Sometimes I think about how strange it is there is something, variously acknowledged, as Seattle Mariners Baseball. Not like, that the Seattle Mariners, a current team in Major League Baseball, have played baseball games, nor that there iswas a place you could visit and watch them do just that. But the running gambit behind this site and many others like it is that something historically unique happens when the Seattle Mariners play baseball, that we could call the Mariners something like a site of exception. Upon first glance, yesterday’s 5-3 win over the Rockies might not seem to be a good candidate to ruminate on this idea, but it is what I woke up with in my head, so you’re getting it.

The Mariners are now almost exactly one-third of the way through the shortened 2020 season and are trotting out a cool .353 winning percentage. This is pretty much what everyone expected. Hovering right around this clip for the rest of the season wouldn’t put the year too far from any other random season you could pick from a hat since 2003. If you wanted to, you could riff on that warning you see history professors quote tweeting the news with–history doesn’t repeat but it does rhyme–except to analyze the development of a farm system instead of world historical political movements. I remember the games here and there where a young Taijuan Walker would notch seven strikeouts to earn the midseason meaningless win thanks to a Brad Miller home run; now, run a find-and-replace with the names Justus Sheffield and Dylan Moore and kablamo–history is back, baby.

In this sense, the very banality of a Sunday afternoon win like this is far from the exception I mention above. What does seem exceptional is that half the entire Miami Marlins team contracted COVID and had to be replaced by a bunch of random kids who then proceeded to become the hottest team in baseball to propel them towards the top of the NL East. Sure, you might say, this sounds quite a bit like the Mariners’ 13-2 start with their new roster at the beginning of last season. But the Marlins’ (albeit brief) hot start is the result of utterly unpredictable and extreme circumstances. The Mariners, on the other hand–not all, to be fair–confused their luck as circumstance. Hence, cosmically, the lesson they (and we all) were forced to learn by season’s end.

If something unique happens when the Seattle Mariners play baseball, I might argue it looks very little like any of these statistical anomalies that nevertheless pepper the past two decades of their existence. Those do make for exciting stories, but alongside each are countless games like the one we saw on Sunday (or Saturday, for that matter). A young starting pitcher gives up some contact early on but settles into a rhythm, Mariner hitters exploiting the other starting pitcher’s similar early trouble before settling into their own, obverse, kind of rhythm. Bullpen trouble, more success the fourth time through the order, and a save notched by that guy who might be the closer now because he was yesterday, and the day before. Progress made on the Chart of Development, a nice postgame press conference or two, few if any asses shown, and everyone gets sent home happy. That might not make for as exciting a story as Mike Blowers calling the inning, count, pitch, and location of Matt Tuiasosopo’s first home run, but it’s just as crucial to what makes Seattle Mariners Baseball uniquely what it is.

What makes Seattle Mariners Baseball, at least in its contemporary form, is the fact that the Mariners expose, through both fault and contingency, how historical narrative is something that can only ever be concocted out of the wreckage of meaningless stuff. Much like it feels to watch the rest of the world respond to the epidemiological effects of COVID-19 while the wealthiest country in the history of human civilization sits confused on its ass, the Story of What’s Happening With The Mariners it turns out, changes every few months here and there, each moment truly little more than an attempt to make sense of storylines and players that may or may not intersect, projections which may or may not pan out. 

I mentioned history rhyming above–well here, it’s not even so much that one could point to echoes with earlier rebuilds as it is the realization that each rebuild was always already built upon a narrative foundation that made its shape thinkable and possible. And then, when they failed, as each did, the limits of how that project was thought are laid bare for all to see, and a new story is begun. 

It’s not that the Mariners are the only team in baseball for which this is the case, but rather that frankly, just by the numbers, it has been this same unchanging case, day in and day out, for the better part of two decades. Instead of complaining about how unfair that is, or arguing that I’m mired in hopelessness, we should revel in the experiment’s success at exposing this lie in the way we think history works. For me, it no longer seems interesting to ask if this plan is going to work or not, which of these kids will turn into something or bust, who is elite, or even how they plan to add to the core of the roster on the off chance that every single one of their prospects hits their ceiling for sustained years of multiple-win performances. No, the Mariners have been given the gift of a pen that unwrites this formula: there is no such thing as narrative/it’s just narrative all the way down.

Early in the game, Sheffield had notched his first two outs before giving up a 3-1 double to Charlie Blackmon, which bounced all the way back to the right field wall. Watching these games with the cutouts of fans placed (and dressed) creatively behind home plate and the dugout walls has been, shall we say, an enervating visual experience in baseball’s obvious attempt at returning to some kind of normalcy. 

But as the camera followed the ball, lifting the top of its frame into what would have been full seats I noticed something strange, a masked uniformity to each cutout, ostensibly printed and cut on the same machine, a gallery of onlookers not one taller or more prominent than another, staring on in silent contemplation while a young team had a chance to either fall into a hole or dig themselves out of it. It’s always been that way.