It’s a common misconception that we can’t see the stars during the day because the Sun is too bright, the relative luminosity of our proper-noun Sun overpowering the distant, cold light of the rest of the galaxy’s stars. It seems intuitive – the human eye is limited in the range of the light spectrum it can distinguish at once, and exceptionally good at adjusting to levels of ambient light. You can’t see a candle if it’s in front of a spotlight, for example, and our pupils contract and dilate in the dark
and the light.
The difference is slight, but it’s a different concept – it’s actually the sky that washes out the stars until night falls. The Sun’s light hits the atmosphere, the layers of gas that makes our planet inhabitable, and it scatters, creating a strong, cohesive blanket of diffused light that hides the stars from us.
The overall suckiness of this 2026 Mariners team has felt like a relentless sun beating down on us, meeting and scattering across the atmosphere of a unyieldingly and increasingly foul discourse. To be clear, I can’t say that I 100% blame The Discourse – between players playing hurt, underperformance from stars, performance from reinforcements, concussions, managing decisions, on and on and on, there has been plenty of fuel for the fire. But this year, it’s felt like the little moments of joy, the stars of this season, have felt few, far between, and hard to see.
In the final weekend of the season (for Seattle, at least), both the Mariners failure to make the playoffs and the farewell festivities for Rick Rizzs have shone brightest. The fact that this is likely our farewell to J.P. Crawford, Mariner, has felt a little bit lost in the scatter.
We got to go to the game last night in person, only our second game of the year (I once again publicly manifest a high-speed rail between Bellingham and Sodo), and as we sat down, I realized that more likely that not, this was the last time we’d see J.P. Crawford play as a Mariner, in person.
I had the same thought as he came to the plate in the seventh inning and tapped it with his bat: this was the last J.P. AB we would get. I hoped it would be a good one.
When he launched that ball, into the right field stands a couple of sections over from us, deep into the night sky, it felt for just a moment like he was launching us out into space, above the atmosphere, where we could still see the stars, where we could still feel joy at a ballgame, where baseball could feel like this again. He brought us one last moment of magic in a mundane season. He, like he has since 2019, made Seattle baseball fun.
The time for full J.P. tributes will come. But today, I’m still basking in the joy of that perfect home run.
