Vitamin SEA: All-Star Break

Mayday's new Seattle Mariners blog covers the season so far

Hello everyone, my name is Henry, and welcome to Vitamin SEA. A little background on me before I get started: I have seen one playoff appearance in my 23 years of being a Mariners fan. I often joked that the reason for the 20 year drought was because I was born right before the 2002 season started. My mom is Japanese, and for a while she was seriously considering naming me Ichiro. I first learned that players could be traded from team to team in 2008 when I learned that Richie Sexson was no longer a Mariner, which six-year-old Henry thought was the worst thing to ever happen to him (that is, until Ichiro got traded to the Yankees). I watched the Cal Raleigh playoff-clinching home run from my Emerson College dorm room in downtown Boston, to the roaring cheers of my Mets and Red Sox fan roommates. All of this is to say, I have watched a lot of Mariners baseball in my life.

The 2025 season has been nothing less than emotional whiplash so far. A lackluster offseason followed directly by Victor Robles obliterating his shoulder had me believing that we should pack it up and try again next year. Dylan Moore’s AL Player of the Week win had me texting all my friends that I knew buying his jersey was a good idea. The injury bug biting the rotation early was immediately helped by a surging Logan Evans and a very respectable Emerson Hancock. I no longer beg every day for Donovan Solano to be DFA’d. I think Jorge Polanco’s magical month was not a fluke and hope his horrible month afterwards was. If this year has shown me anything so far, it is that if I have any strong feelings about this team one way or the other, all I have to do is wait a week and things will turn completely around.

Let’s look at the past week and a half alone. The Mariners shut out the Pirates three times, including a win over Paul Skenes. For a team that seems to play up or down to their opponents, getting solid wins over a bad team is very encouraging. Follow that up by going into Yankee Stadium only one game behind the struggling Yankees, avoiding Max Fried and Carlos Rodon, and proceeding to get obliterated. Even seven no-hit innings from the internet’s favorite pitcher Bryan Woo and a five-run lead could not give us a win in that series. That was probably the worst game of the year, with the only one coming close being the Robles injury game in my opinion. After that series, everyone wanted to sell at the deadline. The Mariners clearly couldn’t beat good teams and the Astros just were not going to give up any ground in the division. And to make things worse, they had to go to Detroit to play the MLB-leading Tigers before the break. Another bad showing going into the break would surely sink our hopes completely of this team being a real contender…Oh we swept them? And scored 35 runs? And Julio Rodriguez looked like himself for the first time all year? Yeah, that makes sense.

Going into the break the Mariners are actually in a pretty good spot, all things considered. While the Astros continue to be annoyingly good, even without Alex Bregman, Kyle Tucker, and most of Yordan Alvarez, five games is not an insurmountable lead. The wild card race is very active, and I’m not scared of Boston or Tampa Bay running away from the Mariners in the standings. Even the Yankees are still well within striking distance. The rotation is finding its form again, the bats are no longer the worst in baseball and the trade deadline has a large Geno Suarez-shaped shadow looming over it for us. Oh yeah, and Cal Raleigh exists.

If you told me at the start of the year that Cal Raleigh would be a legitimate contender for MVP, leading the league in home runs, Home Run Derby champ (Don’t let anyone tell you one inch isn’t a lot) and have the greatest season for a catcher ever up to this point, I would be surprised but not shocked. After his last few amazing seasons, I’ve always thought that Cal could be a player of this level, but I didn’t actually expect it to happen like this. If you really think about it, the signs were there. Breaking Mike Piazza’s catcher home run record through the first three years, winning a Platinum Glove and then signing a six-year contract, things for Cal have been looking up and up and up for a while now. He was the best catcher in the league last year (William Contreras was also very good I know), and he is only getting better. Do I think he wins the American League MVP? I can’t say yet. Aaron Judge is still a god amongst men and Yankees fans love to throw his stats in Mariners’ fans’ faces on Twitter whenever the MVP race is brought up. But the popularity contest is a wildly important part of this whether you like it or not, and the national media LOVES Cal Raleigh right now. If anything, Judge might have a problem with voter fatigue. Look at the NBA, the only reason Nikola Jokic didn’t win his third MVP was because the league wanted a new face on top for a bit. Cal might get the same treatment. At this point, I’ll take what I can get.

I feel like I need to set out the vibe that I want to bring to this blog. I spend too much of my day on Twitter consuming the most downtrodden doomposting I’ve ever read in my life. I don’t want to add to that. I am writing this before the All-Star game tonight, and I expect our boys to have a good time out there and for Woo to strike out everyone he sees. But coming out of the break, this next series against Houston is one of the biggest of the year. We cannot afford to come out of the break with high spirits and get slammed by the one team we can’t afford to lose to. The Houston Astros are very beatable. I think on the Mariners’ best day they are by-and-large the better team and have real potential to win the division.

And before you all go “Henry, how can you be so hopeful about this team after 23 years of coming up short when it counts?”, I don’t know. I want more than anything for this team to be good, and I think this fanbase is so starved for a win that we can lose hope too easily sometimes, me included. I truly can’t imagine what a Seattle Mariners World Series would look or feel like, and so every little win will feel like a step closer to an unimaginable goal. The 2025 Mariners have legit potential to be a very good baseball team and I want to properly enjoy what we are doing and not just think about October all the time. Let’s be clear, it is not going to be sunshine and rainbows every day here. I have seen some truly horrific baseball from this team and baffling moves from the front office, and I will complain when it happens. There is an important balance that we must find as Mariners fans that allows us to hope when things are good, and not get so out of hand that we are inevitably crushed when we end up one game short of the playoffs. If anyone has not watched the Jon Bois Youtube documentary of the History of the Seattle Mariners, it tells a great story that this team is so much more than the wins and losses. If we cared only about winning the World Series, we would have all jumped ship to the Dodgers already.

Sorry if I got a little carried away there. I just clearly think I know better than everyone about this team and need my perfect correct opinions to be heard over everyone else’s (Although if I wanted that I shouldn’t have put this behind a paywall huh). Let’s have some fun this season.

Go M’s,

Henry “I hope we don’t DFA Dylan Moore” Neiman