The History of the Seattle Mariners (2020)

I will have some baggage to address involving this most peculiar and wonderful documentary, which I will get to as soon as I figure out how to describe what it is. It is over three and a half hours long and available on YouTube in six separate episodes or with all pasted together in one (recommended). It is closer to a 3D animated powerpoint presentation than what we think of as a documentary, with the visuals dominated by a calendar-page style chart of the years 1977 to 2019, which is filled in and cluttered up as we go with exciting photos, news headlines, and, most importantly, statistics. The statistics are there to be discovered. They are what make the hours of this documentary worth sitting for. They make the hours seem short. I suspect a job like this could be done with any team—that any professional sports franchise 25 years or older will have statistical freaks and jaw-dropping weirdness. But director/writers Jon Bois and Alex Rubenstein have 100% made the case for the Mariners, who even statistically appear to be what they appear to be: a most peculiar study in unrelenting futility. Bois and Rubenstein, collectively known as Dorktown, work under the banner of SB Nation, a sports blogging network owned by Vox. As advertised, The History of the Seattle Mariners is a very thorough history, starting in 1932 and continuing with the Seattle Pilots episode, before literally charting Mariners history from 1977 on. I moved to Seattle in 1985 as an eager baseball fan ready to switch lifetime allegiances for the sake of witnessing a Gorman Thomas dinger in the Kingdome. As the years 1977 to 1988 are generally regarded as the tedious overture to the Mariners opera, I arrived just in time.

So to the baggage proper: 1) I have been actively turned off all professional sports by the response to the pandemic (start with hogging up too much of an already meager testing supply for the sake of meaningless exhibition games and continue a year and a half later with Aaron Rodgers). Don't even talk to me about college sports, which is a crime in progress on multiple levels, not just covid. 2) I have been actively turned off baseball since 1995, when players crossed the picket lines of others after their own strike was resolved even as owners turned to homerun derbies and other circus-like changes to the game to get butts back in seats, whistling and playing dumb about the complicated issue of PEDs. And 3) the Seattle Mariners. Where do you even start with this team? I can now say, thanks to this meticulously researched documentary, that the answer to that question is 1932. And I know better that the team has delivered more pleasure to me than I have generally been willing to admit. My favorite period is probably many people's, 1989 to 1995 (even if the last year was deeply soured by stadium politics). It was the coming of Ken Griffey Jr. and a bunch of Yankee-killers, which climaxed in a best-of-5 postseason series down two games to beat the Yankees in a freaking storybook finish.

I cried then and I cried again, watching the 1995 episode here, even though with mixed feelings still because of the stadium issue, a whole other story. Sticking to the main point, the underachieving powerhouse that was the Mariners for the rest of the '90s—with Griffey, DH Edgar Martinez, pitcher Randy Johnson (my favorite), and shortstop A-Rod—is well detailed here. They address disgruntled people like me at one point, with a weak argument that if all you want is a championship you're missing the point, but what I have learned about myself is I don't have such sisyphean levels of appetite for meaningless labor. The weakest part of this documentary is the portion devoted to the 21st century, starting with 2002. Yes, Ichiro Suzuki and Felix Martinez continue the amazing statistical march to pointlessness (and Adrian Beltre, and Robinson Cano), and in many interesting and dramatic ways. But what plays as tragedy first inevitably plays as farce in redux, and much of the last hour here is unnecessary, though still interesting in chatty distracted ways, for example, say, with the Jack Wilson story. Above all, on a personal level, The History of the Seattle Mariners renewed my appreciation for Griffey—I'd had a grudge against him since he left for Cincinnati, having always treated the Mariners as his quadruple-A steppingstone there. It wasn't really like that, I see here, and it reminded me of what it felt like to be a fan in 1989. Anyway, if a sports / baseball / Mariners curmudgeon such as myself can not just like this documentary but positively love it, there's hope for anyone with more moderated views. In short, don't miss it.