After 21 long years of frustration and failures, of close calls and coming up just short, of spring trainings filled with hope and offseasons spent with regret, of entire careers without champagne celebration for King Felix and Kyle Seager, of so much change, including three general managers, eight managers and two interim managers, of hundreds of players, who were good, bad or Chone Figgins, of “Believe Big” to “True to the Blue” to “Sea Us Rise,” the Seattle Mariners are finally returning to the playoffs.
With an aching sore thumb that he’s tried to play through for the last few weeks and kept him out of the starting lineup on Friday night, catcher Cal Raleigh came in to pinch hit with two outs in the bottom of the ninth of a tie game.
After flailing at a 3-1 slider and fouling off another slider from right-hander Domingo Acevedo, Raleigh didn’t miss the third straight slider that stayed over the middle.
He launched a majestic fly ball deep into the night. As it climbed toward the right field stands, his teammates and 44,754 rose in anticipation for jubilation. The ball smacked off the windows of the Hit It Here Cafe and turned T-Mobile Park into joyous bedlam as the Mariners won 2-1.
As Raleigh rounded the bases, the sold-out crowd celebrated with hugs and somewhere Dave Niehaus smiled and shed a tear at what he missed.
When the 2001 Mariners, winners of a Major League Baseball-record 116 games, lost to the Yankees in the American League Championship Series, a return to the postseason felt like an inevitability if not a near every-year possibility. Instead, a fan base that first tasted the postseason with the “My Oh My” magic of Ken Griffey Jr. scoring from first on Edgar Martinez’s double to left in the Kingdome, celebrated postseason appearances again in 1997 and 2000 and felt unfulfilled in the failure of 2001 waited for years in disappointment and frustration, 21 to be exact, for a return to the postseason that never came despite promises and posturing.
Three months into a 2022 season filled with expectations of making the postseason, the Mariners seemed destined to push the drought to 22 years.
On Sunday, June 19, they were shut out for a second straight game by the Angels, losing 4-0 to finish an awful homestand. They were 29-39 and listing toward another long summer of baseball irrelevance.
But led by a strong starting rotation and a stingy bullpen and energized by a 21-year-old rookie, whose mixture of talent and charisma has captured an entire fan base, the Mariners reeled off a stunning turnaround that included a 14-game winning streak going into the All-Star break. On Sept. 11, after taking two of three games from the defending World Series champion Braves at T-Mobile Park, the Mariners were 79-61. They had gone from 10 games under .500 to 18 games over .500 in a span of 72 games.
By earning one of three American League wild card spots in the expanded MLB playoffs, the Mariners ended the longest active drought in North American major professional sports. The weight of that unwanted distinction, which they inherited on Jan. 2, 2018 when the Buffalo Bills made the NFL playoffs, accumulated from an annoyance to a burden.
But instead of finding ways to excuse themselves from the drought, Mitch Haniger, Marco Gonzales and J.P. Crawford embraced the weight of all those seasons lost and expectations unmet. They made it their own to shoulder and carry, knowing how gratifying it would be when they ended the streak themselves and celebrated with a city they would own.
This story will be updated.