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POLL RESULTS: Middling marks for the Mariners

Published 9:14 am Thursday, October 4, 2018

By Nick Patterson

It seems Seattle Mariners fans ended up feeling pretty neutral about the 2018 season.

This week’s Seattle Sidelines poll came in the aftermath of the Mariners’ season, which concluded last Sunday. Seattle finished the season 89-73, but missed the playoffs for the 17th straight year. Therefore, readers were asked to grade the Mariners’ season.

Here’s your evaluations:


Add the two together and it’s mostly middling marks for the Mariners. The highest percentage of voters — 46 percent — gave Seattle a C for the season, while another 37 percent gave the Mariners a B. A small, but not insignificant, percentage of voters — 15 percent — thought the season deserved a D or an F, while just 2 percent gave the season an A.

In some ways this is pretty much what one would expect. Yes, the Mariners finished with a good record. Yes, Seattle was in the playoff hunt for most of the season. But ultimately the Mariners didn’t end their playoff drought, and the arc of their season peaked early and receded from there. The combination of positive and negative developments, combined with the sequence of events, seems to justify a middling grade.

But in another way some of these results are remarkable. Seattle finished 16 games above .500, had the fifth-best record in the franchise’s 42-year history, and yet 15 percent of the voters still deemed the season a failure or near failure. Why is that?

The obvious answer is the disappointment from losing what appeared to be a certain playoff spot. In early July the Mariners were neck-and-neck with the Houston Astros for first place in the American League West, and they were eight games in front of the Oakland Athletics for the final wild card playoff spot. At that point, according to FanGraphs.com, Seattle had an 88.3-percent chance of making the postseason. But the Mariners went into a swoon, the Athletics went on a tear, and over the course of three months the standings flipped, with Oakland finishing eight games ahead of Seattle to render the last few weeks of the season academic, at least for the Mariners.

But what I also think it shows is where the mental state of the local sports-watching community stands with regards to the Mariners. It’s always been difficult being a Mariners fan, given the franchise needed 15 years just to post its first winning record. Seattle has made the playoffs just four times and has never reached the World Series, and the voting seems to reflect this reality. In conducting these polls I’ve noticed the responses tend to skew a little more negative when the poll involves the Mariners, and I think that’s the product of the Mariners being such a long-suffering franchise.

The Mariners now enter the offseason with several questions facing the team, meaning it may be a while before Seattle is able to put together a season deserving a better grade.

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