Eric's Short and Sordid History of Seattle Sports: Part 1 (Mariners)

by user Andersed

Seattle is a beautiful city. It's home to incredible lakes and mountains, the ocean, valleys, and perfect weather (in summer). I suppose it does rain a bit, but only in the winter. The people here were recently voted the smartest in America. The city is home to an outstanding public university, a vibrant local music and art scene, and nearly everyone cares about personal fitness.

Because this is a sports site, I'll gloss over the city's major problems: awful public schools, homeless, suffocating traffic, and poor infrastructure, to name just a few.

Seattle has another problem: bad sports teams, a team that might leave, bad coaches and managers, bad general managers, blase sports fans, ridiculously expensive stadiums, just one modern professional sports title, city government that doesn't care about sports, bad sports owners, and one really, really bad college football team.

For these purposes, I want to just look at the three current major sports teams (Mariners, Seahawks, Sonics, in order of my preference) and their status.

Seattle Mariners - MLB. Established: 1977.

This year: Coming off two consecutive 90-loss seasons, the team wasn’t expected to do much. The young M’s are in 4th place in the AL West, yet only five games out of first place. Felix Hernandez, Jose Lopez, and Adam Jones provide hope for the future.

Recently: Like I said, the recent past hasn’t been positive. The team has always made questionable moves, including trading Randy Johnson, Ken Griffey Jr, Jason Varitek, and Freddy Garcia. However, since 1995 the team has made the playoffs four times after 18 dry years. The Mariners have entered an era where they’re at least expected to be decent every so often. They’re out of the Kingdome, and at least still in Seattle.

Overall: You can’t say much about a team that has never made the World Series and routinely develops stars for other teams, except in Griffey’s case. It’s been pretty bad for those few Mariner fans who have been devoted to this team since 1977.

Best moment: In 1995, the Mariners made an incredible comeback in the West that culminated with a one-game playoff victory over the then-California Angels. Then they went two games to none against the Yankees in the Division Series before again coming back to beat the Yankees in the bottom of the 11th in Game Five. I was at that game, one that helped save baseball in Seattle by getting funding for SAFECO Field. It was an absolutely euphoric atmosphere, obviously, even though they lost to the Indians in the next round.

Worst moment: Unfortunately, many bandwagon Mariners fans would disagree with me. The organization’s worst moment came at the close of their 116-win season in 2001. After a Division Series victory, they fell to the hated Yankees in sorry fashion. Worst of all, most fans didn’t seem to care that much. Oh well, great season, too bad it didn’t last longer. Oh, well. THAT’S NOT OK. In a real sports town, such an abysmal end to the season wouldn’t be acceptable, mostly because it makes the regular season look like a fluke. Ever since, fans attracted to the Mariners by that year have irked me beyond belief.

Date

Sat 07/22/06, 8:32 pm EST