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Twenty Years of Baseball Pain
Welcome to life as a Seattle Mariners fan.
Twenty years. Seattle Mariners fans have not tasted real October baseball since 2001. It is the longest playoff drought in any of the four major sports in North America. The Mariners are still the only MLB team yet to even play in the World Series. Forget about winning one.
Their 2001 team of course won 116 games only to crash and burn to the God damn Yankees in the American League Championship series. Even when the Mariners are good, they are never good enough. Just ask Ichiro, Felix Hernandez, and the other generational talents the franchise wasted over the past twenty years.
The 2021 team overachieved. The club is at least one year ahead of General Manager Jerry Dipoto’s schedule, ever since he announced his plan to take a “step back” in 2019. I decried the move at the time — the horrors of two decades of suffering threatening to prolong themselves — but after 90 wins, I am finally starting to see the light.
Despite the team’s negative run differential, lack of starpower, and pennant race inexperience, the Mariners hung with the big boys from Boston and New York until the very end. In reality though, the wild card excitement was what I should have admitted to myself sooner — false hope. For the twentieth year, playoff baseball was not meant to…
