It's tough to say how Mariners fans should have felt before Sunday night's game against the Detroit Tigers beyond "faintly and familiarly nauseated." True, it was the second home playoff game they'd gotten to see in person in 24 years, and just the fifth Mariners playoff game played anywhere in the last 24 years. On the other hand, the team had lost Game 1 the night before in 11 innings, and were facing the human key grinding machine that is Tarik Skubal in Game 2. The only thing they really knew for sure was that the Seahawks had already played; this was convenient, but also meant they had no good reason not to watch. But hope? Hope did not abound. “Hope” and “October” are both just not things the Mariners typically do.
But that was before Jorge Polanco, and then Jorge Polanco again, staked the home team to a lead. And when the coast was clear of Skubal's glower, and then after the Tigers took that lead back late, Cal Raleigh and Julio Rodriguez and Andres Muñoz finished the job. The Mariners have an off-day today before resuming this now-tied American League Division Series in Detroit, which means that today, before the Pavlovian sense of impending doom can reintroduce itself, Seattle fans can help themselves to as much hope as they can stand.
On a grand day for the meek inheriting the earth—unless, of course, you're Arizona Cardinals RB Emari Demercado, whose game-turning premature celebration means that he will soon inherit what the meek typically get—the Seattle Mariners won a home playoff game. Seattle fans have not seen playoff baseball in their home stadium since the ashes-and-tar end to the best season ever, in which they won 116 games and lost to the New York Yankees in the American League Championship Series. That was back in 2001, and it is as if the team spent all their goodwill with the gods on that moment only to find out that the gods bet New York on the money line.
As Sunday dawned, the Mariners had just lost Game 1 to the Tigers in 11 innings on a walk, a wild pitch, and a strategically placed ground ball by the noted batsman and future Guy Zach McKinstry; later that day, they would be facing the best starting pitcher in all the land in Skubal. Given Skubal's résume and repertoire and the Mariners' blank page history in the tenth month, it seemed reasonable to expect that things would end poorly, and perhaps even drably. Desperate attempts to remind folks that the Mariners had beaten Skubal twice this season fell mostly on deaf ears and stony hearts, because that had happened in April and July, and everybody plays in April and July, even the Rockies. This was October, and the Mariners have been religious in their refusal to October. Whatever would come next was, in a very real sense, unimaginable.
But all that was before the interventions of Jorge Polanco and all the other heroes whose names you saw a few paragraphs back. Polanco reached the seats twice by laying off Skubal's hate-filled changeup and attacking a more amenable pitch he could send into the Cascadian night. The first, in the fourth inning, came off a hittable (relatively speaking) slider that caught the crowd by surprise, given that Skubal was mercilessly plowing through the rest of the lineup. The second, two innings later, came off a hanging 99 mph sinker and startled them even more because…well, because it wasn't Raleigh or Rodriguez but Jorge freaking Polanco, a modest enough former Minnesota Twin (forgive the redundancy) who had found his way west at age 31 and had made little enough impact in 2024 that he returned to the club on baseball's version of the veteran minimum contract. He was better this year than he was in 2024, worse than he was during his sole All-Star campaign five years ago, and overall pretty much exactly Jorge freaking Polanco.
And now he is also part of Seattle's albeit brief postseason history, along with Raleigh and Rodriguez, whose successive doubles in the eighth inning off Kyle Finnegan sealed the win, and Muñoz, who smothered the Tigers in the ninth. They are all right there with . . . err, uhh, umm, Jamie Moyer? Yeah, Jamie Moyer, who beat Cleveland in the 2001 ALDS at the sprightly age of 38. Moyer retired 11 years later, and 13 more years passed after that before the Mariners pantheon of postseason heroes admitted another member. Jamie Moyer is 62 today, which is surprising only because he has always been 62 in our minds.
But we're off topic. The Tigers and Mariners are the most compelling series left, both because the teams are good and because of the way they have made so much out of so little. Abandoned to the backwater of FS1 on a football Sunday dominated by the Tennessee Titans, New Orleans Saints, Carolina Panthers, and what the Toronto Blue Jays are doing to the Yankees, this series has created its own space in large part because Jorge Polanco showed what can be done to counter both a quarter-century of history and Detroit's and baseball’s most overwhelming pitcher. And he did it without the company of Edgar Martinez or John Olerud or Ichiro or the other name-brand Mariners from that 2001 team. To the extent that we can ever truly know a team that traditionally has nothing to do with the month in which the rest of us are immersed, those are the Mariners we know. But it’s October now, when no one knows anything. The most fun of all may be watching the Mariners and their growing list of brand new fans squinting into the light. For them, October is no longer just about trying to remember where your umbrella is.
