7/24/2013 -- Mariners Are Not

An existential disaster, that’s what this game was. The new-look Mariners had spent the past few weeks building an identity. They were a team. They were a team that never lost. Today, they lost, and that identity has been shattered, scattered to the four winds. “The Mariners”, as an existent unit, are no more.  They have ceased to be. There is no “Mariners” now. There is only a collection of irrevocably discrete energy beings whose temporary corporeal shells happen to be wearing matching shirts.

Don’t believe me? Think I’m waxing melodramatic with no regard for reality, probably out of some perverse desire to be “artistic” or “entertaining”? I don’t know why you would think that, but I know that people thinking crazy things isn’t at all uncommon, and I know that the first rule of good debate is to address the counterarguments – even the crazy ones. So, I’m going to show you some statistics.

Fangraphs provides a variety of statistics that can be used to analyze the similarity of sports teams. Without getting too deep into the methodology, these are calculated based on a combination of past performance and projected future performance. The more similar the performance, the more similar the teams. Prior to today’s game, here was the list of teams most similar to the 2013 Seattle Mariners:

• Colorado Rockies 
• Toronto Blue Jays 
• San Francisco Giants 
• Kansas City Royals 

What follows is the list of most similar teams once today’s game is taken into account. You’ll notice that the list is drastically different:

• Seattle SuperSonics 
• Milwaukee Beers 
• Newark Yaunkees 
• South Ossetia Roughriders 
• Proxima Centauri Beedogs 

This is bad news. This is very, very bad news. Obviously, none of these teams are likely to win a Major League Baseball game anytime soon. That certainly bodes ill for the Mariners’ chances of winning the World Series this year. The larger problem, though, is that none of these teams even exist. It’s not just a question of how we can expect the Mariners to ever accomplish anything if they don’t exist (we can’t). It’s also a problem for us, for you and me, for our identity as sports fans.

I have, for a long time now, understood myself to be a Mariners fan. I haven’t always been happy about that fact, but that was who I was. Now, that has been torn away, and I am lost, adrift in a perilous universe, with no shield of sports fandom to protect me from the terrors of the beyond. What shall I do? Shall I fill my days with meaningful, productive activity? Shall I construct an existence wrapped in experiential wonder at the beauty of the world? Maybe. I definitely could do those things. On the other hand, the Houston Astros are only one channel over, and I hear they might be pretty good in a few years…