OCTOBER 31, 2025 | OPINION | By Obie King-Bagley
Since the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the Seattle Mariners have not ended a season with a record under .500. However, in the 2010s, the team was met with indifference in Seattle, and T-Mobile Park (formerly Safeco Field) was rarely packed to the brim. Two decades of being comfortably at the foot of the AL West had waned fan enthusiasm, and any prospect of being more than the American League’s version of the Pittsburgh Pirates looked far-fetched at best.
While they broke their 21-year-long playoff drought in 2022 and managed to win a thrilling wild card series in Toronto, they were then swept by their divisional rivals, the Houston Astros. This was especially frustrating considering that Houston proceeded to win the World Series, marking their first legitimate championship. 2023 and 2024 brought a different kind of heartbreak, when the Mariners missed out on the playoffs by a single win each time.
This year began with an incredible hot streak, which flickered out around mid-summer before igniting again during a late-season surge. For the first time in what felt like decades, the Mariners had a genuine superstar in soon-to-be-crowned American League MVP Cal Raleigh. Raleigh set the all-time home run record for a catcher, was named an all-star, won the home run derby and became just the seventh player in MLB history to hit 60 home runs in a season. The team reinforced at the trade deadline by adding Josh Naylor and Eugenio Suarez, two players who became key pieces of their late-season heroics, with Naylor in particular becoming a fan favorite.
With all the pieces coming together, the Mariners headed down to Houston in mid-September, tied on wins at the top of the division. Only six games remained after this series, meaning whoever won would almost certainly take the top spot. With years of heartbreaking ends to the season, especially to Houston, it felt like it would end in yet another disappointing near-miss. Against all odds, the Mariners won all three games.
Clinching the team’s first divisional title since their record holding 2001 season had to wait a couple more nights, but it felt as if they had finally exorcised the demons that had been blocking their progress over the last few years. Whether it was their exceptional rotation, the MVP candidate playing the best baseball of his life or an Etsy witch hired by a fan, the 2025 Seattle Mariners seemed destined to break the 48-year streak of heartbreak.
This feeling of destiny continued into the playoffs, where they faced the Detroit Tigers in the American League Divisional Series (ALDS). A tense series swung back and forth until it reached its final stage in Game Five in Seattle.
Fans of both teams could barely watch as the game reached its fifteenth inning, the longest winner-take-all game in the history of the sport. With bases loaded, playoff cult hero Jorge Polanco hit a walk-off single to win the game and send the Mariners back to the American League Championship Series (ALCS) for the first time in 24 years. This set up a series against the Toronto Blue Jays for the pennant and the chance to play in the World Series. Could they finally do it?
In another world, this article ends on a happy note for Mariners fans. And yet, the team yet again found a way to break all of Seattle’s collective hearts. I could talk about the fact that they returned to T-Mobile Park protecting a 2-0 lead, or their two separate games where a win would have sent them to the World Series and I could bring up that they led in the winner-take-all Game Seven until the bottom of the seventh inning.
But at the end of the day, the Mariners did what the Mariners always do, and that’s what makes them both so easy and so painful to root for. Out of the 32 teams in MLB, 31 have played in a World Series: no guesses as to who the one missing team is. The Mariners still hold the record for the longest drought in Major League American sports, and with other traditionally strong teams faltering this year, it felt like the perfect opportunity to change that.
The Mariners will be back next year and they have set themselves up for long-term success. Their development system is now one of the best in the league, the city is supporting the team again, and provided they maintain this core group of players, they will once again be in the playoff mix next year.
While this was a missed opportunity, the hope is that this will give them the experience to go one better next October. A catastrophic fall off and another 20-year wait seems unlikely, though I’m sure that’s what they said in 2001 as well.