SEATTLE — The night before they set out to make history, the Mariners general manager, his top lieutenant and the team’s manager sat inside an office. Their team had not played well lately, and yet, all of one win stood between them and the franchise’s first postseason berth in more than two decades.
Suddenly, their catcher, Cal Raleigh, walked in. The manager, Scott Servais, needed to deliver some less-than-ideal news.
“You’re not playing tomorrow,” Servais said.
Raleigh balked. On the night the Mariners might end the longest playoff drought in professional sports, they wanted him to sit? “You gotta let me finish this off,” he said.
That’s when assistant general manager Justin Hollander jumped in. “Let me mediate here,” he said. “Maybe you can come in as the game goes and finish it.”
Raleigh didn’t love the compromise, but he didn’t argue, either. He showed up at T-Mobile Park and went through his routine. He watched the Mariners take a 1–0 lead in the bottom of the first, watched the A’s tie the game in the top of the second and watched both teams play to a standstill until the bottom of the ninth. Hollander, watching from a suite above the field, wished that Servais had gone to Raleigh in the seventh. But Servais didn’t do that.
He turned to Raleigh in the ninth.
Hollander remained in the suite, high above the field. He stood next to Jerry Dipoto, his mentor, the GM and lead architect of a remarkable resurgence. Both looked down at the field, at Raleigh, at the moment that could change everything, upending two decades of tortured history, sending the Mariners to the postseason for the first time since 2001.
Hollander said to Dipoto, “This is about as ‘Mariners’ as it gets.” Meaning fingernail-biting, tension-heightening, never-easy, especially not now.
“I’m betting on Cal for the win,” Dipoto said.
Down below, in front of 44,754 fans who were open to trading souls for one run of any sort, Raleigh let two balls pass. He swung and missed at a slider. He took another ball. A’s reliever Domingo Acevedo threw him two more sliders, and Raleigh missed one and fouled the other off. Then Acevedo went to the old slider well one too many times. The last pitch he threw hung low over the plate. Raleigh “went down and got it,” Hollander says, while watching the replay hours later inside the same office where they met with Raleigh the night before.
Raleigh launched the pitch toward the right-field stands. He leaned his body left, trying to ascertain the trajectory, trying to will it fair. The Mariners spilled out of their dugout, toward the infield. At that point, everyone knew. “Holy s—,.” Hollander says. “It hit the window [on the second level of the stands].”
The ball was fair and gone and, more importantly, the drought was over, right that very second, after something like a million seconds had passed by. Hollander says he leapt into Dipoto’s arm “like a 7-year-old.” Dipoto confirms this, adding, “He might have wrapped his legs around my waist.”
Raleigh circled the bases as Seattle fans who waited two decades for this moment rose to their feet and roared. Fireworks exploded overhead. The bullpen pitchers sprinted toward the dog-pile of Mariners near the pitcher’s mound. The players joined in a circle, did the can-can dance, then piled atop each other, and it seemed fair to wonder, at that moment, whether a ballpark could spontaneously combust.
Raleigh found Hollander on the infield. “Hey, thanks for getting me worked into the lineup tonight,” he quipped.
That postseason drought, the thing that vexed and puzzled and embarrassed Seattle’s baseball team, ended Friday night. It ended with a blast and a boom, relief and exaltation, and more than a few tears falling down so many cheeks. It ended because of a faux-hawked hero, an architect who wore his “B”-level shoes in anticipation and an audacious plan put into place five years ago that’s not even close to a culmination.
Yes, the Mariners, the low-luck, high-loss franchise that spent the past two decades burning through managers, general managers and superstars, secured a wild card bid on Friday night. That might not seem like a lot. But here, after everything, it was.