The Light Bat: Introduction
A quick review of where we've been, and where we're hoping to go.
Welcome to The Light Bat, a Seattle Mariners Newsletter. I am so glad you’re here. The newsletter will be providing Mariners-influenced content twice a week, typically on Tuesdays and Fridays. This is the first-ever edition, and I want to use it to set the table. The feast will begin in earnest this Friday with the Official Light Bat Mariners Offseason Plan.
Who
Hi y’all. My name is Nathan. I’m a 43-year-old real estate agent living on the Kitsap Peninsula on the western shore of the Puget Sound. I’ve been infatuated with the game of baseball since well before I was old enough to consider the concept of reaping what I sow. Being raised in the Pacific Northwest, that led me quite naturally to the Seattle Mariners. Again, being a child at the time I could not grasp the cascading effects that such an early-life self-Charlie Brown Kicks Football’ing would do to my psyche. Over the decades with a lot of work (and therapy) I’ve learned to forgive myself. Hopefully you will too.
While I’ve been fixated on this silly game since around 1983, I’ve been doing what is now called “producing content” on the Seattle Mariners since 2011, when my buddy Jon let me write here and there for his Mariners blog Pro Ball Northwest (RIP). That led me to the privilege of writing and editing at esteemed internet fixture Lookout Landing from 2013-2016. That stop granted me sufficient readership that when I stepped away from LL due to Vox Media disrupting the paradigm of fair wage compensation, I was able to co-found the independent venture Dome and Bedlam with my good friends Scott Weber and David Skiba. Dome and Bedlam was intermittently active and consistently a nuisance to the Mariners’ front office from 2016 until early 2024. I enjoyed the hell out of it.
My experiences also somehow landed me a local radio show. During the baseball season you can find me on 93.3 KJR FM for Mollywhop Mondays with my friends Chris Crawford and Ian Furness. The show makes a lot of people very upset which, full disclosure, I think is very funny.
What
The Light Bat is a twice-weekly Mariners newsletter. December 2024 and January 2025 are going to be about figuring out what does and doesn’t work. Right now the loose idea is Tuesdays will serve as a combination news roundup (should any whiteboarding in the Dipoto Imaginarium accidentally manifest itself into tangible reality) and/or attempts at analysis of the team. Fridays are going to be a bit more……experimental.
I’m going to see what hits and what misses (and there will definitely be misses, we’ve all got a personal K%) and try to build a thing you enjoy reading as we head into what is sure to definitely be another Mariners season in 2025. I want this newsletter to be something you look forward to; a weekly ritual that serves as illuminating and insightful, honest and fair. In short, I want your 2025 Mariners experience to be more enjoyable because you read The Light Bat.
Why
I’ll go ahead and assume you mean beyond my vanity and need for attention, correct? A very fair question. The market may not exactly be crying out for another middle-aged white dude to spend his free moments telling you about how baseball was better when Paul Abbott and his 87-mile-per-hour fastball went 17-4 in 2001, and yet I fully intend to do that and a good deal more. What gives?
Well, I don’t do well purely as a consumer, for one thing. With Dome and Bedlam officially closing up shop in early 2024 I found my various quips, thoughts, and ideas about the team confined largely to X: The Future of Unlimited Engagement, which is a very bad website. This led to me wanting to engage less, both with the team and its fans. It did not make the 2024 season enjoyable. I do best when I am outputting as well and inputting, and I’m hopeful this will be a good outlet. Additionally, The Light Bat allows for more focused reach. If you’re reading this it’s because you chose to. You clicked that subscribe button, and I love you for that.
The Dome and Bedlam project, such as it was, became defined as the opposition party against the Mariners of the Jerry Dipoto Era. As various media enterprises became swayed (or acted swayed for some combination of access and/or job security) by the concept of the Moneyball-style rebuild Seattle was evangelizing, our little site felt compelled to point out the various inconsistencies, falsehoods, and incongruities contained therein. While many felt we were simply cranks for the sake of being cranks, over the years the Mariners were kind enough to make it quite clear that we were largely correct about both their underlying motivations and lack of aptitudes.
Regardless of how you feel about all of that enough time and digital ink has been spent on that project. For anyone who cares to look the Mariners’ Whole Deal is fairly obvious, and if you disagree with that here at the end of 2024 it’s likely nothing I or anyone else says is going to change that much.
While The Light Bat will certainly contain snark and jokes at the Mariners’ and their “Guy Who Refers to Everything as A Life Hack” POBO’s expense, its purpose and intent is far from that specific thing. This newsletter is seeking the joy of the game, the good-natured laugh at predictable failure, and the delirious high-fiving of total strangers as a response to inexplicable success. It’s seeking camaraderie through humor. It believes that baseball is still, after centuries, a wonderful game full of mystery and unscripted drama. Baseball fandom is better than most things. I think it’s something worth having, and I’m excited to try and build it with you.
How
If I have any kind of an overarching thesis to this project it’s this: I believe the Seattle Mariners exist well beyond their record, their roster, or (blissfully) their ownership and executives. The Seattle Mariners are something that we have created and always will create together through the acts of observing, processing, and commiserating about them. This idea, ephemeral and poorly defined as it may be, offers a liberating level of freedom. We are not beholden to what the team markets, wins, loses, does, or says.
The Seattle Mariners are not John Stanton or Jerry Dipoto. They are not even Julio Rodriguez and Logan Gilbert. Many of us predate these names by decades, and will be here long after their chapters have finished. This story is ours, and that means we’ll Free John Jaso, throw some lawn darts, and yell “Go Biz” after a new restaurant opens, and especially when someone gets a newly-invented title as a promotion (and a big congratulations to newly-minted Vice President and Assistant General Manager Andy McKay. Go Biz).
The Seattle Mariners may very well never win a World Series, but I and we do not have to wait on that to make the 2025 season the most enjoyable one of our lives. I want to love this team, and I want to love them with my fellow Mariner fans. The Light Bat is going to search for that shared love twice a week. I hope you join me, and I hope we have a great time.
Goms
Light Bat FAQ
Is this thing free?
It is! For now, at least. While some of you have quite generously offered to pay for the newsletter I don’t feel comfortable accepting anyone’s hard-earned cash until I feel the product has settled in and established itself.
While transparently I do hope to be able to turn on payments for Opening Day 2025, at least one post per week of The Light Bat will always be free. Should payments be accepted I will work hard to have a model in place that offers what I feel is fair value for that payment.
Are you going to podcast?
No! At least, I’m not planning on it. There are already innumerable Mariner podcasts, one for seemingly every taste and on every topic. I’m not sure you need 40 minutes per week of me three beers deep recreating the Book of Ecclesiastes around the Mariners. Additionally, once I have ascended to power it’s my full intention to make podcasting a prosecutable offense, and I do not want to have to prosecute myself.
Anything else we should know?
Yeah, actually. If you read this far I’ll let you know one thing The Light Bat is never going to do. I am not going to discuss baseball players by their “value”. I may make reference to a player’s contract status here and there for humorous effect, but I have no interest in getting into the weeds of whether baseball players are “worth” what they make. Major League Baseball operates without a salary cap and in a system that ruthlessly exploits and underpays 98%+ of its labor force. Teams acting as though they simply cannot figure out how to pay players enough to begin to try and compete are lying obviously and blatantly. I will not be party to that fiction.
The Seattle Mariners Baseball Club exists solely due to the passion and generosity of the people of this region. They exist to provide us - the consumers that create their unfathomable largesse - a successful product that makes us proud, both on and off the field. I am not and will not be beholden to an artificially constructed economic framework at the behest of some old white guys whose greatest accomplishment in life was being a nerd in the 1980s. They need us far, far more than we need them.