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.
Such a recognition cannot and will not mean total iconoclasm. To declare Year Zero and say with an angry voice, “we have no history” would be a rancid display of self-pity.
But what they actually did, which was to exhort their current core to win it all while including them in the list of 50 historic players who never got to the biggest stage, was self-pity of a different kind. It was a declaration from the organization that they could not imagine anything except failure. It was a display that they somehow saw 1995 as something in the same tradition as a title, that they saw a supposed Cal Raleigh, Julio Rodríguez-led World Series as the continuation (or even the echo) of what Dan Wilson and Edgar Martinez did all those years ago.
In any sport, teams who break long-standing legacies of losing recognize that their championship core is something new. The 2016 Cubs were not the revenant spirits of Dave Kingman and Sammy Sosa, they were a thing unseen on the North Side since Johnny Evers and Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown.
Contrast this with Cleveland, a city that remembers Rajai Davis’ vain home run that October and Francisco Lindor’s similarly vain homer in the 2017 ALDS. Contrast this with the pre-2016 Cubs, whose most pertinent recent memory was a fan who didn’t actually commit fan interference.
If the Mariners are ever to win a World Series, they must realize that the greatest moment in their history was not “The Double”, because if they ever do make it to the Elysian Fields, the greatest moment in their history is yet to happen. Declaring “The Double” (or Eugenio Suárez’ 2025 grand slam) the greatest moment is a resignation to the idea that the best the M’s will ever get is a stay of execution.
Such a resignation was clear when majority owner John Stanton’s greatest pitch to the fans was not that he would do everything and risk anything to win a championship, but merely that he would clear the baseline and keep the team in Seattle.
A stay of execution is better than the alternative; the city can attest to this in the gaping hole in its heart where the Sonics used to be. But it is not the most that this team can do. If they want to, they can find it in themselves - from ownership to the front office to the players - to go the extra mile and do something they have never done before.
There are baby steps being made, at least. Dan Wilson, hired due to an “interview” that was 35 years long instead of an actual talent evaluation, left his role as manager in a still-indeterminate way at the end of the 2026 season. The team is now looking for someone with an understanding of the modern game who can create a clubhouse culture of accountability rather than a nostalgic figure who lets the players do what they want.
But it is still evident that the organization lacks the will to leap into the unknown, at least at the top level. Stanton’s comments made it very clear he believes that what he is doing is enough, and while Dipoto seemed to mostly grasp what went wrong this year in hindsight, he hasn’t yet demonstrated an ability to stem issues when they come up during the season or a willingness to change any of the fundamental problems of his approach.
If this ownership group, front office, and player core is going to win a title, they will all need to recognize the novelty of doing so. It won’t mean letting the past die on the vine, but it will mean recognizing that they cannot cower completely within their past and still expect to do something they have never done before.
