There’s something about the power alleys that draws the eye. Those deep, often obscured, corners of the outfield wall seem to be the natural end point of perspective when looking at a baseball diamond. They’re the sort of unreachable, indescribable reaches of the game. Where the game dares you to go, or hopes you won’t find it. It’s sort of where the Seattle Mariners have led us with their warning-track power. They’re floating, indescribably, towards that deepest corner. We aren’t exactly sure where they land. The eye is unable to judge flight between casual flyout and looping home run. That’s where you find us, too. For a long time we’ve been watching Seattle Mariners Baseball. We’ve used it as a centering piece for acknowledging and unwrapping the greater parts of the sport, too. We’ve tried to push away, we’ve ignored it, spat at it, and, ultimately, we’ve always come back wanting just one more piece. That’s why we’re here. 

Here is the space where we will talk about the Seattle Mariners. We will note their players and coaches, their front office holders and owners, but we will do more than that. We will cover this team in its current and future iterations, and those of the past. We will take our turns focusing both on the forest and the tree. The Mariners of yesteryear have afforded us countless turns to contemplate just what exactly we’re doing here. We don’t anticipate that ending anytime soon. So, we’ll be here to do that, as long as you’ll allow us, and we mean this, the distinct pleasure. Hello, and welcome to Dome and Bedlam.

***

There are so many ways to engage with baseball and be a fan. Some folks love reading about stats, stats, and more stats, while others appreciate tracking the years-long journey that a draft pick makes on their way to the majors. Some fans use baseball as a jumping-off point to discuss politics and art, and some rely on recounting last night’s ballgame to break the ice when talking to in-laws or trying to make new friends at the bar. And some people just want an excuse to enjoy a burg and some suds with their buds. At its very best, a community-driven Mariners blog should serve as a lodestone, attracting all sorts of M’s fans who indulge in and appreciate all sorts of fandom. Hopefully this new iteration of Dome and Bedlam will do just that, creating a place to exchange ideas, share our love/hate for this God-forsaken baseball team, and appreciate the weirdness of others.

Baseball fandom really is a broad spectrum. One extreme is the superfan; a person whose identity is found not so much in whether their team wins or loses, but that they never, ever, ever, stop rooting for them to win. It’s an identity that idealizes loyalty, cherishes rivalry, and craves acknowledgement of their superior fan-ness.

The opposite end is the baseball romanticist. Largely agnostic towards specific teams, this fan believes in the sport the way the faithful believe in God. Whatever issues confront it or us, the Greatness of the Game Itself, as it has proven over its century and a half of existence, is simply too powerful to be overcome. Baseball will always win, because it always has, and because it must. As Whitman canonized, “the game of ball is glorious.”

Major League Baseball in 2020 is not particularly choosy where on this spectrum you fall. What it asks is that you fall on it, and preferably stay where you land, paying a little rent for the privilege. Our current age asks only that you never think past whatever impulses lead to a click, filling your social media feeds with perfectly curated advertisements and “news stories” for weeks at a time. It wants you to believe, more than anything, that you truly are what you consume, and so it will feed you what it needs to feed you until you are what it needs you to be. 

In this often-paralyzingly bleak social and cultural ecosystem we can then look to the Seattle Mariners as a gift, rather than a curse. Rooting for the most success-bereft franchise in major American sports, fans of the Mariners long ago left the known solar system of the sport-to-consumer galaxy, and have been charting new phenomena for years. 

Through LolleBlueza, Game 161, the 80’s, a 17-game losing streak, Big Unit, Little Unit, Junior, Edgar, ‘95, a collapsing stadium, 116 wins, Ichiro, Felix, and all the rest, we have learned that fandom is not a spectrum at all, nor an identity. It is a tool. It is a way to meet friends, to mark time, to savor, to cry, and to laugh. It is simultaneously all the varying faces its power brokers so carefully curate to extract our money, and none of them at all. More than anything, fandom is a choice. Our choice. We make it fresh each day, and we do it exactly how we please. 

It bears mentioning that while the style of writing on Dome and Bedlam will be varied (we promise that the content will be weird and wonderful and all over the place), our faces and experiences are fairly monolithic. For this site to be what we want it to be, the diversity of contributing voices needs to increase dramatically. 

To address this current shortcoming, we plan on holding regular open calls to add new writers and perspectives to our roster. (It’s important to note that this blog is not part of a giant corporation generating revenue for a billion-dollar enterprise; nobody is making any money at D&B, but we do trade in camaraderie and good times.) Additionally, if you have any interest in writing about the Seattle Mariners, don’t wait for an open call. Reach out to us! We’d love to have you share your stories and join our community. 

***

Baseball is the original cancel culture. Long before public figures feared backlash over offensive statements, or online boycotting grew in scope, fans have felt the power to boo, demand results, and withhold their support when an injured player or a hapless manager drew their ire. In fact, a strange relationship between baseball fan and baseball team was grandfathered in before the era of centralized production and franchising, one in which the former felt some power to determine exactly what product they received from the latter. Today, such an unearned sense of privilege feels quaint.

But cancel culture, in its modern incarnation, isn’t really the same phenomenon that it’s presented as. The connections between it and the evils of public shaming and cyberbullying, commonly made, are flawed: They ignore, as they always seem to do, the power dynamic between the two parties. Bullying is bad, because it’s the wielding of power against the powerless; public shaming is the collection of communal power for use in crushing the individual. In most modern iterations of cancel culture, even the collective might of the so-called mob is nothing compared to the privileged, unassailable position of the wealthy. It is not designed to ruin them out of vindictiveness. It is designed for the public to wield some sense of authority over the public good, fairly and in the free market, by rewarding the cultural values they prefer. This isn’t evil; it’s just, in our modern era of top-down cultural marketing, completely foreign.

Never has the baseball fan been more powerless than they are today, in an age when cable contracts and contention windows have insulated ownership and management from the faintest possibility of public accountability. There are people fighting these battles, and it’s good that they are. Largely, however, Dome and Bedlam takes the other tack, which is not to fight against cultural imperialism but to ignore it. Baseball is flawed, and ethically dubious, and it’s our right to take from it as we see fit. We can reproduce the accounts of this game without the express written consent of Major League Baseball. We can do whatever the hell we want with it. The game is ours. 

***

“There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism,” they often say, which is mostly an excuse to assuage your guilt over buying a new pair of Nikes despite knowing full well they were stitched together by a child laborer in an Indonesian sweatshop. The problem with that statement, however, is mapped out perfectly, right there, in the preceding sentence. Critiques of ‘ethical consumption’ began as a necessary step in forcing people to realize that individual consumer action fundamentally cannot challenge globally structured systems of power and domination. And yet, we still somehow found a way to turn that into its own kind of micro-politics of resignation that is still, at the end of the day, less about learning how to build networks of solidarity and more about a cool new set of shoes you don’t really need. Nothing else you could do.

With the caveat that anyone would be deluded in thinking that watching baseball is somehow a form of radical activism, that the opposite might be the case has seemingly started to take hold. Fans are slowly realizing that Major League Baseball is actually run by a cabal of profit-seeking billionaires for whom this whole thing is little different than the abstractions undergirding credit default swaps or futures on the oil market. It’s just about money, making money. Mariners fans, in particular, were surprised to learn the organization that made sure to fly a Pride Flag had also just kind of la-la-la-look-over-there’d their CEO’s documented history of being a sex creep. He’s still in charge. The accusations do not end there.

Should I watch? How should I go about considering my baseball fandom in light of these revelations? What is the role of mediated entertainment in a world spiralling into chaos? Well, we don’t really pose answers to those questions here. This is a baseball blog where we say bad words and use photoshop to make it look like dinosaurs are eating Mariners outfielders sometimes. What we do know, however, is that there is something beautiful about the game of baseball when it works; as with most of our cultural institutions, it has a connection to a deep history that provides meaning out of meaninglessness. 

In the spirit of the Mariners teams which came before us, we would like to pose this blog as a spirit of engagement with a totality which cannot be seen, cannot be known. In fact, that’s the whole rub, right there. It’s not just that the Mariners are bad and weird and following them inevitably produces a kind of split subject, utterly unmoored from the expectations of wins and losses. Inertia breeds no fools. What is really at stake here is a mode of being-in-the-world itself, one which we offer here as a tool not for making sense of It All, but rather as a way to Make It Through.

Some have taken to call this “irony,” but this is a gross oversimplification. Many of the affects read as “irony” seem brash or inconsolent, but ours do not emerge from a nihilistic drive towards complete detachment. Having true irony brain would mean donning a mask of assholery just for the sake of pissing off all who pass by, the true revelation being there is nothing behind the mask in the first place. No. What we pose is that the only way through any of this is to don no masks. To stare contingency in the face, and when met with a challenge, when offered up with the truly unthinkable, not buckle under the weight of contradictions. To take hold of our actual conditions, take joy in their unveiling, and then proceed accordingly. The weight of fiction is an invisible anchor.

In short: We laugh when Norichika Aoki horribly misplays a fly ball in the ninth inning of a game the Mariners were actually winning in a stretch of a season that was moving towards possibility at a moment when the decades-long goal of playoff baseball started to actually poke its head out from beyond the horizon like the tops of distant goalposts, because all along we knew this was probably going to happen in some way or another but we had no idea that it would be precisely this way, and then once it happened we realized that we indeed had seen it and what a gift to be there at the moment of revelation when history broke and decades were relived in mere seconds and the meaning of it all became clear as sunbreak in the Arctic after the dark of a summerswinter. That wasn’t short, at all, but it’s precisely the point. This shit is weird. So we will be, too. Ethical consumption can fuck off. Lets meet history with tomorrow, together, and bask in the transformation.