Following a weekend series win against the Arizona Diamondbacks and the continued implosion of the Houston Astros, the Seattle Mariners have unexpectedly found themselves 1.5 games out of a playoff spot with 12 games left to play. This wasn’t supposed to happen with the Mariners this season, but then again nothing seems to have gone the way it’s supposed to in 2020. In that sense a Mariners playoff run is entirely fitting; what better way to herald the end of the world than the Seattle goddamn Mariners making the playoffs?

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If the Mariners overtake the Astros for the second AL West playoff spot, questions about the legitimacy of their postseason berth will naturally arise because it will have come via something called “the second AL West playoff spot,” a new wrinkle brought into play from Major League Baseball’s expanded COVIDball playoffs. We even talked about it and the strange fandom identity crisis it would create last week. It’s going to be up to each Mariners fan individually what a playoff appearance will mean to them in 2020; there’s no right or wrong answer. I’m largely indifferent on the whole matter. I welcome the fun that comes from September scoreboard watching in a year that has largely been devoid of fun, but I can’t bring myself to care about whether a successful postseason berth comes with or without an asterisk. The goal of the Seattle Mariners, and the Jerry Dipoto regime, is no longer just to make the playoffs; the time for that was from 2016 to 2018 with an 85-win core group that needed just a little more juice to get over the top. That juice was left unsqueezed, and the goal of simply making the playoffs with King Félix, Canó, Cruz, and Seager was a total failure. The Seattle Mariners have moved past that core group, and we as fans should move our expectations past only ending the postseason appearance drought accordingly. Making the playoffs comes bundled in with what our new expectation for the Mariners rebuild should be: sustained success from a championship quality roster.

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It’s hard not to sympathize with the fans who wouldn’t be able to see any validity in a 2020 Mariners playoff team. The playoff drought has transcended the identity of their fandom and become a tangible villain among the likes of the Super Bowl XL referees, the Oklahoma City Thunder, and David Stern for many Seattlites. Seeing a monster that’s stuck around for nearly two decades being taken down via an expanded playoff format in a pandemic shortened season by a Mariners team in the fledgling stages of a rebuild would be anticlimactic beyond any sense of acceptability. To have players like [checking notes] Sam Haggerty and [squinting] Nick Margevicius climb the mountain and slay the dragon that players like Ichiro, Edgar, Cruz, and, most importantly, Félix couldn’t during their (post-2001) time with the Mariners feels inherently wrong. 

That’s not the fault of Haggerty, Margevicius, or any other of the number of the Seattle Mariners I’m not yet fully convinced haven’t been auto-generated the same way MLB The Show does when you play Franchise mode too long and all the real players are gone. Our lack of familiarity with the vast majority of the M’s roster means that these simply aren’t guys you gotta love. That doesn’t mean there aren’t players on the roster, or in the system, who won’t be the guys you gotta love someday, but Kyle Seager aside it can be hard to say that this group of Mariners have earned the right to step into the pantheon of Mariners legends by ending the playoff drought.

That’s an irrational and selfish thing to say, but fandom itself is inherently irrational and selfish. Fandom appropriates and internalizes the labor of others for the personal gain of each individual fan. This doesn’t make fandom immoral or unethical, but it does make it very dumb. It’s very dumb to say that a roster full of players who’ve been grinding away at a niche set of skills for their entire lives hasn’t earned the right for an opportunity to achieve the ultimate success in their field because you don’t feel like they’ve been wearing your city’s laundry for long enough yet. And it’s perfectly okay to say that! It’s okay to be a big time dumbass sometimes, and that’s especially true when it comes to sports and the overarching narratives we build as fans. Just look at how some of the other villains of Seattle sports were defeated–the demons of Super Bowl XL were exorcised when the Legion of Boom dismantled the greatest offense the NFL has ever seen, the Oklahoma City Thunder are clearly cursed until Seattle has the Supersonics returned, and David Stern is fucking dead. Not all of these were explicit victories, per se, but they’re all climatic blips to grasp onto in the persistent anticlimax that is everyday life. 

Perhaps fandom, as a viewing experience with explicit fail and success states–win the game or lose the game, make the playoffs or go home early, etc–can be seen as a way of rooting against anticlimax. For baseball in particular, the slog and time commitment of a typical 162 game season can make even a single year without the explicit success of the playoffs feel like a year wasted. String 20 such seasons together in a row and you’re looking at the Seattle Mariners Rooting Experience, an entire generation’s worth of persistent anticlimax. To close the book on that era of Mariners Baseball now by stumbling into an expanded playoff format with a JAGgy roster would be the ultimate anticlimax. It’s likely the most fitting ending to the drought, but that doesn’t mean everyone’s going to be happy if it comes to fruition. And if they aren’t, that’s okay. To be dumb, is to fan, is to be human.