By Ryan Divish / The Seattle Times
SEATTLE — The original plan for this story was to write about Julio Rodriguez as the ebullient host of the 2023 All-Star festivities at T-Mobile Park.
The Mariners’ “Young Simba,” welcoming a national audience to his kingdom.
But baseball can be cruel and mocking when it comes to the most thought-out plans and even more disruptive and callous to budding superstars expecting to become transcendent players.
And part of that story would be about the Mariners and this season of expectations. Even with the uncertainty about Julio making the team, which he later did as a replacement for Yordan Alvarez, he’s still part of a young nucleus of players that seemed poised to push the organization closer to a new “golden age” of baseball in Seattle, similar to that stretch from 1995 to 2001, coincidentally the last time the All-Star Game was here.
So that would’ve worked.
But this first half of the season has felt more leaden than golden. The Mariners’ goals of competing for a division title died before July and the secondary expectation of reaching the postseason is fading but not erased.
One season does not an era make in either direction. But it also wasn’t working as a pivot subject.
Instead, this story is now about what it probably should’ve been about in the very beginning. A constant that has withstood the torturous nature of baseball with the struggles to find seasons of success and enduring too many considered failures.
This fan base.
This stadium.
This city.
With the All-Star festivities coming to the Northwest for the first time in more than two decades, it will offer a national audience, both on television and in person, an extended glimpse of what people here have long known and want the rest of the baseball world to understand moving forward.
Seattle has been, is now and will remain a city that truly adores baseball on similar levels as places like St. Louis, where fans somewhat self-righteously dubbed themselves the “best fans in baseball,” or metropolises like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.
***
The first pitch of the Mariners’ game vs. the Tampa Bay Rays on July 2 came on one of those perfect cloudless, sun-drenched summer afternoons by Puget Sound, where descriptions like pleasant and comfortable can’t be used enough.
As Perry Como sang, “The bluest skies you’ve ever seen in Seattle.”
With the grass of T-Mobile Park looking greener than a golf course fairway in the impossibly bright sunshine, a crowd of 35,546 fans eschewed early holiday weekend travel to watch a Mariners team that has been largely disappointing this season try to salvage a homestand with an unexpected series win over the Tampa Bay Rays, the team with the best record in baseball.
In the new press box that now carries his name in honor, Randy Adamack, the former vice president of communications who has been with the team since 1978, made a simple gesture to the crowd outside when asked what makes Seattle an underrated baseball town.
“You see it right now,” he said.
Indeed, it was just days before that the Mariners lost two straight games to the lowly Nationals, one of the worst teams in baseball, in lifeless and frustrating fashion. In both defeats, they were loudly and rightfully booed for their failures in the moment and in the first 80 games of the season.
If hitting rock bottom made a sound, it was the chorus of boos that rained down upon them.
And yet, many of those same people returned for the weekend series against a Rays team that is long on baseball talent and season success but short on recognizable names and stars to the average fan.
For three games, aided of course by fireworks and giveaways, the Mariners, who have done little to inspire attendance, drew announced crowds of more than 35,000 for each of the games. Fans weren’t coming to see Tampa Bay; they came to see a team that has irritated them at times, infuriated them at others, provided glimpses of greatness, allowed for expectations of success, inspired unrealistic hopes and left them wanting more, no matter how painful it might be.
It’s been this way for far too many seasons.
Such is baseball. Such is love.
Sing it, Mr. Como:
“Full of hopes and full of fears
Full of laughter full of tears
Full of dreams to last the years in Seattle”
“We’ve talked in the past about the patience of this group, but what we don’t talk enough about is the passion of this group of fans in Seattle,” Mariners chairperson John Stanton said. “People care deeply about what we’re doing. They follow us closely. They’re knowledgeable, and they also come out. We have had consistent fans. You know, obviously the pandemic took a big dip, but you know, we had 2.3 million fans here last year. We will have around 2.5 million fans around here this year for us. Those are great numbers for mid-size to slightly below mid-size market.”
Like any fan base, yes, even St. Louis, winning is still the preeminent draw for a team’s fans.
Back in 2001, they sold out 59 of their 81 home games, including 36 straight, and 36 sellouts the next season.
A winning baseball team will turn each day’s game from the background soundtrack of summer to an attention-grabbing appointment.
“Baseball is special,” said Kevin Martinez, Mariners vice president of marketing and communications. “It’s every day. We’ve seen how baseball grips this town. We saw it last year. We’ve seen it in the past. Fans build their schedule around the daily drama of the game and the players who create the moments and memories. There’s nothing like baseball. “
Last season’s 22-3 run into the All-Star break, including a 14-game winning streak, was an invigorating stretch as good as any since 2001. When fans packed into the park Sept. 30, 2022, to see the Mariners try to clinch their first postseason berth since 2001, and the subsequent celebration from Cal Raleigh’s cathartic walkoff homer, which included fans never wanting to leave the stadium and the players feeling the same, it reinforced that relationship between the two.
It was sublime.
“I’m lucky because I get to see it in the winter as well living here,” pitcher Marco Gonzales said. “We have family and friends here. There are so many people here that somehow they know everything about baseball. I can feel it. I’ve seen in person with people I know. It’s just the buzz here in the city, going into restaurants, going into stores — people talking about the Mariners, people talking about watching baseball and loving baseball.”
It’s an intellectual fan base that embraced new analytics and advanced thinking from baseball blogs before it was cool, and everyone had a blog. Thanks to fans-turned-writers like Dave Cameron of the USS Mariner and Jeff Sullivan of Lookout Landing. Both men turned their passions into analyst jobs for MLB teams. Cameron went to work for the Padres in 2018 and came home to work for the Mariners in 2021 while Sullivan has been with the Rays since 2019.
They helped nurture fans who thought beyond typical baseball tropes and long-held narratives.
When it comes to the Mariners, there is no passive aggressiveness, just passion and emotional aggression for a sustained success that has been absent for too long. They’ve earned the right to be fatalistic with repeated cries of “Same old Mariners!!” but most can’t or won’t stay that way.
“They show up and they care and even in some of the down years,” Adamack said.
They believe even when they’ve been given few reasons to do so.
“There’s a lot of very deep-rooted baseball fans here,” manager Scott Servais said. “From the beginning of the Mariners to when the Mariners almost left to the building of this ballpark, the iconic stars that have come through here, so there are a lot of baseball fans here, and it runs very deep.”
***
Maybe it’s the stadium that they get to call home for 81 games a year that helps keep them coming back. It certainly doesn’t hurt.
Starting with a groundbreaking in 1997 and finished in 1999, Safeco Field, as it was called then, was a forest-green palace with open air and a retractable roof that made watching even the worst of the Mariners teams seem palatable, particularly in June, July and August.
Designed with a throwback look and feel while adhering to the needs and desires of the modern fans at the time, it offers constant views of the playing field from its wide concourse and an overall pleasurable viewing experience.
“If I was a fan, and I’m trying to check stadiums off my list, this would be at the top for me,” Gonzales said. “It’s just the environment and the weather. I’ve been to a couple Mariners games before I was even in pro ball. I just remember it being such a fan-friendly place.”
And when the team is winning regularly, home games turn into the only place to be during the summer, attracting an eclectic mix of fans. It’s a perfect place for young kids and just as fitting for their grandparents.
“It’s the thing to do in the summer,” Gonzales said.
In its 24th year of existence and now called T-Mobile Park due to naming rights change, which includes the addition of the company’s magenta to the ballpark color scheme, the place with a few cosmetic enhancements and upgrades has aged gracefully and better than most movie stars.
“I’ll give a lot of people a lot of credit for making it a priority to keep and maintain the building and improve it,” Adamack said. “There’s been a commitment in that we want this ballpark to last 100 years. We want it to be to Seattle what Fenway is to Boston and what Wrigley is to Chicago. They’ve got a 100-year head start on us, but I think we’ve made a lot of progress.”
The view from Lookout Landing on the third deck, encompassing the waterfront, brings peace. The look of the downtown skyline from the 300 level shows the city’s growth. South Alaska it is not. Forgive the smell of the garlic fries.
***
Contrary to some reports, the city in those views isn’t dying. It’s very much alive. But it isn’t perfect. No, it isn’t the same city as it was in 2001 in both good and bad ways. Really, what city is the same as it was two decades ago?
The increase of more than 1 million people in the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue area since 2001 and the emergence of a little company named Amazon have yielded changes to the population base.
Like most major most cities, there were struggles and issues that were amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic. But it’s certainly something more than the videos of fish being thrown at Pike Place or political protests.
Similar to their devotion to the baseball team, with its imperfections, the residents won’t allow for outsiders to criticize or mock their city. It’s still theirs and not yours to besmirch.
The All-Star Game offers a chance to show that it’s more.
“It’s awesome for the city and the Pacific Northwest,” Servais said. “There’s so much about the city and this community that people don’t know. It’s very diverse. The All-Star Game really brings all the biggest names and celebrities. Everybody that touches the game at all will be here. The city has done a lot of preparation for it. Our organization has worked extremely hard. They will see it. It will be great for our city.”
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