FanPost Friday: “Well, then I guess there’s only one thing left to do.”
As baseball/movie fans of a certain age may know, it’s “Win the whole f*cking thing.”
Hello and welcome back to FanPost Friday. The MLB trade deadline has come and gone and the Mariners neither bought-in significantly nor softly sold much of anything besides Paul Sewald for three incredibly mid players. What the Mariners believe they did, which Kate wrote about in her excellent deadline wrap-up piece, was not disrupt the 2023 team and fill in a few holes for the 2024 roster.
So, uninterrupted 2023 Mariners team, your purgatorial state is over. What’s next? As stated in the title and dek of this post, Tom Berenger said it best in “Major League.”
Sidebar—It’s a funny thing how the movie “Major League” is continually intertwined with my Mariners fandom. The movie came out in 1989 and yet the plot has some eerily striking similarities with the Seattle Mariners during the early to mid-90’s as they nearly got moved to Tampa, but the scrappy group of underdogs more-or-less kept the team in Seattle by winning clutch games and making the playoffs for the first time in the team’s history and building massive public approval and generational support for the team in the process. Elements of “Major League” are products of its time and have not aged well at all, with plenty of overt and casual misogyny and racism layered into the movie’s core plot and sense of humor. But, both the overall “us (the slobs) versus them (the snobs)” motivation and its comedic usage of classic baseball player archetypes still hold up really well, in my opinion. I remember it was one of my friend’s favorite baseball movies, even though he wasn’t a baseball fan. We’d always watch it if it was on.
But anyways, here we are again and I have “Major League” on the mind. I don’t believe this team can make any kind of deep playoff run as constructed right now and yet Berenger’s quote has been ringing in my head all week. I am just not wired as a fan to simply stop watching or caring about my favorite baseball team when they are within spitting distance of a Wild Card spot and are in the midst of of a pivotal 4-game series with the hated Angels with a chance to put some real distance between them in the standings. I am wired to keep watching until the wheels fall off, until the last meaningful pitch is thrown, and I will be happy to be proven wrong by this comparatively ragtag group of characters that no one without ties to the Northwest spends any time thinking about.
Before I get to the prompt, hey look at this poll from last week! Two out of three series down, one to go?
Prompt: Is your approach to watching/following the team post-deadline going to change in any significant way? What are you looking for in the final ~2 months of the season?
Discuss in the comments and let’s go Mariners. Have a great weekend!