The Seattle Mariners ... might be good?

When I write about the Seattle Mariners, I’m usually exploring one of two themes. The first is that Jerry Dipoto is addicted to transactions and needs to hang out in a bathrobe and talk in a group session about not making trades. The second is the oppressive, unmistakeable ennui that comes with following the team with the longest postseason drought in North American sports.

This is an article that dances around both themes and comes to a surprising conclusion: The Seattle Mariners ... might be good?

Since starting this gig eight seasons ago, I’ve always worked with at least one Mariners fan. This is why I feel comfortable poking at the ennui; it’s just something I picked up. To be a Mariners fan is to explore the idea that sports are fun, even if you’ll always, always, always be sad at the end of the season. This is a franchise that got to watch ...

Yet it always ended with sadness. That’s okay! That’s baseball, and it ends in sadness in one way or another for 29 teams every year. It just felt more preordained for the Mariners, for whatever reason.

But it’s important not to conflate that eventual disappointment with the ride along the way. When it comes to rides along the way, the Mariners have been something special for over 20 years now. It’s been a lean few years, but considering the franchise is still an adolescent on the baseball timeline and have never even won a single pennant, they sure have packed a lot of baseball history in.

Those lean few years were what Dipoto was tasked with fixing, and for the first two years, it felt like hyperactivity for the sake of hyperactivity. Was he really thinking that Jason Goldstein for Dillon Overton was something his team needed to turn its fortunes around, or is he unable to resist the checksums spit out by his brain that tell him one baseball player is more valuable than another, down to a 45th digit? For a long time, it felt like the latter. A bowl of soup with 91 grains of salt sprinkled in it is tastier than a bowl with 90 grains in it, so he kept looking for that 91st grain. And once he was there, he was looking for the 92nd grain.

This just might be a tasty bowl of soup now.

You might be focused on the weirdness of their Pythagorean record, where they’ve allowed nearly as many runs as they’ve scored, yet are on pace to win 100 games. Don’t be. Most of that good fortune was accumulated in the early part of the season. Over their first 21 games, the Mariners were 11-10, despite being blown out 10-1 and 11-1 by the Giants and Royals, known offensive juggernauts. Since then, though, they’ve averaged nearly 4½ runs a game but only given up about 3½. That’s a recipe for a 100-win team, and it’s what they’ve been doing for 41 games now.

They’re doing this with the fingerprints of Dipoto all over them. Jean Segura is hitting .341 and Mitch Haniger is thumping his way to another productive season, while Taijuan Walker is out for the year. Dee Gordon turned out not to be a natural center fielder, but it also turned out that he was right there when the Mariners needed a new second baseman. Marco Gonzalez is thriving, even as Tyler O’Neil is obliterating Triple-A, and smaller cogs like Ryon Healy, Ben Gamel, and James Pazos are all contributing more than the players who were shipped away would have. He’s already made a big trade this season, even though we’re nearly two months from the deadline, and you know he’s itching for more.

They’re doing it with the remnants of a previous regime, too. Kyle Seager, Mike Zunino, and Nelson Cruz were already in place. James Paxton was drafted two scouting directors and three farm directors ago. This is always the case with every renaissance team, though, where the deposed regime never getting credit for the foundation they left behind.

It’s Paxton that makes me reevaluate the stereotype of Dipoto as a human transaction seeking other human transactions on Craigslist. It would have been incredibly, incredibly easy to move Paxton for some sort of shiny trinkets back when the transaction maelstrom was swirling violently. He wasn’t a Dipoto guy; he was always injured; he still had trade value, even though he was perpetually on the edge of a baseball cliff. That he’s still here is something of a minor miracle.

It’s also something that helps confirm that Dipoto had a vision all along, that he had some idea of which players to keep and which players were expendable. All along, he’s been building, building, building something in there, and this might be the truest expression of that vision.

Will it last? Man, I can’t answer that. The problem with the ennui is that it’s thick enough to trip over. I would have guessed that was going to happen after the Robinson Canó suspension, and the Mariners were going to lose 11 games out of 10. That didn’t happen, but there are still other nasty sinkholes to worry about. I don’t need to list them all. Buuuuuut, sure, for starters, Paxton’s next season with more than 150 innings will be his first, their offense runs through a 37-year-old, and they might have the worst farm system in baseball, which will hurt their ability to add reinforcements.

I have a feeling that Dipoto is looking for ways around that. Top prospect Kyle Lewis probably shouldn’t waste too much time on Curbed Seattle.

Still, right now, the Mariners are flying as close to the sun as they’ve ever flown in the Dipoto era, and it’s possible that we’ll look back and realize he traded the team’s wax wings for winches, pulleys, joists, sheets of canvas, and lightweight pliable framing. It’s still early. The Mariners can still plummet to the earth, and we know this because we’ve watched them do it over and over again for the last 41 years. We know this because most baseball teams do, at one point.

Just not with the zeal and aplomb of the Mariners, usually. Don’t worry about that yet, though. Look at them, turn them over, inspect every nook and cranny, and come to the same conclusion as the rest of us: The Mariners ... might be good? The kind of good that comes from a deep roster and can get even better in July?

It’s weird, alright. But it turns out that all of these convoluted moves might have been leading to something after all. It’s like all six seasons of LOST, but in reverse. The ending might actually make the confusion worthwhile.