The Mariners are no longer a lovable novelty. Now they're here to prove they belong (2024)

CINCINNATI — Less than 12 months after the home run that changed everything, Cal Raleigh is standing here in the clubhouse, and the question lingers: Can the Seattle Mariners again capture September magic?

Last year Raleigh hit the walk-off homer that clinched a wild-card spot and ended Seattle’s 21-year playoff drought. Sweet chaos ensued, a flashpoint moment in franchise history. Ever since, Raleigh has lived a very different existence. There was life before the home run. Now there is life after.

“Quite bluntly, yeah,” Raleigh said when asked if the home run was indeed life-changing. Not long ago Raleigh was a young catcher just trying to stay afloat in the major leagues. Now, when Raleigh walks down the streets of Seattle, he often hears people calling out.

“Hey Dumper!” they might say. “Big Dumper!”

The nickname is an ode to Raleigh’s large derrière, but he has come to embrace the persona and his place in Mariners lore. Teammates wear T-shirts featuring the Big Dumper moniker and a dump truck full of baseballs. The home run has earned him a few free drinks in Seattle. But it’s the stories that stick with him most. Fans have stopped Raleigh to tell him where they were and what they were doing when the ball collided with the right-field foul pole. Some have shown him their own videos. He has seen everything from Blair Witch-like footage of fans going ballistic in the stands to raw video of people’s loved ones, Mariners diehards, watching on television. In spring training, at least one fan teared up as they gave Raleigh their account of his home run.

“People are like, “I’ll never forget that until the day I die,’” Raleigh said. “It’s really cool. It’s not something you would ever think at the time. I was just trying to get on base.”

That is what Raleigh learned last year about what the Mariners can mean to Seattle.

And now, with the Mariners surging and eyeing the 2023 postseason, this is the feeling Raleigh, his teammates and Seattle’s fans are chasing again.

“We ended the drought and saw how well-received we were in Seattle and how many fans were showing up, the support, the love,” Raleigh said. “Kind of seeing the city fall in love with baseball again, it was awesome to see.”

Last year the Mariners were loveable newcomers to the national scene. Now they are back with a bigger mission in mind. They have been baseball’s best team in July and August, and no one in their clubhouse seems afraid of saying the quiet part out loud.

“We’ve felt it all year, but this last homestand felt like playoff baseball again,” Raleigh said. “It means a lot to the people (in Seattle), and they want to see a winner, they want to see someone win the division, they want to see us go to the World Series and do something that we’ve never done before.”

There are 30 franchises in Major League Baseball. Twenty-nine of them have made at least one appearance in a World Series. The one that has not? The Seattle Mariners.

Mariners history is a well-worn punchline, the type of thing fit for a book, or, more fittingly, a six-part, tongue-in-cheek web documentary (“The History of the Seattle Mariners: Supercut Edition” has 3.5 million views on YouTube and is the seminal work on Mariners’ misery).

In brief, the team’s 47-year history is defined best by lawsuits and thumbtacks, falling ceiling tiles at the Kingdome and missed opportunities. Despite Edgar Martinez and Ken Griffey Jr., Randy Johnson and Alex Rodriguez, Ichiro and Félix Hernández, the Mariners’ peaks have been few and far between. They have had a losing record in 30 of their previous 46 seasons.

The course of all this was supposed to change a few years ago, when baseball operations president Jerry Dipoto made the tough call to rebuild. The Mariners won 89 games in 2018, but their path forward was limited.

“We had the type of roster where we weren’t young and we weren’t old, we weren’t good and we weren’t bad,” Dipoto said last year. “We were kind of caught in the middle.”

The process that follows can be long and ugly. Seattle lost 94 games and finished in last place the next season. Other major-league clubs, meanwhile, have learned that sustained losing doesn’t guarantee subsequent success; not everyone automatically becomes the Cubs or the Astros of the 2010s.

But when a rebuild works, this is pretty close to what it’s supposed to look like: Since July 1, the Mariners are 40-19, tied with the Orioles for the best record in the American League. In August, Seattle set a franchise record with 21 wins in a month. A young pitching staff has somehow become one of the best run-prevention units in baseball, and center fielder Julio Rodríguez keeps doing things the sport has seldom seen before.

That was the overarching takeaway from August: As Julio goes, so do the Mariners.

Monday in Cincinnati, the dynamic 22-year-old had just officially been awarded the American League’s Player of the Month award. He hit .429 with seven home runs in August, a different highlight every night.

“It’s definitely been a lot of work, but a lot of team effort, too, that we were all in together,” Rodríguez said. “It was pretty cool. It was a pretty cool month, and just looking forward to keep building on it.”

That, too, is Rodríguez in his purest form. As his manager, Scott Servais has seen Rodríguez bounce in and out of stretches of peak performance during his fledgling days in the big leagues. When Rodriguez is right, Servais said, he is not locked in on the iPad, looking at a pitch he just missed or worrying about his hand placement. He is instead atop the dugout steps, watching his teammates with the same level of intensity some players reserve for reviewing their own at-bats.

“I know the best version of Julio is that,” Servais said, “and that’s what we’re seeing right now.”

But for all the joys of August, the real obstacles lie ahead in September and October.

Along with the Astros and Rangers, the Mariners are in a fearsome race in the AL West. At the beginning of September, all three teams were within one game of first place. That had never happened before since MLB moved to a six-division system.

The Mariners entered their recent series against the upstart Reds having lost two of three to the Mets in New York. In Game 1 in Cincinnati, Rodríguez homered in the fourth inning. It was his 25th home run of the year and made him the only player in MLB history to hit 25 home runs and steal 25 bases in each of his first two major league seasons. Every day Servais searches for new superlatives to describe his center fielder.

But with his team trailing and the bases loaded in the seventh, Rodríguez struck out with a mighty whiff on a high fastball. In the ninth, Rodríguez was again up with the bases loaded. He was rung up watching strike three. Rodríguez, so often breezy and jubilant on the field, was apoplectic. He argued his case, and in the clubhouse postgame he sat with his head down, chatting about the at-bat with teammate Teoscar Hernández.

But in the J-Rod Show, every day is a new episode. The next night, Rodríguez hit two opposite-field home runs, bringing his total to six in eight games. Again the Mariners lost, this time choking away a three-run lead in the eighth. But win or lose, the vibe remains the same. Try to win. See what happens. Move on to the next one.

Outfielder Dominic Canzone dropped his bags in the Mariners’ clubhouse for the first time just before the Aug. 1 trade deadline. Within a few hours, he marveled at the team’s loose culture. Rodríguez gets most of the publicity and the love. But the Mariners’ B-plot characters are important parts of the team’s heartbeat. Shortstop J.P. Crawford and third baseman Eugenio Suárez are two of those leaders.

“You can just tell right away that they lead in a way I haven’t seen before and I really enjoy,” Canzone said. “And I think that’s what keeps the clubhouse so loose.”

Rodríguez cackled in the dugout one afternoon while talking about Suárez. The man they call “Geno” likes to sneak around the corner and shout “Hey!” in an attempt to startle anyone standing there with their backs turned. He does this stuff every single day.

“He always says, ‘Good vibes only,’’ Rodríguez said. “I feel like that’s a guy that you always want to have on your team.”

At the trade deadline, Canzone, infielder Josh Rojas and infield prospect Ryan Bliss came to Seattle in exchange for closer Paul Sewald. It was a curious move for a club that remained in contention, suddenly parting with its closer. But Dipoto is known as a wheeler and dealer — Trader Jerry, they call him — and there was a method to the madness.

“We felt like dealing from a strength, which has been our bullpen for multiple years, and maximizing a return with controllable players we could move forward with was an important step for us as an organization,” Dipoto said after the trade. “And we found a trio of players that we thought fit our roster very well. We didn’t trade for faraway prospects. We traded for guys that step on the field and we feel make us better today and into ’24 and beyond.”

So far, it seems as though the Mariners played the deadline well. The bullpen has remained fierce minus Sewald. Canzone and Rojas have added depth and options to the lineup. And though Hernández and France were among other players rumored to be available, they ultimately remained Mariners. Hernández hit .365 in August, helping fuel the team’s torrid month.

As one of the longest-tenured Mariners, Crawford has seen plenty of roster turnover in only four seasons. “I’ve been here long enough to see both sides of it,” he said. Talent is the obvious reason the Mariners have improved. But Crawford lives this every day and says the clubhouse is a different place, too.

“We probably have the most fun in here out of any team in the league,” Crawford said. “New guys coming over here, we try to make them feel as comfortable as possible. Once they’re comfortable, baseball is just that much easier.”

After the Mariners won to avoid a sweep Wednesday in Cincinnati, Crawford and his fellow infielders huddled together and broke into their patented victory dance.

“It’s just what we do, man,” Crawford said. “We have fun. We talk s—, but we hold each other accountable, and once that game starts we’re ready to rip your head off.”

Rodríguez and the rest of the offense remain scorching hot, but the pitching that has carried the Mariners could be hitting a rut.

Luis Castillo is the anchor of their rotation, but there is a heavy weight on the arms of young starters Logan Gilbert (26), George Kirby (25), Bryce Miller (25) and Bryan Woo (23), along with a host of relievers.

In the bigger picture, it is fascinating to consider how quickly the Mariners have produced an effective, largely homegrown pitching staff. It’s not supposed to be this easy.

“I’ve watched it the last couple years, so I’m not surprised,” first baseman Ty France said. “But when you take a step back and look at what they’ve actually done and how good they’ve actually been, it’s amazing. “

Wednesday in the dugout, Servais smirked when a reporter asked what exactly the Mariners are doing right when it comes to developing young pitchers. The manager didn’t want to give away any secrets, but he did give a long soliloquy on good scouting and consistent communication throughout the organization.

“We’re good at it, and we need to be good at it,” he said of developing arms. “We’re not gonna go out and just get every big-name free agent pitcher, although we went out and got Robbie Ray, we’ve extended Luis Castillo. We just know that the long-term health of our organization is going to be tied to having good, young pitching, starters and relief pitchers. That’s just how we’re built and how we’re going to be built going forward. It’s really, really important.”

Again, though, these young arms have carried a heavy load. Tuesday in Cincinnati, Miller pushed his season innings total to 132 ⅓, including a short stint in the minor leagues. Last year in the minors he threw 133 2/3.

This, however, is the central conflict the Mariners face. After a slow first half, Rodríguez and the offense have hit their stride. Can the young pitching that carried the Mariners this far hold up a little bit longer?

At the end of August, Servais joked about wishing the month was 60 days long. Now in September, the Mariners have started 2-4.

“These things happen,” Servais said. “If anybody thought this was gonna be easy, they’re crazy.”

No one expects that. The challenges that await the Mariners over the next month — a difficult stretch of schedule, a finish with a combined 10 straight games against the Rangers and Astros, a young pitching staff at risk of exhaustion — are a new beast compared to what they faced last season.

Still, it is hard to think about Seattle’s stretch run without wondering whether the magic of last September can persist. Back then, it was all fresh and new. Fans flocked to the ballpark and players fed off the adrenaline.

“I don’t want to say we were just satisfied with just ending the drought because obviously there was a bigger picture in mind,” said France, the first baseman. “But it was a huge weight lifted off the Mariners organization.”

It was new to the manager, too. On the night the Mariners clinched, Servias stood on the field, champagne goggles on his head, microphone in hand. He talked of the team’s journey just beginning. “But for tonight,” he said, “Let’s partaaaay.”

A couple of days later, Servais spent a lengthy pregame session standing in the grass, chatting with Tigers manager A.J. Hinch, formerly of the Astros, talking about the rigors of managing in the postseason.

That postseason proved to be short-lived. The Mariners beat the Blue Jays in the Wild-Card Round but were swept by the Astros in the ALDS. The only contest played in Seattle was an intense 18-inning affair the Mariners ended up losing 1-0. Their run and their mystique ended, even if the moments and images — like Raleigh circling the bases after his home run — endured.

This year, things may be different. The Mariners dipped their toes in the deep waters of playoff baseball. They know what it feels like. Know how it tastes.

“It does help having gone down that path, but then we got some guys who haven’t been there, either,” Servais said.

If last season was about breaking a drought, this year is about finishing the job. Even with a red-hot August in the rearview. Even with a grueling schedule ahead. Even with the powerhouse Astros and the darling Orioles threatening in the American League.

“It’s more of a sense of urgency,” France said. “I think it means a little more to us knowing we could be a part of the group that …”

France’s voice trailed off. He didn’t have to finish the thought for everyone in Seattle to know exactly what he’s talking about.

“There’s another drought for us to end,” he said.

(Top photo of Rodríguez: Jamie Squire / Getty Images)