We keep thinking that we’re going to stop. There cannot possibly be anything else the Mariners could do to drag our aged behinds into the seat to yak into a mic for, right?
Well, no. Kevin Mather went up like a firework stand in a bone-dry pine forest, the Mariners are (once again) the object of the baseball world’s ire and, well, we needed to talk about that.
Stick around for a discussion on what fandom means, if we can still really see ourselves as fans in the traditional sense, what the team does from here, some rudimentary Q&A, and a whole lot more.
This community and your listenership are the only thing that keep us going through all this, so thank you. Feel free to rate us and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. We are grateful for you.
(Music Credits: The Menzingers, Billie Eilish, Green Lung)
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This was so good, you guys. Sorry I missed out on the previous 46, but please do more of these. Maybe it’s just me, but it feels like so many people, for lack of a better word, radicalized over the past few years in all facets of their life, that the timing of this couldn’t be worse for fans of the Mariners. Although there is an argument to be made that maybe it’s better, since maybe 5 or so years ago, fewer people would have respected the value of labor or had *this* level of animosity towards pompous, racist billionaires.
With the caveat that I haven’t watched a game in 3 years, I still find it extremely hard to believe that Dipoto is not directly involved. Assuming Mather and them were the ones dictating the cheapness and lack of desire to win, the person building the team has to know. It’s not like Dipoto goes to Mather and is like “hey I can sign Mike Trout for $100,000,000 and a few bags of funions” and, when Mather says “no” since Funions are too expensive, he walks away like “makes sense, I won’t question this.” He has to know what was happening, if not be a willful participant.
Similarly, I don’t know how you fix this without new ownership and a completely new operational method. Because:
a) They’ve been willfully bad for years, and yes I think it has been willful, because it was clear on paper they were going to be bad and then they frequently performed at expectations. They do not care about winning, and
b) Based on what we know about sabermetrics, if they build a crud team and then luck their way into a WS win with the same ownership, knowing what we know about how little the winner of the WS is the best team on the field, does it really help anyone except the least involved fans feel like things are better or fixed? Maybe. But I feel like if I turned it on in April and they started going 162 and 0, because know how they were built and why, I have a hard time imagining myself finding joy in that.
Maybe I’m overthinking it now that I feel like more of an outsider, but it’s really hard to generate passion about someone or something you know deserves to fail.