So there’s this:

It’s a good joke, an accurate joke, and one we and I richly deserve, but it speaks to a deeper issue I want to focus on for a few words.

I often find myself feeling guilty over not keeping this space and the podcast up more regularly. I spent most of my 20’s wishing I were a sportswriter, fell absolutely backwards into a golden opportunity writing and editing Lookout Landing (my absolutely favorite baseball website ever), and then created a new project, this project. Despite my consistent neglect the site and show continue to hold a loyal audience, something that means a whole darn lot to me. I’ve often thought (and we’ve had discussions as a group) about knuckling down and taking the place to a more regular publishing schedule. We even did exactly that once, posting every work day during the truncated 2020 season. But we didn’t keep it up, and the site slowly returned to its current 1-2 posts a month state. 

I’ve told myself it’s because we’re busy (we are), but the truth is it’s not that. We make time for what we want to make time for. No, the site’s transient existence is largely due to state of the sport, nicely summarized here:

I linked to the Passan article because it’s free. There’s no shortage of similar articles today (this sub-only piece by Andy McCullough stands out as particularly righteous hellfire). With MLB staring down a canceled Opening Day the big national voices seem to finally be capitulating to the idea many smaller voices have been hammering for years: Baseball owners, who once viewed major sports ownership as a prestigious plaything to show off to their peers, see their franchises solely as assets for maximization. 

As billionaires the owners are uniquely well-suited to absorb any and all exterior pressure to do otherwise, and the sport itself has slowly morphed from an entity that flows money (the only reward the owners recognize and/or covet) towards the most successful franchises on the field to a league that spreads money in vast swaths evenly among all 30 teams. Something something socialism only for the wealthy something something.

As the league has veered away from even the pretense of caring about its regular season I keep coming back to the Mariners, and this space, and wondering why we do any of this? We don’t stop being fans because our team loses. In fact I’ve learned to love the Mariners in some ways precisely because of their losing. Through nearly half a century of near-constant failure I’ve been able to convince myself to care. Jack Zduriencik, Bill Bavasi, Scott Spiezio, Bobby Ayala, Chone Figgins, 2010, wasting Felix Hernandez, and on and on. They were bad, but they were earnestly bad. When they failed, you knew they felt that failure. 

Or, perhaps they didn’t. Perhaps a life of mostly-middle class comfort largely insulated me from understanding just how cold and calculating all this has been since the beginning. What I know for sure is that the gig is up now. Who the owners are and what they stand for is clear and exposed for any to see that cares to look. The league with the best baseball talent in the world is run almost exactly like an automobile manufacturer or, perhaps more accurately, a loose connection of sports websites depending on a group of passionate individuals to create a valuable product for pennies on the dollar.

Once you see it you can’t unsee it, try as you might, and I have tried really hard. I’ve tried over and over to shake the past 3-4 seasons out of my head, forget they ever happened, and start being upset about things like bullpen usage and lineup construction again. I want to lose myself on the field for nine innings a night, get wound up about wins and losses, and get in front of a keyboard and microphone and talk about it with all of you. I want to want to do that so badly. But I can’t. At least, not yet, and certainly not until this owner-conceived and owner-executed assault on labor desists. 

As a Mariners fan I am capable of enduring a lot. But Major League Baseball is dying a self-inflicted death, and I cannot care much about that if it does not care about itself. My hope is we get the games soon, and that they’re good enough to remind us why we care. Until then, this space is stuck in it’s on-and-off semi-existence. We’ll post when the Mariners make us care, which just isn’t very often.