This might be the most buzz the Seattle Mariners have had since the early days of Ichiro.
It’s a lot of fun, and going to be a fun summer, I think. The pandemic is finally easing up. People will be traveling more than they have in years — in fact, after seeing Olympic National Park last week, I believe that has already started.
And people will be packing T-Mobile Park this summer. At least they should be. The Mariners are an exciting team. I’m so looking forward to this season.
Last year, the Mariners somehow won 90 games. I say “somehow” because they were extremely young, and had an absolutely terrible team batting average of .226. That was the lowest team batting average in all of baseball.
I give Mariners management a lot of credit for realizing that last year’s team was flawed and going out and getting really aggressive during the offseason. First they brought in solid All-Star second baseman Adam Frazier, signed Cy Young winner Robbie Ray from the Toronto Blue Jays, then absolutely fleeced the Cincinnati Reds, bringing in a big slugger at third base, Eugenio Suarez, and an All-Star outfielder, Jesse Winker.
And they have the Athlon Sports No. 1 prospect in all of baseball, Julio Rodriguez.
The Mariners are showing they’re all-in for 2022. I like it. It’s not something you often see from this franchise.
Meanwhile, the rest of the American League West looks weaker. The Texas Rangers are awful, the L.A. Angels are awful once you get past Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani and the Oakland A’s are tanki… er, I mean rebuilding. Even the Houston Astros may be down a bit after they lost Zach Greinke and Carlos Correa. Now is the time.
The Red Sox are always going to be my first team, but I had just moved to the Pacific Northwest in 1994 just when the Mariners were beginning to rise out of their 20-year expansion team morass.
I remember the excitement around the team in their improbable run in 1995. Yup, I was actually watching the playoff game against the Yankees in which Edgar Martinez hit the double into the corner, scoring Ken Griffey Jr. from first base. And I was sold on the Mariners. I became a true-blue fan that day.
I was there for the maddening days of Bobby Ayala. The Mariners had a monster team offensively, hit more than 200 home runs every year in the final half-decade of the Kingdome. They had a whole bunch of future Hall of Famers on those teams, and a couple of guys close to the HOF in Jamie Moyer and John Olerud, yet they never made it to a single World Series. They even won 116 games one year and didn’t make the World Series. I spent a lot of Sunday afternoons down on South Beach on San Juan Island listening to Dave Niehaus call those 10-9 games that the Mariners always seemed to blow in the end.
Honestly, in the 2000s, I lost interest in the Mariners. They went from maddening to awful. They had one of the worst offenses not just in baseball, but in the entire history of baseball. They became boring. They completely wasted the talents of Felix Hernandez and Ichiro. The team lost its way.
So, it’s been a frustrating, exasperating journey ever since Griffey rounded third base and knocked the Yankees out of the playoffs. A lot of disappointment. A lot of Bobby Ayala. A lot of bad free agent signings. A lot of straight-up awful teams.
I hate to say it, but I really believe last year’s team was lucky. That’s the only way you hit .226 as a team and win 90 games. They won a lot of games with only five or six hits by belting some clutch home runs in the eighth or ninth inning. I could see the team being better this year and yet winning fewer games because you simply can’t sustain luck.
But as I said, the AL West is just there for the taking. They might have caught lightning in a bottle last year, but with the opening pitch Thursday, hope springs eternal. And there’s lot of hope this season.
________
Sports Editor Pierre LaBossiere can be contacted at plabossiere@peninsuladailynews.com.
