Billy Mac remembers being in the broadcast booth in 2019 when Félix Hernández pitched his final game for the Seattle Mariners. Hernández, a Cy Young Award-winner and six-time All-Star who also threw a perfect game, came up in the big leagues with the team in 2005. But over the course of his 15-year career in the Pacific northwest, he was often the lone bright spot for a franchise that at one time had a 21-year playoff drought (a streak that finally fell in 2022). From his first All-Star season in 2009 until his final one in 2015, Hernández boasted a stunning 2.83 ERA, winning 104 games and losing only 65. Yet, he never once made a postseason pitch. But for Mac, a fact like that is all too familiar for the team he’s rooted now for decades – a team that was established in 1977 and remains the only active MLB franchise to never make a World Series.
“Few careers were less taken advantage of than that of Félix Hernández,” Mac tells the Guardian, refraining from using the word wasted. In the booth that night, Mac says he snapped a photo of the team’s broadcast crew as Hernández left the mound. “They all stood up,” he says. “You don’t see a standing ovation in a radio booth – that was a really special moment.”
For the New Orleans-born Mac, who moved to the Seattle-area in the 1970s with his wife, the Grammy-nominated 1960s pop star Merrilee Rush, he always dreamed of living in a town with pro baseball. As soon as the M’s landed in the region, he bought season tickets in the bleachers. A musician himself, Mac says he’s sung the National Anthem before Mariners games upwards of 60 times and he’s since written a book on the team’s Hall of Fame broadcaster, the late Dave Niehaus, who was also the subject of this Macklemore song. Over the years, Mac and Niehaus became friends, bonding over a love of the game. Mac still follows the team, often listening to its latest standout broadcaster, Rick Rizzs, on the radio. But he can’t shake the fact that the Mariners continue to disappoint their fans.
“We have long had a succession of ownership groups whose understanding of the game was not sufficient to create a winning organization,” he says, diplomatically. In 2016 John W Stanton led a group that bought the team from Nintendo of America.
Mac, like many in the city, romanticize the good years the team has had, from the 1995 playoffs when Ken Griffey Jr, Edgar Martínez, Randy Johnson and company defeated the rival Yankees in dramatic fashion, to 2001 when the team set an MLB record with 116 wins with MVP Ichiro Suzuki. As for this year’s squad, there is renewed hope. And though the squad is first in the AL West, with the rival Houston Astros rapidly climbing, Mac can’t shake the idea that the owners aren’t in it to win it
“I sometimes fear that our ownership is more interested in a $9 box of chocolate grasshoppers than they are in putting a winning team on the field,” Mac says. “Am I happy that they’re over .500 now? Absolutely. Do I want to see them play as well as they possibly can? Yes. But if you look at the lineup, I think there’s three guys hitting over .235. You’re not going to win with that.”
If you ask other Mariners fans their opinions of the team, you’ll quickly find that Mac isn’t alone in his sentiments. In Seattle, those who follow the M’s are almost always passionate and hopeful. And yet they also share Mac’s pause regarding ownership. Seattle’s Robb Benson, a longtime rock musician in the city who has also sung the National Anthem before a game in 2022, has been a fan ever since his dad took him to the stadium as a five-year-old during the Mariners’ inaugural season. “It’s like there was the curse for the Red Sox and then the Cubs and now it’s our turn,” Benson says. “I can only hope that I will see us make it to the World Series in my lifetime.” He adds, “I’m split between the optimism and pessimism – ownership has been very frustrating.”
Janine Chiorazzi, a Seattle-based elementary school art teacher, says she became a fan of the team eight years ago, after her son’s grandfather died. “He was the ‘sportsball’ person for my son,” she says. “When he passed away, I took on the role. For baseball at least.” Still, her enthusiasm is tempered. “I think that the management is motivated by profit [not winning],” she says.
Cedric Walker, who works for Amazon as an engineer by day and is a musician by night, says going to Mariners games in the 1990s with his mother “are some of my best memories growing up.” But, he adds, “I would be lying if I said that it didn’t get to me [that the Mariners haven’t made the World Series].” He says that when he wears his Mariners team gear out and about, he feels as if other baseball fans “feel sorry for me.” Nevertheless, he’s hooked on this year’s squad, which he says is “exciting and fun to watch. These guys really believe in themselves and it has been nice to see them gel together over the years.” But, he tells the Guardian, “As for the management, that is a bit of a love-hate relationship.”
Whenever a team loses, it can be easy to blame ownership. They can seem like an obvious, albeit out of reach, target. But when it comes to the Mariners, decades of losing with few bright spots point to an unescapable truth. Owners have largely not been proper stewards – despite a recent sense of urgercy. On opening day this season, the team had finished with a losing season in 30 of 47 years and the franchise held a 3,514-3,873 record in that span. Despite that, fans continue to hold out hope. One of the common bright spots, along with (now struggling) center fielder Julio Rodriguez and others such as Raleigh or shortstop JP Crawford, is the team’s manager, Scott Servais, a former catcher who was hired to lead the M’s in 2016.
“If there is an All-Star in the entire organization, it’s Scott Servais,” offers Mac. “I think he’s a tremendous manager who has really gotten the most out of what he’s been given to work with. And I really hope they see it through with him. [But] this is an organization that let [three-time Manager of the Year] Lou Piniella go because they refused to acquiesce to his requests for a left-handed bat the season after the incredible 2001 campaign.”
Servais, who placed second in Manager of the Year voting in 2021, has led the team to success of late, even earning that 2022 playoff appearance, the team’s first in over two decades. The M’s missed out on the postseason by just a single game last year, but if things continue as they’ve been going this season, the Mariners look like they may make the playoffs again. In the end, however, what’s clear is that Seattle loves its baseball team – the Mariners are in the top-half of attendance this year. But what seems less clear is if the Mariners love Seattle. Certainly many in and around the organization do. But does ownership, which is arguably the most important aspect of any sports franchise? Until the team is able to break its streak of World Series absences, that will remain up for debate.
“Was it Bobby Knight who said the will to win is a lot of crap? It’s the will to prepare to win that separates you. Until this franchise shows that it’s prepared to do what it takes…” Mac pauses to collect himself, “To circle back to Scott Servais – if the passion for excellence that Scott Servais embodies, if that were replicated throughout the entire organization, then this could be a hell of a franchise.”
