The Seattle Mariners stunning season ended on Monday night, coming up one run shy of advancing to the World Series. Entering game seven of the American League Championship Series (ALCS), the Mariners needed one more victory to advance to their first-ever World Series. However, that dream was halted with a 4-3 defeat to the American League’s number one ranked team, the Toronto Blue Jays.
The ALCS stared out promising for the Mariners as they jetted out to a two-game lead, defeating the Blue Jays twice in Toronto to start off the series. After two consecutive home losses, the Mariners finally put one more tally in the win column, with Eugenio Suárez treating the crowd at T-Mobile stadium to a grand slam to solidify their 3-2 lead in the series.
However, back in Toronto, the Blue Jays would go on to win the next two games, winning the American League pennant, and stamping their ticket to the World Series. The World Series will see Toronto go head-to-head with the LA Dodgers, with game one scheduled for Friday, Oct. 24.
The Seattle Mariners are unfortunately the outlier of all Major League Baseball (MLB) teams. Since the team’s formation in 1977, they are the only team to have never made it to a World Series.
It’s now officially the fourth time they’ve appeared in the ALCS, attempting to change history by getting to finally check their name off, and complete the list of teams who have been to the World Series.
Even getting to the ALCS was quite the feat as it had been 24 years since the Mariners have been in such a position to have a chance to go to the World Series. In order to advance to the ALCS they had to first defeat the Detroit Tigers. In a long, hard-fought series, while deadlocked in a 2-2 tie (in a best-of-five series) the Mariners came up big on Oct. 10, by outlasting the Tigers, and scoring the winning run in the 15th, yes 15th, inning.
The horrible drug induced soundtrack of MLB will sweat you dry when you aren’t used to the climate of this sport, and even then the heartbeat of seasoned Mariners’ fans was palpable that night. The Mariners had come up by one point in the second inning, and were overtaken by the Tigers in the sixth, with the Mariners tying things back up in the seventh.
Both teams played such good defense keeping them tied following the eighth, ninth, 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th, and in the bottom of the 15th, with a run-time two minutes short of five hours, the Mariners overcame by a single point, breaking the record for longest post-season game in MLB history. For the record, standard baseball games only last nine innings but when playoff games are tied they will go on for as many innings that are necessary for one team to score a point.
They did it. For the first time in the latter half of their own existence they were headed to the ALCS with a chance at going all the way to the World Series.
“I’m just so happy for the city,” Julio Rodríguez said. “I don’t think there is any fanbase that is hungrier than Mariners fans. I’m just so happy that we were able to pull through this series and can give them some more good baseball.”
The next and last obstacle Seattle would need to overcome en route to the World Series, would be beating the Toronto Blue Jays in the ALCS. With the series tied 3-3, the Mariners were leading with a handful of runs for the first half of the game at a solid score of 3-1, thanks to home runs by Julio Rodríguez and Cal Raleigh.
It was in the seventh inning when it all turned around. As soon as the Blue Jays’ outfielder George Springer hit a home run with two players on base, they took the lead by 4-3, and the Mariners would never recover. The rest of the game can only be described as a slow choking fade to black.
Cal Raleigh, a home-run record breaking player for the team this year, was holding back tears in an interview after their loss. “I hate to use the word failure, but it’s a failure. We expected to get to the World Series and win the World Series.” The heartbreak wasn’t only there. In another interview with a misty eyed pitcher Bryan Woo, the interview was interrupted mid sentence by an anomalous, game defining scream of agony.
As an outsider looking in, it’s easy to dismiss these as overreactions. At some point it is just a game, and though not death or murder or cancer or an earthquake or bad friends or cavities or fascism, it isn’t real. It is a man-made invention like the Greek gods, or dreams, or values that define who we are and after all of our history in this sport, now that the Mariners finally made it back to the point of having the chance to change their legacy along with MLB history itself; it is somewhere else, just out of reach.
Maybe they should’ve put some players out before Raleigh or Rodriguez to load the bases before their lone home runs at the top of the third and fifth innings, respectively. In all this speculation, there was no game defining fluke. Simply, it was a solid swing at an opportune moment by the other team, with no energy of our own to catch back up. Another losing season, after a lifetime of them.