It’s just another day. There was weather. There’s always weather. There was news. There’s always news. There’s always a million things you have to do, somehow even on a Sunday. But if you’re lucky, you catch a moment to yourself, maybe while you’re having your coffee, and you think about your place in the world. How can you help but be a little reflective on a weekend filled with nostalgia for an icon you grew up with? So you think about who you were in 2001 and who you are now. It makes you realize that you might not be putting in enough effort not to harden as you age. Now that you’ve seen more, now that more bad things have happened to you, and now that you’ve done more bad things to others. For a moment, it makes you hope for hope itself, that you might be able to become a little more hopeful and a little less cynical.
The trigger down this journey of interiority was baseball. So you consider how baseball can itself be fodder for cynicism: you remember well the last time the Mariners retired a jersey number and that it came to be known as Deadgar Weekend. Yet baseball gives you reason to hope too. In fairness, it’s a hope that’s a bit insubstantial, not the kind that keeps people going through real horror with all its violence. But it gives you a taste of what it means to hope, so that you’re familiar with it when you need to reach for it for real. Hope is a muscle; you have to exercise it.
Today was one of those games that lets you hope. The Mariners got things going very early, with the first five runners reaching base and jumping out to a 4-0 before the Rays had recorded an out. That sequence was highlighted by Cal Raleigh’s 45th home run of the year, which ties Johnny Bench for the second most by a catcher. Like Ichiro before him, Cal Raleigh is redefining what’s possible. If that can’t make you feel hopeful, what can?
But the Mariners left the inning with the bases loaded, and Eugenio Suárez was caught stealing along the way, which ended a franchise-record 24 consecutive stolen bases without getting caught. And then Bryan Woo started to look a little shaky, surrendering a pair of doubles in the second to make it 4-1, a triple in the third to make it 4-2, and a home run in the fourth to make it 4-3. All the while the Mariners’ bats went quiet, letting Adrian Houser, who looked like he might not survive the first inning, somehow wiggle through five. The mood shifted.
Yet failure was not inevitable. In fact, the Mariners never even trailed. Woo recovered and kept alive his streak of pitching six innings every start this season, the first time a pitcher’s done that in his first 23 starts since 2019. He even tied his career and season high with nine strikeouts, picking up the last one with an absolute bullying of Jake Mangum by sending a fastball down the chute and daring him to come get it. Bryan Woo, you’ll recall, came out of nowhere, a bad reliever at Cal Poly who turned into an All-Star. If that can’t make you feel hopeful, what can?
And the bats came back around eventually, with Josh Naylor finally tagging on a fifth run in the seventh with his 15th big fly of the year. It was his fourth as a Mariner, making him the first player in MLB history with at least four home runs and ten stolen bases in his first fifteen games with a franchise. Just for fun, he had a couple sterling defensive plays in the middle innings as well. The stolen bases have deservedly gotten the attention, as he proves that you don’t have to be fast to add value on the bases, showing us all that we may not be as limited by our weaknesses as we think. If that can’t make you feel hopeful, what can?
After the Mariners added on one more in the eighth, Matt Brash came out to get the save with some absolutely nuclear sliders, taking just 12 pitches to pick up four whiffs, a strikeout, and a pair of routine ground balls. With the bullpen running on fumes headed into the off day, finishing off the series with dominance earns him today’s Sun Hat Award. That series sweep cements a 9-1 post-deadline homestand in which the Mariners made up four games on Houston and showed off a relentless new lineup. They’ve pushed their odds of winning the World Series up to 9.8%, the highest in FanGraphs history, higher even than after they won the Wild Card Round in 2022.
You heard a lot of fear coming into this weekend. You heard that the Mariners would obviously, surely, inevitably blow it. They always blwo it on the big weekends. The thing is though that they don’t. The time before Deadgar Weekend that Seattle retired a jersey number, they swept Anaheim. They just celebrated Ichiro for an entire week and won every game.
Hoping for the Mariners to do well isn’t free. You’ll feel disappointment when they lose because sometimes they will. You’ll also have to endure the cynics, smugly insisting that their negativity is just them being realistic, even though they’re always predicting disaster. And to be sure, false optimism is no better. Only a fool always insists that things will work out, because sometimes they won’t. You do want to do what the cynics claim to be doing and be realistic. The Mariners have flaws. Having the highest World Series odds in FanGraphs history still amounts to a less than one-in-ten shot. The team does not currently have the division lead, and if they did, they wouldn’t have a bye.
But when you drink your coffee on a busy Sunday and think about who you were, who you are, and who you want to be, you realize you’ve seen enough not to whistle past the grave yard. And you also don’t want to be someone who always expects the worst. To do so robs yourself of something important. Hope is something to hold on to. And it’s worth risking disappointment for because you need it. The Mariners are a gift because they let you believe. When the chips are actually down in your life, and you need a more substantive hope to reach for, you’ll be able to find the part of your soul where it lives. So believe in the Mariners. They’ve done enough to deserve your belief. And you too deserve to believe in something.
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