We live in the Age of Reaping. From every facet of modern American society we are thrust headlong into a maelstrom of death, disease, and terror brought upon by the inability of our institutions to grapple with the demands and needs of its citizens, many of which spring from the decades-long neglect from those very same institutions. You are almost certainly aware of all this, and I don’t intend to inflict you with further summary. It sure sucks.

Baseball would like you to think of it as a safe refuge from all this pain, and when it clicks – when Mitch Haniger digs a ball laced into the right-field corner, plants his left foot, pivots, and trebuchets an arcing, seething fireball to Jean Segura, who casually flicks a no-look tag behind his back to stun a huffing Luis Valbuena – it works. The game, the pure sport of baseball, is an oasis from suffering. Sadly, baseball in America is largely (and increasingly) run under the banner of Major League Baseball, a Very American Company.

Mariner fans, such as we are in 2021, are now stuck wondering what to root for. The easiest answer would be to cheer for the team to acquire as much talent as they can, both in the immediate here and now, and in perpetuity moving forward. We should hope for savvy and thoughtful trades that fill in gaps in a roster that will soon be, theoretically, supplemented with graduates of one of the sport’s most highly-regarded farm systems. We should be cheering for the team to have its nose in every situation that sees a suddenly austere franchise look to shed its best players. We should be hopeful that the team has had, at minimum, preliminary conversations with every notable free agent, of which there is still seemingly an endless supply. This, right now, is the cusp of what should be the most exciting time to be a Mariners fan in at least a decade.

Instead, the Mariners biggest acquisition is Chris Flexen, who may have spent enough time in Korea to purify the Mets from his system, but also may just not be a very good major league pitcher. As player after player after player signs for shockingly low prices, it has become increasingly clear that whatever free agent moves the Mariners do end up making will be at the very last possible opportunity, with a primary focus on players who will play for whatever pittance the team throws at them.

If and when that happens, there will invariably be cries praising Jerry Dipoto and the front office for their acumen, and they will be wrapped in the now traditional modern garb of baseball compliments: “They have found great value.” Value, more than anything, is now what drives the game. What began as a way for the Oakland Athletics to compete with the New York Yankees has been slowly subsumed into yet another resource for Ivy league finance dorks with NPC-in-a-Bioware-RPG names like “Chaim” to strip mine for profit. This is who we now root for, not the players, but the growing number of front offices who are “waiting for their window” before splashing into their slowly counted cash. Baseball as stocks is here, and it is terrible.

The entire premise of fans being excited by a team acquiring a player on a team-friendly contract was that, theoretically, those savings would be pushed forward towards further acquisitions. The idea of course being that enough of these smart deals over a long enough period of time will result in a winning baseball team, the one thing fans can agree on they want. That system suffers a catastrophic breakdown when the team uses savings on payroll to simply, y’know, save money, and refuses to uphold the basic fan-to-team contract, in which the fan says “I will root for you to succeed” and the team says “I will try my best to win”.

So, again, we as 2021 Mariner fans are stuck. The team may end up signing players like Taijuan Walker and/or James Paxton in a few weeks. If they do so I’ll be very happy, primarily because I like both those players and would enjoy rooting for them as they play for my team again. But make no mistake, any free agent the Mariners sign between now and Opening Day could have been signed weeks, if not months ago. The gap between what could have already happened and whatever does happen is about one thing: seeing how low the market will fall, and how much money John Stanton and Co. can save. 

We aren’t rooting for smarts, or for savvy, or for value. We certainly aren’t rooting for billionaires to be happy about how much they saved on athletes who devote their entire lives to a one-in-a-million shot at one big contract. We’re rooting for a team to win baseball games, or at least to do everything in their power trying. Rooting for savings is a concept purely from our modern age. Looking around at the state of things, that’s a pretty good sign it’s an ideology to reject.