Baseball is a game of narratives. It’s what we love about it, the storytelling, the slowly built drama that rises and falls over 2-3 hours and 162 games, a season so long it essentially doubles the nearest competitor in professional sports. We Mariner fans cry every Opening Day as our late and greatest broadcaster Dave Niehaus’s velvet voice underscores another fresh video depicting a new season’s fans, some of whom are, like my son, inevitably too young to have heard him live.
“Desperately need to hear Dave say ‘welcome back, baseball.'” Mariner fan @brittanyanne08_ tweeted (Xed?) less than an hour before they released this year’s breathtaking entry. By the time the annual Make-a-Wish kid was rounding the bases and copying signature moves from star Mariners, I was a blubbering mess. And it was hardly 10 o’clock on my Philadelphia couch where, recovering from COVID, I would watch the 37th Opening Day in my life as a baseball fan, though I missed most of them (or listened to Dave on the radio) before the advent of MLBTV.
For most of this particular entry, despite the Mariners’ uncanny knack for winning on Opening Day, the narrative we all had in mind was Logan Gilbert getting Felixed. The lanky first-time OD starter’s 2024 stat line reminded us all how appalling it was that such a rising superstar, who made his first All-Star roster last year, posted a 9-12 record on a team that still won more than they lost and finished just a game shy of the playoffs (again). And while it’s fans and the media who delve most deeply into these narratives, we know they impact the players too. Baseball players are notoriously superstitious and momentum-driven in a game already beset by streaks and droughts. To what extent did the Felixing narrative frustrate Felix, forcing his hitters to press even harder and resulting in those same 1-0 and 2-1 defeats? Can Logan Gilbert, still at the foot of his immense potential and not yet joining buddy Cal Raleigh in extending his time in Seattle, already hear the what-ifs of wondering what it would be like to play for an explosive offense?
Opening Day is a reset, of course, but it can fail to feel like one if the old habits are dredged up. The Mariners kept reaching base, mostly by disciplined walks that already were a big improvement from this time last year. (Before my wife fell asleep, I told her aloud “when Julio’s locked in, he takes his walks.” He promptly struck out on that [first] AB, but then patiently drew a full-count base on balls his next time up.) But they stranded runner after runner, drawing the early ire of straight-talking new full-time TV play-by-play announcer Aaron “Goldy” Goldsmith. It felt inevitable that when light-hitting Central Valley native Tyler Soderstrom parked a Gilbert hanger in the deepest part of centerfield in the top of the 5th that we’d be on the sad end of this one, dwelling on the twin specters of both the insufficiently improved Mariner offense and the unfixed batter’s eye that hangs darkly just above where Soderstrom’s homer bounced.
A better narrative is Chaos Ball and its close cousin Fun Differential. Scott Servais’s 2021 squad is long gone with only a handful of names still from that roster, but the Mariner appetite for mischievous comebacks remains as relevant as the post-win “happy dance” or the movie-set metal trident that somehow has yet to injure so much as a bat boy as it gets marched up and down the narrow Seattle dugout. In the 7th, the Mariners finally chased starter Luis Severino who’d accumulated a high pitch count through 6 despite keeping the Mariners off home plate (see all those walks). And if the revamped and re-signing Sacramento A’s (sorry MLB, that’s what I’m calling them and you should too) have a glaring weakness, it’s middle relief.
Ryan Bliss drew a 4-pitch walk and JP Crawford dragged his walk out dramatically. With two on and none out and veteran bunter Victor Robles at the plate, it was immediately time to redeem the inexplicable choice of 2/2 (actual hits!) Jorge Polanco straight sac-bunting with 2 on and 1 out the prior frame. Victor didn’t disappoint in showing bunt, but the wildness of Athletic reliever Tyler Ferguson (I swear the whole roster isn’t named Tyler) hadn’t dissipated. So the first attempt went foul after nearly hitting Robles. And the second attempt went… somewhere before skidding to the backstop. It’s unclear if Robles actually intentionally missed the pitch to facilitate his runners running or it was just too wild for him to catch, but either way, he subtly motioned for Bliss to take off and he was ready. He hesitated rounding 3rd, then came home, beat the throw, and was called safe.
The replay clearly showed that while he would have been safe throughout the first century of baseball by easily beating the throw, he actually popped his front foot slightly over the plate, giving Tyler F. just enough time to tag him while his back knee made contact. What a way to keep the Felix intact! The call was overturned and suddenly we went from a tied game and the go-ahead 90 feet away without an out to a very ominous 0-2 count, 1 out, and the tying run looking very far indeed, having just been erased.
Victor Robles is a man of redemption, though, and promptly parked the first legitimately good pitch Tyler F. threw into center, deep enough to score JP and restore the tie. It wasn’t what the inning was meant to yield and it was still a disappointment, but the relieved smile on Logan’s face spoke to and for all of us. This might not be a Felix.
Re-enter Tyler S. First batter of the 8th, first A to face not-Logan. A line-drive laser to the first row in right field and we are down again, just like that. The broadcast team was still in the midst of introducing Trent Thornton with high praise from his impressive 2024 run and awkwardly returned to the script right after Tyler S. finished circling the bases. To his credit, Trent buckled down promptly, but our Felix night was restored on the back of a guy who now had 14% of his career homers in this game.
The narrative I really came here to sell you on, though, is a formula that the Mariners deployed in their best moments of both the 2023 and 2024 season, and really went into overdrive when Manager Dan Wilson and then Hitting Coach (now Executive Vice Director of the Use of Bats, or something, a title that allows him to mostly avoid road trips while still calling the shots on hitting) Edgar Martinez took over late in the year. And that is: rack up a high pitch count on tough starters, keep the game close with your starters, then jump on their bullpen and ride your superior bullpen to victory.
Sure, it’s not as clean and sexy as Chaos Ball or Felixing. But unlike both of those, it’s consistently effective at winning baseball games in the 2020s era of strict pitch counts, stretched bullpens, and solo homers.
Speaking of which, Randy Arozarena’s solo homer to start the 8th felt like the most cathartic hit of the last two seasons plus this one just underway. It’s not just that it was a no-doubter that incited a “see, that’s what I’m always trying to do!” bat-flip. It’s not just that it turned on the Electric Factory with a current of belief that ran a string straight back to 2022. Most crucially for me, it felt like a redemptive repudiation of Teoscar Hernandez and his verdict that he (and by implication, every righty with power) just couldn’t hit in Seattle, couldn’t dig in, couldn’t get comfortable, couldn’t find the ball, and so he just had to take his talents to SoCal and empower an already overpowered team to win an actual World Series. Arozarena and Hernandez profile as similar players to me, a reminiscent swing and swagger (though Randy is by far the flashier and ultimately slightly more fun), both infectiously likable. They’re easy guys to root for, like so many on this team. There was a bit in this swing of Mitch Garver’s exasperated walk-off, but the pent-up frustration had lasted 8 innings instead of a full month. It’s easy to overstate the narrative weight of Opening Day, but at the same time, it sets a precedent. And this one said “we are not powerless.”
We had had 3 batters to at least tie things up, maybe eke out a lead. Raleigh, Randy, and Raley (the 2025 Mariners are brought to you by the letter R). Raleigh had worked a ridiculous 12-pitch at-bat, but ended it by swinging at 3 straight balls, fouling 2 and missing 1. Randy went deep. And now Raley gave us a chance to work up a lead to avoid the Manfreddian Crapshoot of contemporary extra innings baseball (because really, the A’s were going to bring in Miller in the 9th in a tie and that wasn’t going to be pretty).
Raley worked a walk and Jorge Polanco proved once and for all that he had no business bunting by depositing a Jose Leclerc pitch over the wall in center. Not as deep as Soderstrom’s first offer, but so much more important. “You had to get to Leclerc,” Goldy reminded us, reaffirming the narrative (Jump the Bullpen? Make Middle Relief Mid Again? We’ll workshop it.).
There was one last narrative to stare down, which was the Shaky Closer. Even recently new fans remember the tribulations of Diego Castillo, or even slightly younger renditions of Andres Munoz and Matt Brash. Going back a way, we have Fernando Rodney, or countless folks before him, echoing all the way back to 2000 Arthur Rhodes, normally so reliable and collapsing in the ALCS when it mattered most. The Shaky Closer is a widespread narrative far from uniquely ours, part of It’s Never Easy and That Elusive 27th Out, things that make baseball such a great game since it is always losable until it is officially won, a game without a clock (still, mostly, though not technically anymore). And Andres Munoz, full of firelit butterflies, was happy to oblige this tortuous narrative, supplying a leadoff walk, the death-knell of hard-won leads the baseball world over.
How joyous then that he could ensnare Brent Rooker, coveted star and would-be Mariner trade target (another version of the A’s would have done this deal, but not the new trying-not-to-lose Sacramento edition) in 3 pitches with his 4th K of the night, the guy who got us more than anyone else last year helping shut down a rally we had already played out the A’s mounting in our minds (Goldy here also verbalized it, a slightly aggravating habit he has of building drama by jinxing us with the potential worst-case scenario). Not out of trouble yet, we could barely process a bounding ball up the middle that JP Crawford turned into an improbable, beautiful, tag-throw double-play to end our first game, and win, of the year.
He yelled with an elation that was rare last year outside of an early summer hot streak and a late Wilson/Martinez/Turner fueled rally to relevance that fell (again) a game short. We got to see a dance on Opening Day, make it 8 of the last 9 and 11 of the last 13 1-0 starts. We got to suspend for a day, if not start to gradually shed, all those narratives of yesteryear. There is a system and process building here. Sure, it’s the Sacramento A’s, a team no one had ever exactly played before, and one that despite some darkhorse prop bets, no one actually expects to win. Sure, it’s still March. But we always look back on the games we could have won in these years we fall (literally, are you kidding) one game short. And today we slipped through the cracks of our bad history and into something that feels fresh, new. Dare I say the opening of a different day in Seattle?
Mariners Stats:
Comeback Wins: 1
Multi-Homer Games: 1-0
Personal Stats:
Watched on TV: 1-0
