50 in 50: Mariners Cannot Unimaginatively Wallow in Past

Nostalgia is an odd thing. In sports, it typically revolves around something good: a championship, a dynasty, something in the record books for all time. When a team goes a long while without one of those, their fans’ nostalgia becomes somewhere between quaint and delusional (the position along that line determined by the loudness of the fanbase).

But for a team without any championship glory? A team whose most famous moment was not a World Series or even a pennant, but instead a narrow avoidance of relocation? Nostalgia is something else entirely for the Seattle Mariners. At best, it is a way to find meaning in one great gray mass; at worst, it is an anchor holding it all under the waves.

The Mariners’ 50-season celebration on Aug. 9 was remarkably depressing from a certain point of view. The team was and is the only one who has never been to the World Series, yet speakers extolled their history while simultaneously calling upon the players to find that as yet unseen land. There was no hint of irony in any of their voices. 

No hint of turning the page, or doing something new, or a recognition that though there were many good things in the first half century, none of it was ever enough.

This isn’t true from a statistical or scientific perspective, but from a certain sense of cosmic order - the hierarchical, humiliating kind that abhors hubris and self-pity above all other purported vices (perhaps we may in materialist terms call it some subconscious element of human psychology) - the Mariners can never overcome the final hurdle until they recognize that doing so would be something utterly unrooted in their past.