The Journey
Success brings expectation, but it shouldn't come at the expense of the journey.
For the majority of the off-season, I couldn’t quite put my finger on why things felt different, and now as we have reached Opening Day, that feeling of different still lingers.
Normally, my experience of a Mariners off-season feels more like trying to assemble a 1,000 piece puzzle, constantly second guessing and tinkering, holding ideas and pieces off to the side while trying to figure out how the Mariners could make everything fit for the next year.
This normal often included more memes and mockery, more quotes to tear apart, more moments of foot meets mouth responded to with a mostly sardonic tone from the general fanbase. The off-season would traditionally fly by with the Mariners achieving only the bare minimum - a bare minimum that by the end of March leaves even the most optimistic prognosticators saying that this could be the year if four or five things break exactly the way they need to.
For the past two decades, the normal for Opening Day was more in line with Hope Springs Eternal. That regardless of past discretions and everything your eyes and head told you, your heart screamed that this was finally the year. You didn’t necessarily believe your heart’s bellows, but you certainly placed hope in them - and for seven months of 2025, a starved fanbase was finally rewarded for it.
Over the course of last season, that hope gradually developed into a belief that bigger things weren’t just possible, but probable. The free feeling of wishing for the best was over time replaced by the heavy feeling of previously unachievable goals now becoming reality; a feeling that would leave you breathless and white knuckled pitch after pitch, inning after inning, night over night, that can reward you with utter ecstasy when things go right, but will leave you broken in silence when things go wrong.
The deep water of the playoffs are not for the weak of heart. They are a labyrinth of emotion, a never-ending maze of anxiety and stress that can be almost impossible at times to enjoy in the moment, but will be sure to leave you with lasting memories (or scars) that will stay with you forever.
With these memories, October tends to leave another ‘gift’ that we carry with us through the cold winter months, which in this case, was responsible for this off-season feeling different, both in how I viewed it, and with what the Mariners accomplished.
The gift, was expectations, and with these expectations, comes a different view of Opening Day, a view where the collective fan base is no longer hoping for the best, but expecting it. These expectations are not only being bestowed upon the organization by their fans, but also by national pundits, writers and projectionists alike. They are damn near unanimously being labeled as the best team in the American League, and with those labels, comes a different perspective of watching the 162 game marathon of a season.
We as fans over the last two decades have often seen the Mariners as a living example of pathos, where the absurd and hilarious were not only matched, but often exceeded, by the inadequacy and pathetic in nature results of a franchise that might as well have built their stadium to be surrounded by a circle of lain down rakes. You entered each season with the hope for better, but expecting the comical worst - and for 20 years, the Mariners almost always emphatically delivered in spades.
Sure, the organization gave a peek of what life could be in the realm beyond competency in 2022, but that was all almost instantly forgotten over the next 12 months due to a mixture of good process, bad result, infamous press conferences, and some good ole fashioned bottom line baseball. The Same Ole Mariners were back like they never left, as to was the familiar feeling of hoping for the best, expecting the worst on Opening Day.
But 2026 isn’t your Same Ole Mariners - not after last year. Both fans and players alike are marching to the beat of a singular drum, the drum of expectation, one that can only be met if the organization goes somewhere it has never gone before. Anything short will likely be deemed a disappointment, or worse, and there is no going back.
It is fair, and expected, to have expectations - but in all of those expectations, we must remind ourselves to take time for the most important part of reaching the inevitable end - the journey.
We know where we want to go, and we know what it is going to take to get there, but focusing on the horizon at the expense of the here and now leaves you in a state of callous waiting, and ignores the present we should all choose to live in more.
Enjoy the Tuesday Nights in Oakland Sacramento.
Laugh at the TOOTBLANs.
Make memes out of screenshots.
Laugh, Yell, Mock, Cheer at the Mariners - they have, and always will, deserve the full spectrum of our human emotions.
But most importantly, don’t let your expectations come between you and the emotion the journey brings us; the highs, the lows and everything in between.
Live in the now.
There will be time for us to meet up with our expectations in October.
Go M’s.