With the 2022 Mariners seasons one two days away it’s a time to reflect on all the stuff that makes us love this silly game. While the debut of Julio Rodriguez is obviously the most exciting early development, baseball is a sport with as many faces as it has fans. It has a way of offering you whatever you need from it. With that in mind, here are the themes/trends/players/events besides Julio that has the D&B staff excited.

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The Old Man and the Teens

By the standards of life, I am not old. By the standards of Major League Baseball, I am ancient. As of today, there are three (3) players on a major league roster older than I am (thanks for coming back, Pujols!). While I may feel aches and pains more acutely than I did in my 20s, I still have some gas left in the tank. Therefore, I will be rooting for Sergio Romo (younger than me, but at least born in the same era) to stave off Father Time, and show the rest of the roster – all born after the calendar flipped to the 90’s – that us old guys still have something to contribute to society.

-Dan Gomez

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There is, by most measure, entirely too much baseball in a baseball season. 162 games, 1,458 innings, 4,374 outs, etc. It’s a lot of sports! It’s probably too much! While the end goal of a baseball season (per generally agreed upon social constructs) is to win as many games as possible, the sheer volume of baseball on offer allows for fans to seek out the sport’s sidequests how they see fit. My sidequests of choice: A game played under protest, an outfield of Winker/Kelenic/Haniger as often as possible, more throws to places where there is no one to catch the ball, and the unicorn: Luis Torrens – “3B”.

Give me some weird, weird meat, Mariners.

–Nathan Bishop

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Baseball is the Tom & Jerry hallway of our lives. We don’t need to look at it too closely all the time—the effect works so much better when we don’t—but it looks weird as hell when it’s frozen. What makes this sport special isn’t the perfect moments, or even the storylines. It’s that there’s too much of it, by design, such that it offers this sensation of infinite depth: it can never be fully explored, or explained. Even the most plentiful sources of entertainment, like, say the production details of Morbius, have their bottom. They end. Baseball will never end, never slow down, never even bother to pick us up on the way. It plunges cheerfully and madly onward, unheeding of what we want or need or think. I miss baseball, but mostly I miss missing baseball. 

-Patrick Dubuque

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The Mariners have been bad in an extremely specific way for far too long. They are, perennially, the fifth most-important item on your to-do list. Annoying enough to never quite be at the top, just to get it over with, and never so easy to just finally do it. By force or choice, this year they’ll have to DO something, finally. They have enough young talent that has to produce, enough potentially-terrible roster construction that has to either succeed or fail, enough disinterest amongst fans that something has to give. They can’t (they will) just quietly win 78 games and have everything stay the same. Something’s gotta give. Let’s hope it’s dingers and postseason droughts.

-David Skiba

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Personally, I’m excited about the things I get to tell people what I’m doing when in reality I’m watching this Seattle Mariners baseball team. Birthday parties, apartment yard work, watching a marvel movie(?) hell, I’ll even tell someone I’m camping if it means I get some peace and quiet while I get to tweet into the abyss about a solid Suàurez at bat. I’m locked and loaded with excuses. The next thing on my to-do list is to buy a better air conditioner. 

-Scott George.

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The 2021 Mariners’ 90 victories were won in the ugliest imaginable fashion. Spending a summer watching the offense Mr. Magoo its way through the late innings of ballgames to produce a solitary run while the bullpen grits their teeth and deaths their grips is a viewing experience that I don’t care to repeat, which is why I’m excited to see an honest-to-God Major League lineup penciled in every day. While the lineup should be even deeper than it is, it’s at least deeper than it was, and that means I’ll get to watch some goddamn dingers when everyone’s clicking on all cylinders.
-Matt Eitner

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As you may or may not know, I am a fan of the Gonzaga Bulldogs men’s basketball team. With that fandom comes intense joy throughout the regular season followed by emotionally-crippling disappointment in March. This year especially. The Seattle Mariners, as we are all well aware, have largely not broached meaningful baseball in July, and thus have deprived us of the normal emotions most people feel as fans. Last year, run differential be damned, that wasn’t the case. This season, somewhat muted free agency notwithstanding, the Seattle Mariners *should* be competitive this year in every month of the regular season. Hopefully, that extends to October, and we all get to enjoy the disappointment that comes with rooting for a good team.

-Peter Woodburn

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During MLB’s offseason, if you’re able to successfully disconnect from the hot stove media circus, the winter months can be a wonderful time for baseball fans. You can catch up on your reading. Or get lost in a new hobby. Or finally get around to dusting the tops of your bookshelves. Sometimes I’m able to take a step back and do this, but this year I wasn’t so lucky. The lockout and the surrounding angst grabbed my attention and would not let go. And it made me feel so tired. For a long time, it seemed pretty hopeless — like the chances of getting baseball in April or May (or anytime in 2022, tbh) were slim.

Fortunately, we will be getting baseball this year. A brand new season kicks off (somehow) tomorrow. And I’m excited. Excited for baseball. With the onset of the regular season, we can shift our focus away from the tightfistedness of the Mariners ownership group and instead focus on the tightness of Robbie Ray’s pants. We can rejoice in the high-leverage whiffs generated by Paul Sewald‘s fastball instead of grumbling about the countless whiffs made by the M’s front office during free agency. And we can shake our fists in triumph when Julio socks another dinger into the Seattle sunset instead of shaking our heads in disgust as the commissioner of the sport we love continues to make it obvious that he fucking hates baseball.

As bad and greedy and self-serving as MLB and its ownership groups are, baseball is that much better. Baseball is worth getting excited about. And that’s why, offseason after offseason, we keep coming back.

-Andrew Rice