be placed in a historical context; namely, 46 years of franchise futility. The playoff drought ended at 20 years, but the World Series drought is ongoing.
While intellectually everyone knows that the 2023 Mariners have absolutely no connection to its underachieving antecedents and that bad decisions made in the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, ’00s and ’10s shouldn’t reflect on the ’20s, it’s undeniable that the weight of the totality of Seattle baseball despair is being carried in the present day, fairly or unfairly.
Perhaps its just subliminal, but the foundation of this current angst started being built decades ago. There is an interconnectedness to the franchise failings, and so the current team must bear the brunt of the cumulative futility.
— 5. Social media. I’m open to the possibility that Mariners fans are no more ticked off than they’ve ever been; it’s just that they have new and instant means of conveying their frustration when it’s still freshly steaming in their brains. In 1985, if you had beef with Mariners management, you had to take out a piece of paper, write a letter, put it in an envelope, affix a stamp on it, and drive to the mailbox. Or vent to the person on the bar stool or at the water cooler — an audience of one, or not many more.
Now you can fire off an angry tweet, write an aggrieved email, or vent on any of the multitude of game threads or comments sections on articles like this one, and it instantly reaches a large community of like-minded folks. And while there’s no doubt that fed-up fans have been around since time immemorial, and around here since Diego Segui threw the first Mariners pitch in 1977, there’s also no doubt that misery loves company. And that fans can get swept up in a vortex of venom that justifies, reinforces, and ramps up their heat-of-the-moment bitterness. Call it an echo chamber, but contempt, even more than familiarity, breeds more contempt.
Put it all together, and you have a Mariners team that people love to hate. I suppose the only solace is that it could one day turn back the other way and spiral in the direction of burgeoning affection. It’s happened before, not very long ago.
How? The answer is deceptively simple and painfully obvious: Run off a streak like last year that salvaged a season when it appeared lost. Nothing wins people back like success.
Until then, though, I suspect Mariners fans will continue to look at the 2023 team through the prism of a massively squandered opportunity, and react accordingly.
