I was seven years old when I had my heart broken for the first time.
Funnily enough, it wasn’t by the Mariners. The year was 2001. The Mariners had lost in the ALCS the year before, but I was too young
to understand what that meant. My brain must have undergone some maturation that winter that had given me the capacity to care, because by March of 2001, I cared about the UW women’s basketball team more than anything in the world.
With the men’s team floundering that year to a 10-20 record, the Husky women were the buzz of Seattle. Awarded a six-seed in the March Madness tournament that year, the Huskies narrowly secured a first-round win over Old Dominion before upsetting three-seed Florida and two-seed Oklahoma in consecutive games to reach the Elite Eight. On March 26th, 2001, in front of thousands of hopeful fans in Spokane, the Huskies took on Southwest Missouri State with a chance to become the first UW basketball team to reach the Final Four since the men did it in 1953. They lost by 17.
I cried myself to sleep that night. I cried a little at school the next day, too. I wasn’t able to articulate why I was so sad. I’m told that I kept telling my parents that “it’s not fair,” but I couldn’t tell you why I thought that loss was particularly unjust.
On October 22nd, 2001, the Mariners lost the ALCS to the Yankees and I cried myself to sleep for the second time. The memories of that season are clearer: I got my first baseball at a game (my dad held me up as a prop to coax Tigers left fielder Bobby Higginson to throw the ball to him in the stands). I jumped up and down on my bed when they won for the 116th time. I got in trouble for writing “Jeff Nelson” and “Arthur Rhodes” on the underside of my school desk in Sharpie. The lasting memory: the tears flowing as the Mariners went down 9-0 in Game 5 of the ALCS.
The Mariners didn’t make me cry for a while after that. The disappointments were more chronic than acute. 2004 was the first year the Mariners were truly bad, but it didn’t carry a singular moment of despair. Rather, the experience of the season was defined by ennui, if that’s something you believe a 10-year-old to be capable of feeling.
That dissatisfaction lasted until 2007, which is the first time the Mariners made me angry. On July 1st, 2007, the Mariners were finally good again. They had just won eight games in a row to bring their record to 45-33, good for four games behind the Angels for the division lead and a game and a half out of the Wild Card. Without warning, manager Mike Hargrove resigned, citing a lack of passion for the game. The team hung around for a little while but ultimately suffered a nine-game losing streak and finished six games out of the playoffs. To this day, I remember reading the resignation news and being angry at Mike Hargrove. I’m still angry at Mike Hargrove.
2010 may have been the season that really broke me for the first time. After an unexpectedly good 2009, the Mariners went out and made real noise in the offseason by acquiring starting pitcher Cliff Lee and infielder Chone Figgins. There was real hype for the team’s pitching-first approach, spawning newspaper covers like this one.
It didn’t work. On April 30th, 2010, I went to a Mariners-Rangers game. Everyone knows how this one went. Lee started and pitched seven shutout innings. Eric Byrnes pulled back on a suicide squeeze bunt. Ichiro was tagged out. Byrnes biked out of the stadium. Now 16 years old, I didn’t cry. I was angry again.
On December 6th, 2013, I was 20, and the Mariners shocked the world by signing Robinson Canó. For the first time, a mega-star had chosen Seattle. My friends and I didn’t stop talking about it for months. For the first time in over a decade, every game the Mariners played in 2014 was meaningful. Going into the last day, they needed a win and an Oakland loss. They won. So did Oakland. And for the first time since 2001, the Mariners made me cry.
On September 20th, 2016, the Mariners played against the Toronto Blue Jays at home. They had come into the series down two games to the Blue Jays in the Wild Card. They narrowly lost game one. They lost game two 10-2. Playoff hopes all but extinguished, I cried in the stands. This time, I could articulate the injustice. The Blue Jays had just been to the playoffs the year before. They had won the coolest ALDS of all time against the Rangers. I could barely remember the Mariners making the playoffs. Why did they get to do it again? Why did I have to be surrounded by Blue Jays fans, mocked by their jubilation as tears streamed down my face? Why did I have to care so much?
In 2017, I went to a game with my grandpa. He asked me about some of the new guys we had. I told him about Mitch Haniger, Jean Segura, and Edwin Díaz. He joked that these had better be the guys that would finally win him a World Series, because he was running out of seasons. The Mariners got so injured that they set a record for most pitchers used in a season. My grandpa died a year later. Needless to say, I cried.
In 2022, the Mariners finally broke through when Cal Raleigh made one swing to end the longest playoff drought in sports. After beating the Blue Jays in the Wild Card round, the Mariners faced off against the Houston Astros in the ALDS. The same Astros that had tormented them for years, that featured cheaters like Jose Altuve and Alex Bregman. The Astros that featured Justin Verlander, who famously mocked Canó in 2018 after he was busted for taking furosemide. That had Lance McCullers, who had earlier mocked the Mariners during an in-season series, stating “this is their World Series.” Good things weren’t supposed to happen to poor sports.
The Mariners got swept. I didn’t cry. I wasn’t angry. I felt numb.
In 2023, they couldn’t keep pace with Houston. In 2024, I tuned out in early September when it was clear that it wouldn’t happen. I was close to doing the same this year before the Mariners made a magical run, going 17-1 and clinching the division for the first time since I was seven years old, seventeen years before my grandpa died.
On October 6th, I went to Game 2 against the Tigers. I was a nervous wreck the whole time, holding my dirt-cheap, already-falling-apart, possibly carcinogenic Mariners give-away towel to my face for hours before shouting myself hoarse as Jorge Polanco singlehandedly defeated Tarik Skubal.
On October 12th, I was somehow even more nervous. I stood for five straight hours before Polanco again delivered me from angst to ecstasy.
I watched almost every pitch of the ALCS. I watched in disbelief as the Mariners made Games 1 and 2 look trivially easy. I repeatedly refreshed the Fangraphs playoff odds page after Game 2, trying to will the Mariners’ 85% chance to win their first ever pennant into reality.
I watched, trying to feign unconcern, as George Kirby was shelled in Game 3. I watched with creeping horror as Max Scherzer sliced and diced the Mariners in Game 4.
I yelled from home when first Cal Raleigh, then Eugenio Suárez, hit home runs in Game 5 to deliver the Mariners their final win of 2025.
I watched in dull disbelief as Logan Gilbert was outdueled by Trey Yesavage in Game 6. As the FOX announcers re-told the same tired story about the Mariners passing on Yesavage in the draft last year.
I counted down the outs as the Mariners desperately clung to a 3-1 lead in Game 7. 15 outs to go. 12. Nine. They were at eight to go when a former Astro, of all people, put a dagger into hundreds of thousands of hearts, then screamed with joy at having done it. It felt cosmically unfair. It felt right.
Hundreds of thousands were left wondering “what if?” What if Kirby, Gilbert, or Luis Castillo hadn’t each suffered a meltdown this series? What if J.P. Crawford hadn’t thrown away an out with a bunt in Game 7? What if the Mariners had somebody better than Leo Rivas to follow J.P.’s bunt? What if Dan Wilson hadn’t tried to squeeze a third inning out of Bryan Woo? What if Andrés Muñoz had faced Springer instead of Eduard Bazardo? What if they’d walked Springer? What if Randy Arozarena was Playoffs Randy instead of the Randy we got?
What if Julio Rodríguez hadn’t swung at the last pitch, and had instead walked? What if Cal Raleigh had gotten one more shot?
What if I’d just been born in a different goddamn city?
In and around Seattle, there are thousands of children who cried themselves to sleep two nights ago. There are a thousand grandpas and grandmas who don’t have many more chances. There are probably some for whom this was their last chance. Toronto entered MLB at the same time as Seattle and has two titles. Why is it their turn again? When is it ours? Do we get one?
Instead of Cal embracing Josh Naylor, Julio being dogpiled like Griffey was thirty years ago, our final memories are of Cal Raleigh trying to give a professional interview while puffy eyed from crying. Of Bryan Woo trying to make sense of the misery while Julio screams in anguish in the background.
Now I’m 31, and the Mariners have made me sad and angry at the same time. I know that it will be okay. That in the grand scheme of things, this doesn’t really matter and I’m lucky to think that it does. But right now, all I can think about is the little boy who cried himself to sleep 24 years ago. I wish I could tell him that we’ll get there one day.
I still don’t know whether I’d be telling the truth.
