The Mariners have announced that as part of their 50 Seasons Celebration Night, when the top 50 players in team history will be welcomed at T-Mobile in a ceremony before first pitch, Alex Rodriguez will be in attendance.
It’s been 27 years since A-Rod left Seattle in free-agency and became a villain in the eyes of many Seattle sports fan, a wound that may still be left unhealed.
“I’m not sure if there will be cheers…well, I guess there will be cheers because my family will be with me,” he said in a conversation
with Brock and Salk on 710ESPN with a chuckle. “They’ll have to be cheering loud to mute out the other 45,000 booing out of their mind.”
Lookout Landing staffers (and friends) met to discuss the impact of his fateful decision and the legacy that A-Rod has left in Seattle.
Evan: I’m relistening to the ARod segment and it’s so weird to hear the narrative be about him as a Seattle baseball pariah. Like dude…you are not a top 50 sports villain in this town. We don’t think about you (even if we should). In terms of Mariners specific antagonists I don’t even feel like he ranks very high.
Eric: I think about him, in regards to how fucking dumb the FO was to not make him THE guy after that 2000 season
Evan: I dont remember his parting as being all that contentious? They offered him 90 million compared to 250 million dollars.
Eric: Well the fans hated it bc uhhhh greed? Money? I dunno. But also the FO didn’t exactly make him feel like he could either a) be THE guy as Griffey was making it clear he wanted to go home and b) made a deal to keep them both somehow.
If they kept one or both of them, they win the 2001 World Series.
Evan: People boo him because he’s a cheater, not because he left the Mariners. I guess maybe what I remember as frustration with ownership and Pat Gillick for dismantling that 2001 team other people remember more as player specific animosity for leaving? IDK, my clear memory is that the ARod falling out really came after his suspension from the Yankees. That was the real watershed moment.
Zach Mason: Respectfully, you have no idea. This was extremely contentious. I’ve never heard mariners fans boo louder. People were throwing Monopoly money on the field. Now on the merits I think views about players taking the most money have changed over the past quarter century. But about what happened at the time you’re as wrong as you’ve ever been. Personally I love A-Rod and treasure my memories of him.
Evan: I remember it was contentious at the time, but it sure does feel like it’s come out in the wash given how the remainder of his career went. He’s a bigger villain in several other places, it feels small potatoes here in 2026. Baseball is a very different, distant landscape since that contract was signed.
Maybe the way to put this is he doesn’t feel, to me like OUR villian. We have Jesse Winker and Milton Bradley and Carlos Silva at home.
John: I am with ZAM on this one. He is top five still, and in terms of actual players I don’t think there are any competitors for most hated former Seattle athlete. The Monopoly money thing is one of the most iconic pieces of MLB history of the past 30 years.
I find it distasteful because my perspective has changed significantly since I was an angry six-year-old, which is not necessarily the case for many fans, but it was different than someone coming here and just sucking or disappointing. He was an all-time great and chose to leave to get more money, on the heels of Randy choosing to leave in a similarly heated, but slightly more understood, way, and Griffey doing the same where he also was subject to a lot of frustration, but was given the grace of a hero who just really wanted to go play at home. A Rod got none of that.
I think the closest comparable is Russell Wilson, but not only did he already win a title, he had declined enough to where it wasn’t quite as important that he wanted to leave, to say nothing of him getting traded to the other conference being quite different than signing with a direct divisional rival.
Evan: IDK, I feel like ARod immediately moved on from a Mariners pariah to a national entity and his shame lies with the Yankees. The Mariners stuff is very much a historical footnote at this point. Russell Wilson is, the exact comp in my mind though. We agree on that. Slightly different tracks, very similar arcs.
John: I agree that his national identity as a villain grew primarily once he became a Yankee. But he never did a thing to mitigate his villainy here, and he committed the three cardinal sins of an athlete in terms of turning fans against you without doing actual crimes against humanity:
- Greed (taking the money from TEX),
- Disloyalty (spurning Seattle for a division rival, then compounding that by going to the Evil Empire),
- Cheating (repeatedly and at the apex of the sort of distrustful view towards baseball stars re: PEDs)
Evan: I don’t disagree with you, I just think that’s our very small angle and the rest of baseball doesn’t really remember it that way or any way. The zeitgeist remembers him as a Yankee and his Yankee story first and foremost, no matter the truth.
Ryan Blake: I’ve always wondered why ARod gets hate and Junior is beloved but I don’t know enough about how either left. I loved ARod growing up because I thought it was cool he used to play for the Mariners and they were otherwise irrelevant and didn’t realize until later there was animosity about him disappearing.
Isabelle: ARod gets the hate because he was so open about it being money-driven, and that felt like a particular betrayal vs Junior leaving to be nearer to his family. It just felt like such a keen betrayal, particularly for a region and fanbase where loyalty – through good and so much bad – is prized.
Nick T: The people of Seattle would’ve found all the grace in the world for him if he’d shown them a single reason to give it, and he didn’t. He could’ve literally made something up and gotten away with it!
Evan: You’re completely right, and I would be mad about it, if I wasn’t convinced he was truly one the most deranged people in the sport. So my feels are conflicted.
Nick: Yea and he bailed on the people who were trying to help steer him in the right direction
Amanda Lane: Just had to pop in and drop a little something:
The Hero Becomes the Villain: Alex Rodriguez Returns to Seattle
If you weren’t around then, you cannot possible understand without taking in the context of everything then. It simply cannot be understood through today’s lens at all. This was when athlete contracts in every sport were starting to get insane, when the cost of attending games was skyrocketing, when the Mariners lost Randy Johnson in 1998 and Ken Griffey Jr in 1999, then Alex in 2000. I say boo about him on Bluesky and end up blocking at least a few people because people are still INSANELY angry over him leaving. He was booed more than anyone else in the history of Seattle sports when he came back. And he wasn’t just booed here, it was everywhere. But nowhere as loud as here.
So much of the feeling of betrayal came from how deeply he was loved here, and how he said he wanted to stay and it wasn’t about the money, he just wanted to play for a winner. Then he signed for that much money with a really sucky Texas team. AND, something a lot of people hold on to too, is after he signed with Texas he was somehow roped into writing a letter urging Boeing to relocate to Dallas.
Evan: I will be 37 this month. I remember. Maybe it’s social media and the relationship people have with athletes now and the proximity, but it just feels so much closer now than it did 20 years ago, for me anyways. I wrote Arod a letter on his personal website page asking him why he left when I was in 4th grade, in front of a cheese grater Macintosh computer, in between sessions of WordMuncher and MathBlaster. It feels like so much has changed. Maybe I don’t remember it like I should.
John: I think if it happened now it would be a big deal and also he’d be not nearly as uniquely villainized. Like Kyle Tucker got booed massively the other day in his first return to Chicago and his postgame quotes were honestly fabulous and kinda heartbreaking. Basically “I played through a broken bone and multiple injuries to try and be good here, it didn’t work out and I wish it had. I get how passionate they are here, I’m glad they’re contenders too,.”
Amanda: Something I think about now too, sports writers drove a lot of public opinion about sports and they had been vocal for a long time about rising salaries and how it was ruining baseball. When Alex signed that contract with Texas, it had only been about 20 years of full free-agency. So many of those writers were working in the days before any free agency.
John: Exactly Amanda. My brothers are in their early 50s, they were in their early 30s when this all went down, they were huge baseball fans and diehard M’s fans. The first 10+ years of their lives, free agency didn’t exist!
Evan: It’s like when people say “you’re as close to Cleopatra as she was to the building the of the pyramids” but it’s “you’re as close to Carlos Triunfel as you are to free agency.”
ZAM: Ultimately, there’s four things going on here.
1. What happened at the time.
2. How you personally feel about it/how you think people should feel.
3. How most people feel about it now.
4. What A-Rod’s experience was.
I think 1 and 4 are very closely connected and that’s what sparked this conversation. I’m not surprised that A-Rod feels like there’s baggage. He’s obviously a messy bitch who loves drama in all facets of life (what was that post-JLo break up insta post with I wanna say Coldplay?), but I think anyone would have a hard time not dwelling on what it was like to come back here in the early 00s.
Also, please don’t put in the newspaper that I called A-Rod a messy bitch who loves drama.
