On Friday, my son got braces. He smiles when I pick him up from school. Most parents and half the children hustling away wear some article of clothing with a cream or yellow trident emblazoned on the fabric. Like we’re ready to march, together, a mile or so down to Lake Washington, for an epic Battle of the Seas.
What’s happening here is rarer than that, even.
But Blake isn’t here to show off his teeth. He has a question. It’s about sports.
This might not seem unusual; his father, a sports writer; his schedule, our conversations, his life, all, in so many ways, revolving around games, athletes, playoff runs. Like this one.
This is quite unusual. Because of my job, Blake has always run from traditional sports, toward climbing, parkour (seriously), martial arts, swimming. As a toddler, to catch my attention, he’d bang on the glass door to my office. He’d extend both thumbs downward, if I happened to be watching football, or writing about football. Then he’d say something like, “Daddy, football, booooooo!!!” and waddle away. After that, he took to saying, “Football season is my worstest time of the year!” Before this remarkable baseball fall, at most Mariners games he attended, Blake sought out the in-stadium playground. Sometimes, he hid inside, so as not to return to our seats.
Back to his question:
“Shoot, Bubs.”
“Why are we not watching the Mariners?”
Good question, buddy. Well, we’ve been sick. You’ve never shown much interest in watching live sports before. Nor has Cami (that’s his younger sister). You know that games have commercials, right? And Friday nights are sacred in our house. That’s movie night. You don’t mess with movie night. Even if it’s Encanto viewing No. 872.
“Do you wanna watch tonight, Bubs?”
“Yesssssssssss!”
Drawn out. Just like that. My, oh my! But modernized. Be still, a father’s jackhammering heart.
Bubs, have I ever told you about Dave Niehaus?
“Is that a sportsperson, daddy?”
“Sportsperson of my life, Bubs.”
We’ve got some work ahead of us.
A streaming subscription is procured; a home television, tuned to baseball—Major League Baseball, playoff baseball, staged right across the lake. In this house, on this TV, this late into a bonafide baseball season, that happens on Friday night for the first time in … ever. A family sits down to eat lasagna, while a father who understands nearly half-a-century of Seattle Mariners baseball tries to explain the context, glorious as it is.
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Dad broke it down like this, what we call the A-plus-plus analysis, from a professional, delivered at home, for free:
This is the 49th season of professional baseball in Seattle.
The first was way back in 1969, for one season as the Pilots, before the Mariners were born in 1977.
Blake chimes in, as he tends to. “That’s old! Older than Mt. Rainier! That’s almost as old as you, daddy!”
Touche. Older, in fact. But not by too much.
Cami laughs. Points at me. “Dada, you are old!” She laughs harder. He laughs harder.
Undeterred, I forge ahead. I have facts at my disposal, wisdom because I am old. And adults of a certain age around here can recite such things by memory. Without thinking. Without even wanting to know, let alone recite.
In all those baseball seasons, this one included, the Mariners made the postseason, any round, just six times. That’s 12.2%. Which means 87.8% of Major League Baseball here pretty much stunk, the depth of the odor separated only by degree.
In six appearances in the American League division series, the Mariners have now played three winner-take-all games in that round of baseball’s playoffs. Meaning a father of, let’s face it, almost any age, who grew up here, steeped in misery amid brief spells of magic that evaporate alongside hope each autumn, has had three chances—three nights, period—since 1969 to luck into a night like this one.
“Think about that, fellas,” Dad says, building toward a crescendo. “In the last 50 years, almost, in Seattle, in this area, no dads have been as lucky as dads like me are tonight!”
I look up, expecting enraptured children, both hanging onto every word delivered by a modern day, poor man’s Niehaus. (For the record: really poor.) Surely, they’re ready to throw on some rally hats and grab whatever tridents can be rustled up nearby.
Instead: blank canvases, no interest, silence.
Cami breaks it. “You’re old, dada,” she says, and they both laugh, those deep, uncontrollable fits, evincing a feeling familiar to a 46-year-old father in Seattle, a sports writer in middle age and the baseball team he grew up rooting for, then wrote about, for more than 20 years.
Haters gonna … make some good points?
Two takeaways from Friday rose above all others. One: It is possible—truly, really, IRL—for the Seattle Mariners to become a team that plays enviable baseball, a club stocked with live arms and distinct personalities, that feature the likes of Juuuuullllllllllliioooo and The Big Dumper and George “He Can’t Be a Mariner, Can He?” Kirby; a team that plays defense and steals bases; that electrifies and tethers. And a team, now, for once (thanks and gratitude to ownership or baseball gods, it really doesn’t matter) in my post-college lifetime, has a real chance to make the World Series.
I graduated from Syracuse more than 23 years ago.
Two: the generational gap in play here is fascinating.
That previously mentioned aside: – sad, tortuous, star-laden, this close, drought-defined, comically bad, playoffs?!?!?!, come on, not again, this year, next year, no-really-next-year, next-year-and-this-time-we-mean-it, always … freaking … next year; the drought, for so long, measured, eventually, in not years but in decades; historic; historically futile; amid, every once in a great while, those seasons, like this season, that take serendipitous, magical turns; reminding us, Seattle natives, of what could be but, let’s be honest, probably never will; that is not our baseball fate –
Dad spent Friday evening explaining all that … to an 8-year-old and a 4-year-old; his bravery on par with the Big Dumper’s illustrious, rock ‘em, sock ‘em 2025 campaign—or his delusion matching the prevailing vibes here, from those who root or have rooted for the Mariners. Which means dispensing of things like reason, common sense and any hair left that’s not already gray, to keep coming back, embracing perpetual heartache, or, worse yet, the absence of such.
It's not that the Mariners have lacked for players who rank among the best in baseball, whether powered by Big Unit, The Kid, Bone, Edgar and, sigh, Arthur Rhodes from the 1995 sliders … or Bret Boone’s spinach-built biceps, Freddy García’s stare-glare ferocity, Jamie Moyer’s wicked off-speeding and Ichiro’s hit parade … that core, from those 2000–01 playoff clubs. That’s the only period of real, sustained, postseason success in Mariners baseball history. Two of the five seasons in which the M’s won at least one postseason series. Like in 1995.
The other two: both from the last four years!
By the time we got to the historic ’01 campaign, the kids, just minutes earlier roaring at the television, granting their father the rarest, best emotion—connective, shared, never-forget-it joy—went downstairs.
They put on an Octonauts movie.
I settled back into the couch, wondering how many parents were having nights just like this one. Hundreds? Easy. Thousands. Maybe tens of thousands, if the sea of tridents on the playground were any indication.
Baseball fever—legitimate, grounded in real hope, if the Mariners could extend it another week—ran rampant all around us. Fourteen separate friends or relatives hit me up for tickets. In a typical season, that number hovers around five. For the year.
Enticed by cheesecake, the Bishop kids flew back upstairs, begrudgingly, for the bottom of the ninth. For once, their little-but-oh-so-excruciatingly-loud voices were lent to a greater purpose. Those voices were welcomed.
I kept trying to explain the history, the significance.
They kept trying to focus us on the now.
How many other families had versions of this exact same conversation in and around Seattle the past week?
Blake wanted to know about Tarik Skubal and his remarkable, hard-throwing brilliance. Whether The Big Dumper is the best moniker in sports history was debated. (There is no acceptable answer here except: yes.) We touched on dozens of topics: why I wasn’t there (we have an elite baseball coverage team; I chip in when let free from my cage) … what “adding bats” meant and how truly rare that was for a Seattle baseball team to do so late in any season … why there’s no better Mariner to root for, no one who more embodies the franchise’s fight to here, uneven as it was, gloomy as it was, run-scoring-free as it has been for so long, than J.P. Crawford, the OG, the wizard, our quarterback, er, shortstop … and even how much gum Josh Naylor needed to amass the electric green clump he so endlessly chomped on. (Blake asks to emulate him. Also one answer, the other way: no.)
Did they know that Luis Castillo and Logan Gilbert were starting pitchers who had never thrown in relief before?
What did that mean?
Well, kids, lemme tell you about Randy Johnson. Game 5, 1995. I’m at home, in Tacoma, decked out in M’s gear, watching alongside my dad …
I even had braces on that night. Same as my boy on Friday. In the 30 years between brace-face, seminal-baseball evenings in the greater Seattle area, there was one historic team and the team that ended the drought. And little else. Nothing else.
Did I know this Eduard Bazardo, a man who pitches like I wish I walked into my Mondays, with a detached cool, but with stones, that, when combined with his spinning delivery, also just … intimidates? Well, no. But if I were to ever have a third child (not happening!), “Bazardo ‘47-4eva’ Bishop” sure has a nice ring to it! (Referencing some Jerry Dipoto math there; in Jerry, we trust.)
We looked Bazardo up in the 12th—they were still watching!—right after he entered the worst situation possible and still escaped an inherited bases-loaded jam. First time I’ve ever done that with my kids. First time I’ve ever seen that from a Mariner.
Dude hails from Venezuela (just like King Felix). The Red Sox traded him to the Mariners in August 2023. He went in mostly for mop-up duty until this season, when he pitched a career-high 78 2/3 innings, maintained a slick 2.52 ERA and took a general turn toward bullpen badass.
There’s Blake, as Bazardo dons his magic cape, screaming EAL-KKKKKK at the top of his lungs, running around the living room. He heard this phrase—a drawn out “elk”—on vacation last summer, from a sports writer who knows a turn of phrase (not me).
Dude wore No. 83, like Steve Raible, a beloved wideout from the early Seahawks years; beloved, in part, because he became a broadcaster, the team’s longtime play-by-play announcer, the guy in a few hundred thousand ears when the Seahawks upended their own tortured history and won the Super Bowl of all the numerals (XLVIII) in early 2014.
Even better: Bazardo, bullpen badass that he became, was born in, yes, wait for it … 1995.
Blake fell asleep in the 13th, out cold, on the same couch where he spent his Friday night. Not even our cheers could dent his slumber.
Cami asked for the iPad around then. She wanted to watch Peppa Pig—and did.
This laid bare, at least for me, two entirely different existences within Mariners fandom. Mine dripped with significance.
My entire adult life can be marked exclusively by the Mariners, their seasons, my career and all the intertwining. Start with their prominent place in my childhood, those ‘95 sliders that sparked an interest not in sports but in the people who played them, what motivated and sustained them, made them confident, the opposite of how I felt, so confident the cracks they took were at greatness. Pretty good way to become a sports writer. My college roommate—a great man but a Yankees fan, meaning rude, obnoxious, preening—announcing, “Arthur Rhodes always locks it down!” as we watched Game 4 of the 2000 ALCS in our apartment, the one where squirrels raced inside the walls (Rhodes promptly allowed the go-ahead home run). Those late nights, in the summer of ’01, spent as the last human inside The Buffalo News newsroom, my only purpose to input the Mariners score into the agate, so historic was their 116-win campaign. Some of my first, long take-out-style stories. Yuniesky Betancourt. J.J. Putz. Eddie Guardado … The first-ever interview with Felix Hernandez, in Everett; him, only 18. Covering his first start; in, of all places, Detroit; among my first ever road assignments for any paper … My last story, for The Seattle Times, on the day they were eliminated from postseason contention in ‘07 … The same college roommate, on my wedding day two years later, walking up to the stage and whispering those six words in my ear, before I do; yes, Arthur Rhodes always locks it down … Six separate trips home, from New York, to write about King Felix … My first Sports Illustrated cover, in ‘14, on the Mariners’ newest hope, Robinson Cano … The night Seattle broke the longest playoff drought in professional sports three seasons ago, sitting afterward, observing, in the office of manager Scott Servais, as Dipoto cracked open a bottle of red wine, 2001 vintage, which he passed around in plastic cups … The Astros and 18 innings … Watching the two children, Cohen and Willa, of my close friend, the late Chris Snow, deliver two strikes from the field at T-Mobile Park to raise money and awareness to fight the disease that killed him, ALS, as tears ran down both my cheeks for the better part of an hour.
How many adults over age 25 had similar thoughts, germane to their own experiences, on Saturday morning in Seattle?
And how many of their children, especially younger kids, had zero idea of any of that, why it mattered, what it meant, to whom? How many experienced my experience, which was two kids who thought it was cool that the local baseball team was in the playoffs? But not that cool. Not enough to sustain their attention beyond 20-minute stretches.
That’s the thing, though. Baseball again expanded its playoff format, to 12 teams, in 2022. In those four years, 23 different franchises made the postseason, in part because 40 percent of the league will do just that in any given year. Of those teams, 12 different franchises advanced to one of the championship series. And, of those teams, five different clubs advanced to at least one World Series, which, yes, we know, the Mariners have never done. Yes, we know, the Mariners are the last team in MLB to have not done this, specifically. The next person who raises this gets a trident to an eyeball. Or deserves to, anyway.
Only now, instead of all the glum statistics to place the long-long-long playoff drought in its proper—and properly sad—historical context, Blake and Cami know nothing beyond a … wait for it … winning baseball team. No more. No less. Move over Starbucks! We’re taking over the sea in Seattle! The Mariners have made two postseason appearances in the past four seasons. They won a playoff series, at least one, both times. They made an American League championship series! For the fourth time! In 49 years!
If they advance to the World Series, for the—we know—first time in franchise history, they will be the sixth club to do so since 2022’s first pitch. And, for once, that’s no more than a modest surprise. From here, it’s not even surprising. Get the bats. See what happens. Anybody can get hot. Funny how that works.
Mariners ownership, are you paying attention?
Cami and I went to bed for our typical family Friday sleepover—three humans, one queen, 27 stuffies, 13 blankets, one sound machine, 12 night lights, send prayers for my beleaguered back—after the bottom of 14. The outcome remained in doubt. This hurt. As a father, it hurt. We missed history, Mariners baseball history, by about 20 minutes.
Blake bound downstairs this morning. Already awake, I could hear his thunderous little footsteps amid Cami’s endless snores. I thought he would do what he always does, beg to watch YouTube, and disappear until breakfast, into zombie-mode.
Instead, his eyes stretched as wide as Lake Washington, where history had been fashioned, roughly eight hours earlier, on the other side.
“Did we win?” he asked.
I didn’t know. I went upstairs. Grabbed my phone. Saw it all—inning No. 15, Crawford up, runner in scoring position, walk-off single. Rick Rizzs, the legend, doing what Rick Rizzs does! An American League championship series, in Seattle, for the first time since ’01, when Mr. Rhodes, no disrespect intended, did not lock anything down. Again.
Of course it was Crawford, the standby—and the stand-in for every Mariners fan of a certain age.
Of course it was Bazardo, an injection of new.
Of course it was Dipoto, the last of the Mariners Mohicans, doubted and filleted all over the place, positioning this club where he always said he would position one Seattle baseball team or another.
Thisclose, except, now, to playing in the World Series.
Perhaps this generational gap, as universal as sports themselves, as timeless as a sport like baseball, and yet, distinct, to Seattle and the drought and so many seasons that ended in any possible way except like this season, can be closed? Maybe, the old man thinks. Or hopes, perhaps wishful in his thinking, the jaded nature of a sports writer melting into belief that no longer includes things like reason, statistical analysis or logic.
Is this what sports fandom feels like?
Has it been that long?
Is this what Blake will feel? Cami?
I turn to him, desperate for a moment. For him to give me the significance a father who spent a lifetime watching mostly losing baseball is most certainly due.
“Blake, do you realize how rare this is?”
I launch into braces and seminal playoff victories, fathers and sons, the ties that bind.
“What?”
He’s not listening.
“Blake!”
“Daddy, can I watch YouTube?”
We’ve got some work ahead of us.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Mariners Bridge Generational Divides With Playoff Run Decades in the Making.
