10/18/25: Notebook from Delirium

Thoughts on something new

Happy weekend, all. This will be easily one of the most disjointed and brain-scrambled entries into the newsletter. It’s Saturday and I have to work in a few hours. That said, I couldn’t let this moment - with the Mariners on one win away from their first World Series - pass without offering something.

Consider the below a peek into the mental notebook I’ve been keeping the past 48 hours or so. The truly great ones can synthesize these experiences on-the-fly into something wonderful, but I make no claims to be among them. This is just my brain. This is my brain on Mariber.

• I have told this story before but I will repeat it for newer readers: As newly weds living in LA, my wife and I went for a walk. For reasons that are forgettable and therefore unimportant we started talking about baseball. For the next 45 minutes or so I delivered, uninterrupted and without surcease, The Legend of the 1995 Mariners. It was, to that point, probably the longest I had ever spoken about a single topic in my life.
  
  She didn’t leave me, and hasn’t. At least not yet.
  

• The mythos is solidifying now. The 2025 Seattle Mariners do not have to play another baseball game (although they are guaranteed to play at least two more) to be inducted into the inner circle of our home’s sports pantheon. Every victory, every game, every day they continue we and they are adding new layers of depth, mystery, and wonder to the memories we will pass down as heritage for the rest of our lives.
  
  Dump Shirt Guy leads to Cal, leads to mustaches, leads to Geno, leads Etsy Witch, to 15 innings, to Humpy winning (and now needing to die), to Polanco singles; Bazardo relief innings, Leo Rivas singles, Julio homers, beating Skubal four times, and on and on and on.
  
  The facts and particulars will be misremembered, wrongly told, morphed, exaggerated, forgotten, and thoroughly butchered by drunk uncles and overly-caffeinated tik tok’ers. In 10 years or so no one is going to correctly remember or care what actually happened with the 2025 Seattle Mariners. That’s because legends aren’t real, don’t need to be, aren’t even designed to be. And make no mistake, this team, these players, and this season are already legends.
  

• What is real is that with just one more Seattle victory every team in Major League Baseball will have appeared in the World Series. The Seattle Mariners - literally the Seattle Mariners - are on the cusp as they have never been before. For almost half-a-century, as the team has let us down over and over and over again, this fanbase has taken it upon themselves to create stories, communities, and joy to fill in the gaps in this experience where, at least for a normal team, victories are supposed to go.
  
  It has been a wildly uneven and disproportionate partnership, and over the years I think seeing this team at the mountaintop became such an abstract concept it ceased being the central focus of what we’ve all made this be for ourselves. In that sense Alex Rubinstein and Jon Bois nailed it in The History of the Seattle Mariners: If you’re a Mariners fan still here for winning in the traditional sense “you’re an astronaut who brought his wallet”.
  
  In an interview in today’s Seattle Times, Bois further fleshed out that idea, which I think is a correct diagnosis of what this has all been for so long:

  
  “He said that if the Mariners do win the whole shebang, ‘it would not teach us anything that we don’t already know. It would be sort of antithetical to the idea that we argued with the Mariners: Winning or losing isn’t particularly important,’ Bois said. ‘You love them like a family member, whether they succeed or fail.”
  
  The Mariners are special. They are special not because they have earned our love, not because watching them succeed validates all the energy, time, and money we’ve put into them over the years, and definitely not because winning is what this is all about. They are family. Being let down by family is a big part of the experience. So is choosing to not walk away when you are let down. They are always here whether we want them to be or not, and often the answer to that is “not.”
  
  We still let them in, and we always will. That’s pretty much what family is I suppose.
  

• There is, at present, no way to properly measure time. There was a life we lived before the 2025 Mariners’ postseason, and there will be one after it’s done. For the moment, however, we exist solely in the eternal. Like Cal Raleigh’s eighth inning home run last night we have been suspended so far above ground level for so long that terra firma is becoming a hazy memory. We are flying higher than we ever have. Descent from here is guaranteed by nature, but there is no law written that states when it has to start, nor how far we can go before we land.
  
  To the journey. Goms.