Restless in Seattle: Mariners eager to break postseason drought
SEATTLE — On Fridays in Seattle, it’s impossible to walk down the street without seeing fans wearing sports jerseys. It’s the easiest way to tell a local from someone who moved to town.
The tradition, known as Blue Friday, started as a one-time thing a few years ago. It has since exploded into weekly tradition for Seattle sports fans.
Problem is, the Blue Friday tradition only applies to one team in town: The Seattle Seahawks. You won’t see any Felix Hernandez jerseys or Ken Griffey Jr. throwbacks on Blue Friday, but you can’t walk three steps without seeing a fan wearing a Russell Wilson, Richard Sherman or even a Marshawn Lynch jersey.
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Perhaps that’s to be expected. The NFL season just began, and fans are eager to show off their love for the Seahawks. At the same time, though, this is exactly the moment when Mariners’ fandom should be at its peak.
The club is playing its best baseball right now, and sits just three games out of a wild-card spot in the American League. The Mariners have gone 11-7 in September, and are currently in the middle of a series with the Toronto Blue Jays, one of the clubs they are chasing for a playoff spot. There’s no better time for Mariners fans to be out in full force around the city.
The love for the Seahawks makes sense. The club has made the playoffs in four straight years, winning Super Bowl XLVIII in 2014 and returning to the big game the following year.
To say the Mariners haven’t come close to that level of success would be an understatement. It’s been 14 seasons since the Mariners made the postseason, the longest drought in MLB. The club has not only never won the World Series, it’s never even made it there.
All that losing and disappointment can take a toll on even the most devout M’s fans. Some Mariners fans are hoping for the best, but expecting the worst — because that’s what they’re accustomed to.
With so much at stake, it certainly feels like playoff-caliber baseball is already being played at Safeco Field. Ignore the fact that the regular season still has two weeks left, every single game matters to the players right now, and has for some time.
“Every game is a playoff game for us,” says second baseman Robinson Cano. “And it’s not just this series. The playoffs started two weeks ago for us.
“We’re not out until we’re out on the paper. Three games is nothing. You just have to get on a winning streak again and you never know what can happen.”
While every game has carried significant weight over the past few weeks, the Mariners aren’t letting the heightened expectations get to them. They are well aware of the implications, but they can’t start approaching games a different way.
“We’re all professional,” says catcher Chris Iannetta. “We all take every game seriously and prepare the best we can for each game. That’s what we’re doing. We know what the playoff implications are. We fully understand them. We’re excited, we’re looking forward to the games down the stretch, but we still need to focus on tonight.”
Despite the fact that they’ve dropped their last two games, including Tuesday’s 10-2 blowout loss to Toronto, that strategy has mostly worked thus far. A hot September has put the club in the thick of the playoff race, though they still face an uphill battle if they want to erase the longest playoff drought in the game.
While that’s something you might think only matters to fans of the team, the franchise’s recent stretch of futility does weigh on the players. They want to end the drought for both themselves and the city of Seattle.
“It matters to us,” says Cano. “We want to go to the playoffs. That’s what we want to do for this city.”
That’s a scenario the fans would gladly welcome.
Take this couple spotted at Tuesday night’s game, Patrick and Emma. Prior to one of the biggest games of the season, the two found themselves strolling around the Baseball Museum of the Pacific Northwest, reliving great moments in Mariners’ history.
It’s the same area where the Mariners Hall of Fame is located, where players like Edgar Martinez and Jay Buhner and Jamie Moyer, all of whom played on the last Mariners team to reach the postseason, have shrines dedicated to their accomplishments.
Walking past that area, it’s hard not to get nostalgic about the atmosphere postseason baseball brought to the city so many years ago. Emma attended the game in 2001 when the Mariners got win No. 116. She remembers the electricity in the stadium and thinks a playoff appearance would bring that back. As for Patrick? He has something else in mind.
“I want to see a Blue Friday for the Mariners,” he says.
As the Seahawks have shown in recent years, getting to the playoffs can do wonders for a franchise. Erasing a 14-year drought would be the first step toward making Seattle a Mariners town again.
At the very least, you would see a lot more Cano jerseys on Fridays.
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Chris Cwik is a writer for Big League Stew on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at christophercwik@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @Chris_Cwik
