There’s always a moment, every year, where you scream. The team could be (and usually is) dozens of games out of first, the results of the day’s game meaningless beyond a gentle drip of escapism, the players involved faceless and forgettable, but there will always be at least one time something so unexpected and/or dramatic happens you’ll lose control. Dylan Moore made me scream. He’s kind of made that his thing during his time in Seattle. A useful, but ultimately fungible player throwing his glove out and back, desperate to find something there to save us. Monday night, there was something there, and he caught it.

*****

Full stop, it should not be this hard to enjoy a baseball team. It’s ludicrous that the Seattle Mariners starting their season 11-7, tied for first place, and playing incredibly solid baseball casts a certain segment of fans (your humble author included) into some sort of existential crisis. But for many, again myself among them, trying to grapple with how to enjoy a young, plucky team off to a good start while balancing it against the inertia of nearly half a century of spectacular, ceaseless, historic failure and a front office and ownership that seemingly pinballs from one horrific scandal after another is enough to tie the ol’ mentals into a terrible pretzel.

It’s the actual greatness of the game that all the parasitic billionaires count on to get you. The sport of baseball is so great and so enjoyable that faceless suits – stuffed with money where their soul should be – have devised an elaborate system in which taxpayers pay for their team’s homes, all but the top 1% of players can barely survive, and where revenue streams are so large, so numerous, and so guaranteed that not only is putting a quality product on the field unnecessary for financial success, so is even bothering to pretend otherwise. 

They know they’ve got you. The sport is so good, so ingrained into our culture, our shared lived experience that it won’t die. They know even if you or I quit, if we throw our hands up and walk away, that enough people will stick around. They’ve gamed it perfectly, and they can never fail, at least until American sports fans embrace their power the way European soccer fans do.

And so, the terrible dilemma fans generally, and I very specifically have been struggling with for years now: How do I root for this team authentically, with my time and my money and my heart, when I know that doing so plummets me headlong into a system of monopolization, anti-labor practice, and general exploitation that I find abhorrent? 

I’m far from the first to wrestle with this question, and I certainly don’t expect I’ll come to an answer here. While Kevin Mather’s breathtaking idiocy pushed me to the very brink of letting go of my fandom, I think it’s unlikely I’ll ever be able to fully walk away from this team. It’s certainly not losing that will drive me away. If that were the case I’d have found more rewarding things to do with my time decades ago. But being in the middle, feeling torn between cheering with my friends = many of whom I’ve met through writing about and covering this team – for an enjoyable group of players managed by a suddenly-Good and Correct Scott Servias, knowing that there is no way to do that without feeding a brutally exploitative system run by literally the worst people alive is a frankly exhausting way to try and do all this. If your brain doesn’t put you through this all the time while watching the Seattle Mariners I am very happy for you, because it kind of sucks.

There’s no real “answer” to this. For now, I’ve settled on rooting for the team during games, and trying to build solidarity through the fanbase in what little ways I can. I’m hopeful we can, together, construct an expectation and demand that we are more than just consumers. We are precisely one half of all that’s needed to keep this sport going, with the players themselves being the other half. Anything else in that equation is filler, and could easily be cast aside.

More than anything, I keep coming back to something approximating the last 30 seconds of this monologue on the English Super League: John Stanton and his minority partners may own the Seattle Mariners by rule of law and title, but they are in spirit nothing but temporary caretakers of a public and civic legacy. We built the Kingdome. We built Safeco Field. We buy the tickets and concessions, build our daily routines around the schedule, and share our lives with each other and our children through this team. Our experiences, our memories, our legacies as they connect to this franchise are ours, and they are not for sale. For that very reason no one gets to own them but us.

*****

Dylan Moore did it again yesterday. A screaming line drive by Did-You-Know-He-Used-To-Be-A-Mariner Chris Taylor was all set to break open a scoreless game. The ball, as always, was past him. There was no chance of catching it. And yet he dove anyway, sticking his glove out as far as it could go, his body perfectly horizontal to the earth, floating in a moment of impossible geometries and physics.

He caught it. I screamed again. I hope you did too. I hope we do it together soon, in the middle of it all, of all of this, together.