The last Mariners playoff team lives with a wistful mixture of pride over the winningest season in American League history and lingering disappointment that they didn’t finish such a magical year with a championship. Or even a pennant.
“Looking back, it’s like, ‘Damn, if I could have been better here, better there …’ It still eats at you a little bit that the 116-win team didn’t finish the job,” said Mike Cameron, one of eight Mariner All-Stars in 2001. “It feels incomplete.
“But I just never thought that it would be 20-something years later before the Seattle Mariners got to go to another playoff. That’s what’s so crazy. That’s more crazy than us losing in the playoffs.”
Crazy, indeed. It will be 21 years, or to be more precise, 7,655 days, between the New York evening — barely a month after the twin towers went down — in which the Mariners were ousted by the Yankees in Game 5 of the American League Championship Series on Oct. 22, 2001, and Game 1 of this year’s wild-card series Oct. 7, 2022.
“You just assumed that, hey, this team’s gonna keep going,” reliever Jeff Nelson said.
It’s not like the Mariners completely cratered in the ensuing years — at least not immediately. They won 93 games in both 2002 and ’03, but it was a decade before MLB added a second wild card in 2012, and two decades before it added a third this season. As Cameron said, “That would have been us, twice.”
Manager Lou Piniella left for Tampa Bay after the ’02 season, and general manager Pat Gillick left, eventually to land in Philadelphia, after the ’03 season. The back-to-back departures of the Mariners field general and architect symbolized the start of a fallow period of increasing misery for the organization.
The Mariners came close to a playoff berth a couple of times along the way, but far more often they finished far, far out of contention — exceeding 90 losses seven times along the way (and 100 losses twice). It wasn’t until last year that the ballclub reached the 90-win threshold again, getting eliminated from the playoffs on the final day.
“You look at it and say, ‘How do you win 116 games and miss the playoffs the next year?’” Nelson said. “I don’t know if you can put your finger on it and say, ‘This is the reason why the Mariners haven’t gone back to the playoffs in so long.’ Whether it’s a bad signing, an injury here and there, not adding at the deadline. It’s all of that. And I think it’s just been some bad luck.”
Bad luck, bad decisions, bad plans and, frankly, too many bad players — or to be more charitable, players who performed badly when they arrived in Seattle.
This year’s Mariners’ drought-breaking team has caught the eye, and the affection, of many of the 2001 players, who are watching avidly from wherever they landed in their post-career life. That can be right here in Seattle, in Edgar Martinez’s case. The Hall of Famer notes that the 2001 Mariners had a strong, deep pitching staff, “but this pitching is even better,” he said.
Paul Abbott, a 17-game winner for Seattle in 2001 and now the pitching coach of the Red Sox’s Triple-A affiliate in Worcester, Massachusetts, catches an occasional Mariners game on late-night television. During one such viewing, Abbott found himself enamored by one particular Seattle hurler and began to follow him.
“They have one of my favorite pitchers to watch in Logan Gilbert,” Abbott said. “He’s awesome. He’s got an insane extension. He gets insane ride on his fastball, which is why he gets all those swing and misses top of the zone. Mechanically, I love watching him. He’s fun to watch.”
Abbott said he’s hesitant to make comparisons, considering that the 25-year-old Gilbert is in just his second season. But what the heck.
“He’s got a little bit of Clemens, a little bit of Roger’s arm swing in the back,’’ he said. “He’s very aggressive and he comes at you. He’s got a little [Curt] Schilling in him. It’s early in his career. But he has a chance to be like those guys.”
Dan Wilson, the catcher in 2001 (and for all three of the other Mariners playoff teams), sees the same sort of camaraderie on this year’s squad as existed during the 116-win season, in which the Mariners finished a staggering 70 games above .500, ended up 14 games ahead of a 102-win Oakland team and never lost more than two in a row until after they had clinched in September.
“The thing for me that I like the most about this club is just the energy that they have together as a team,” he said. “I credit Scott Servais a lot with creating that environment down there. And those are the kinds of things that can really carry you a little bit further in the postseason.”
Indeed, Bret Boone sees a Mariners ballclub that might even be able to finish the job that his 2001 squad was unable to — or at least get further in the process. Even if they have to play a 97-plus-win Yankees team managed by his brother, Aaron Boone.
“This is a legitimate team,” said Boone, who finished third in the MVP voting behind teammate Ichiro and Oakland’s Jason Giambi in 2001. “I mean, everybody’s got to be healthy, especially Julio [Rodriguez]. You’ve got to be all guns blazing. But if everyone’s healthy, I’m hearing it around baseball. I mean, other teams, other managers are telling me, ‘Boonie, the Mariners are, like, good.’“
Boone added that these Mariners should think beyond just making the playoffs.
“They can make some noise,” he said. “I would be very disappointed if they didn’t go deep into the postseason with that current roster. Other than Houston, who’s the class of the American League, I don’t see a better team than Seattle. I’m not saying the Mariners are better than everybody else. What I’m saying is, there is not a better team outside of Houston than the Mariners. And that includes the Yankees. The Mariners can go toe to toe with the Yankees all day, personnel wise. So I have high expectations.”
The 2001 Mariners had the highest expectations, but their historic success might have been their undoing. They barely made it past Cleveland in the opening round, needing to win the final two games to take the best-of-five series, before going down in five games in the ALCS to the three-time defending World Series champion Yankees.
“It was almost like a magic-carpet ride,” Boone said. “We all knew we were really good. But we also knew we were in the middle of something really special. At the end, it’s not that we were cocky or arrogant about it. But we had won so much. We just won; that’s what we did. Most teams I’ve been on, it’s, ‘Hey, we got to play good to win the series.’ We went into it that year like, it was our year. We were destined. Just get the trophy ready. It’s already our trophy. We just have to play the games to get there.
“We went to Cleveland, didn’t play that good. Beat the Indians, which we expected to. We knew we’re going to win. We went to play the Yankees. And we weren’t thinking at any particular time that there was even the scenario of us losing. That wasn’t even in the cards. It was already over. It’s a magical year. And almost like we took it for granted. I don’t say that arrogantly. It wasn’t an arrogant team. It was a confident team.
“My recollection of going into the Yankee series — we’ve just got to get through this series to get to the World Series, so we can win the World Series. It was just, are we going to do it in four games or is going to take the entire time? And we were shell-shocked. I still remember getting on that bus looking around and seeing the looks on the face of people, and probably on myself, going: ‘That didn’t just happen. This is not the way this magical season was supposed to end.’”
No one knows how this magical Mariners season, 21 years later, is going to end. But it warms the heart of Cameron and his comrades that the current squad is getting to experience the same frenetic baseball excitement that they did when Safeco Field — then a brand-new stadium — was virtually sold out for the entire 2001 season (and ’02 and ’03 as well).
“It makes you feel good in the heart to see it happening again this year,” Cameron said. “For the city. Last year, these guys got a chance to experience it, and a lot more of it this year, of what I only knew in Seattle. The energy. I’m so glad these guys are able to see that after all these years of not knowing what the hell is going on. It’s literally a blessing in disguise.”
A blessing, certainly. But after 21 years, it’s no longer disguised.