The 2020 baseball season, a stitched together, animated-through-electricity monster that shambled along for both an eternity and the blink of an eye, is nearly over. For the 19th consecutive season the Seattle Mariners will not be participating in the postseason. Unlike some recent Mariner teams, but also like many of them, this team was never really trying for the playoffs. The frustrations of that situation are apparent and need no further elaboration.

What a lack of ambition and commitment gives us, however, is the chance to enjoy the Mariners in whichever way we choose. This goes back to the Dome and Bedlam Manifesto: The Mariners are defined by us, not we by them. We take joy and laughter where we please, and leave the chaff lying to the side. If there’s no wrong way to fan, we submit that some are at least better than others. For the purposes of enjoying and covering Major League Baseball’s last successful franchise, it has served us pretty well.

With that in mind the staff shares the things/moments/ideas/plays/pitches that made them the happiest during the 2020 Mariners season.

*****

I took an edible and watched Star Trek: The Next Generation while slowly dissociating on the couch, my dog licked my knee, I spilled a bag of Gardettos on the couch. Refreshing my Twitter timeline, I found out that Evan White hit a home run. Some people were excited, others demure. I remembered Robert Andino and then I shut my eyes, and they opened only after half a solar rotation.

Matt Ellis

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I’ve been thinking a lot about 15-career-win players. Everyone hates them: they’re batting cleanup in the Septembers of terrible seasons, never quite coming through in the good years. Jose Vidro is a 15 guy. They’re forgotten almost the moment they’re gone, despite being around for years. And yet it’s an exclusive club: only one M’s first-round pick qualified over the last quarter century, and the team traded him away. 

So when I watch Ty France at the plate, with his oops-all-thighs body and his goofy little hitch swing, there’s no small amount of dread. God, I’m going to have to watch this guy for years. It’s not something you say often in the Dipoto era: Only one guy has survived it, a guy who didn’t really have a position, who was supposed to be one of those 15-WAR guys himself. Hopefully we’ll have the time and reason to be sick of him.

Patrick Dubuque

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It would be terrible of me as a proud Gonzaga University alumni to nominate anything but Marco Gonzales tidy gem against the Los Angeles Dodgers, one of the better hitting teams in the league, on Aug. 18, 2020.

I can’t write much more about why it was my favorite moment, because I did not actually watch or listen to the game. I don’t watch many of the games. ROOT Sports inane insistence on clinging to solely television broadcasts without providing an online streaming component means those of us who do not own TVs and cable are cheated out of watching any game. Such is the life of a Seattle Mariner fan. It is never easy.

Peter Woodburn

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I’m always drawn to oddities. Things that are just weird. It’s why I’m an Evan White fan, and root for him, despite the struggles of his rookie season. The weirder, the better, the more likely I am to take notice.

In 1994, when roof tiles fell from the Kingdome, I enjoyed the M’s becoming a permanent road team. I loved it when the Marlins were the home team at Safeco in 2011 thanks to Bono. So obviously, the M’s playing home games in California this year was right up my alley. Another statistical oddity in a year populated entirely by oddities.

Dan Gomez

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The obvious answer here is Kyle Lewis. I’ll just write that here so that everyone can see that and know that and understand that everyone here at this site has enjoyed Kyle Lewis. 

The less-obvious answer is what happened to me a few nights back, watching my first inning of M’s baseball in probably two weeks. The Fly CamTM panned the back of the M’s dugout. For the first time that I can EVER remember, I saw names I had actually never once seen or heard of in relation to the Seattle Mariners. I had absolutely no idea who was on the Seattle Mariners. I laughed out loud. 

David Skiba

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My favorite 2020 Mariner moment isn’t something we got to see. I don’t even really want to see it. It’s whatever happened during the cold, bleak Winter. It’s the squat rack in the basement,. It’s the commitment to truly, for once, getting into The Best Shape of Your Life.

Dylan Moore was a punchline in 2019. A career minor leaguer signed to a major league contract. Yet another galaxy brain’d move by the major leagues preeminent purveyor of galaxy brain, Jerry Dipoto. But stories aren’t finished early, and bloggers are, by nature, morons. Dylan Moore gave us the best moment of 2019, and his emergence as a muscle-bound, haunch-driven, dinger-mashing Swiss Army Knife has been my favorite moment of 2020.

Nathan Bishop

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[Private nursing home, 2062]

“Hey. Hey. What was the M’s record in the COVID year?”
“Like, 2020?”
“Yeah, duh.”
“Um. I don’t know. Fifty-someth—“
“How many games they play that year?”
“Not enough I guess.”
“Too many, you ask me.”

Christian Powers