How Ichiro’s HOF induction helps tell the story of Japanese baseball
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Bradford Doolittle
COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. — Hall of Famers coming to Cooperstown — the newbies and the veterans alike — are typically subject to a fairly regimented schedule. They have a garden party. Ozzie Smith holds an annual charity event. There’s a golf tournament on Saturday morning. They roll down Main Street on Saturday night during the Parade of Legends. Finally, there is the induction itself.
Ichiro Suzuki, a 2025 inductee, took part in much of this, but even though he is an avid golfer, he did not play in the golf tournament. It turns out that doing so would’ve meant that he wouldn’t be able to maintain his usual workout routine. So he headed out to one of the numerous Little League fields a few miles outside of Cooperstown and got in his work.
At 51 years old, he follows the same routine he always has. He played long toss, did his stretching and running, played catch with Billy Wagner’s son — an aspiring ballplayer himself — and took batting practice against Wagner.
When asked why, Ichiro kept it simple.
“Because I love it,” he said.
That much has been clear, not only through his 19-year MLB career but well before it and since. His induction weekend was not the first time Ichiro made the pilgrimage to Cooperstown — he has been here many times. Each trek he made as a player was to view and study different relics that held special meaning to him.
“You just don’t see players come to the Hall of Fame, while they’re actively playing in the winter time — seven, eight times, because they just want to touch the bat of the guy whose record they broke,” Hall of Fame president Josh Rawitch said, “or be here in the freezing cold and snow to see this place.”
Ichiro didn’t limit those travels to the stops in Cooperstown — he famously visited the gravesite of Hall of Famer George Sisler after he broke Sisler’s single-season hit record in 2004 — but the beauty of the Hall of Fame is that it ties all of these interlocking stories together, linking the stars of the past with the stars of the present with the stars of the even more distant past, and in some cases, the stars of the future.
For a person like Ichiro, who is deeply interested in historical artifacts and the stories they represent, there is no better place than Cooperstown, and there is no better ambassador for Cooperstown than Ichiro.
“The history of baseball is very important,” Ichiro said. “We’re able to play the game today because of players of the past. I really want to understand them and know more about them. I think we all need to know the game of the past, things of the past, so we can keep moving it forward.”
Ichiro’s plaque there suggests the closing of a historical, cultural and symbolic loop that brings together two great baseball cultures.
It was the converging of paths, joining the practice of yakyu, the game Ichiro began playing at age 3, and the pastime of baseball, the game he still plays — with ritualistic abandon — at 51.
For all of the cultural significance and the historic nature of Ichiro’s induction, it’s this work ethic and his meticulous nature that is almost certainly going to be his greatest legacy. And it’s one that spins into the future, as he blazes a path to serve as a guide for the Japanese and American stars of the future — and present — to follow.
Before Shohei Ohtani, there was Ichiro. Before Ichiro, there were many, but none who followed the path that perhaps only he could see.
EVEN BEFORE SUNDAY, Ichiro Suzuki had a Hall of Fame plaque on a wall. That one was hung in January at the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame Museum, located within the Tokyo Dome.
The contrast between Cooperstown, a tiny rustic village in upstate New York, and Tokyo, one of the world’s largest and most dense cities, couldn’t be more stark. But the baseball galleries within them look very similar, right up to the shape and size of the plaques themselves.
This is no coincidence. The American version came first; the very concept of a Hall of Fame is a purely American convention. So when one was built in Japan, back in the late 1950s, it was an early sign of the dissolution of differences between the two leading baseball cultures.
The differences, convergences and exchanges between the two is the story told in the Hall of Fame’s stunning new exhibit “Yakyu | Baseball: The Transpacific Exchange of the Game.”
“This isn’t just an exhibition about baseball in Japan,” said RJ Lara, the curator of the exhibit. “This isn’t just an exhibition about baseball in the United States. It’s about how the two countries and how baseball in two countries has come together and exchanged equipment, ideas, concepts, players, teams.”
Baseball’s roots in Japan trace to the 1850s, the game exported there by visiting Americans and seafarers. For decades, even as the popularity of baseball spread, it remained a strictly amateur practice, with the college level seen as the pinnacle of the sport into the middle of the 20th century.
While baseball grew into America’s pastime as a source of joy and play for anyone who could toss a ball or swing a bat, in Japan, at least in the early years, yakyu was viewed as a martial art. In fact, the first thing you see when you walk into the exhibit is a suit of traditional Samurai armor, full of red and gold — a gift from the Yomiuri Giants to Los Angeles Dodgers president Peter O’Malley in 1988.
Yakyu, one of the Japanese words for baseball, describes a game that evolved from the American version and still differs in mainly intangible ways and strategic preferences. The gap between the two has narrowed, as the success of Ichiro, Ohtani and others strongly suggests. But it might never completely disappear.
The “Samurai Way of Baseball” — as author Robert Whiting described it — meant a painstaking focus on practice and repetition, a heavy emphasis on fundamentals and a standardized version of the game in which every discrete act had a precise method behind it, and everything was about the team: the “wa,” as outlined by Whiting in the seminal “You Gotta Have Wa.”
Starting around 1905, teams on both sides of the Pacific began making the voyage to compete against one another. But the biggest influence on the professionalization of baseball in Japan came in 1934, when a team of American barnstormers stuffed with future Hall of Famers — including Babe Ruth — toured the country, drawing huge crowds nearly everywhere they went.
Plans for a professional league were already being hatched, and the success of the 1934 tour helped to cement them. The Yomiuri Giants were founded in 1935, and, as longtime Tokyo resident Whiting put it, grew into a behemoth that became as popular as the Dodgers, New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox combined. It set the stage for Sadaharu Oh, Shigeo Nagashima and the legends who laid the foundation of Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) — and the collision of Japanese and American baseball that the exhibit celebrates.
THE YAKYU EXHIBIT has three centerpieces, and appropriately the first one you encounter focuses on Hideo Nomo. (Ichiro is the second and, though you can probably guess who is the third, we will come to that a bit later.)
Nomo was not the first Japanese-born player to make the transition to the major leagues: The seal was broken in the mid-1960s, when Masanori Murakami pitched two seasons for the San Francisco Giants. There was a lot of rancor in Japan over the move, and after two seasons, Murakami went back to Japan. Meanwhile, greats such as Oh and Nagashima stayed put, both spending their careers with Yomiuri, thanks to the reserve clause in place in Japan, as well as a societal pressure to remain true to Japanese baseball.
Oh talked in later years about how he would’ve liked to have played in the majors, but he just couldn’t do it. The taboo against jumping the pond remained in place until the mid-1990s. This was when Nomo “retired” from his team in Japan, a ploy cooked up by agent Don Nomura to exploit a loophole. Nomo ended up with the Dodgers, and Nomo-mania was born.
Nomo was heavily criticized at the time in Japan, and doubt existed in America about whether a Japanese player could truly make the leap. Nomo more than proved his ability to make the transition, and did so with such verve that it swept through Southern California and beyond, and also captivated audiences in Japan. The practice of baseball fans on the other side of the Pacific rising in the early morning to watch MLB began at that time.
The exhibit features some of Nomo’s equipment, as well as videos of hitters flailing at his nasty splitter. There are also some model baseballs with which you can try to simulate the grips Nomo used on his various pitches, including that splitter.
Jack Morris was in the midst of praising the nastiness of Nomo’s splitter when fellow Hall of Famer Ozzie Smith interjected, “You should try to hit it!”
NOMO’S DEBUT SEASON in 1995 preceded the now-celebrated 1996 Japan tour, which saw an MLB all-star team that included Cal Ripken Jr. play an eight-game series against players from the NPB, then called All-Japan. Ripken had gone on a similar tour in 1986, along with Morris and Smith, and a decade later he already noticed a marked difference in the caliber of play from his Japanese opponents.
“Going over there, you kind of look and shake your head and go, ‘These people are crazy about baseball,'” Ripken said. “They were talking about drawing 60,000 fans for a high school championship game.
“I thought the Japanese were always really competitive and very serious. They wanted to do really well. They wanted to beat us.”
One of the opponents of the all-star group in 1996 was Ichiro, and that experience for the Japanese star, in combination with the phenomenon that Nomo created, began to turn his head toward the other side of the Pacific. He wanted to test himself.
“The excitement I felt in that series was definitely a turning point,” Ichiro told author Narumi Komatsu in “Ichiro on Ichiro.” “Instead of something I just admired from afar, the majors became a set goal of mine.”
Ichiro had become a phenomenon in his home country, his face splattered on billboards all over Tokyo and beyond, as he exploded on the scene by becoming the first player in Japanese professional history to record 200 hits in a season, setting the since-broken record of 210 at age 20. He hit .353 during his nine years for Orix, which would far away be the all-time highest average in Japanese history if he qualified for the career leaderboard.
He did it in his own way, forging a path unlike any players before him. He famously refused to change the batting stance he’d used since high school — much to the chagrin of his first manager with Orix.
Ichiro also donned the name “Ichiro” on his jersey, departing from Japanese tradition. Suzuki is a common name in Japan and his club felt that would make him all the more marketable, which it did. To this day, in baseball everywhere, when you hear the name “Ichiro”, you know exactly who’s being referenced.
Bobby Valentine, who initially bucked against tradition when he went to manage in Japan, eschewing conventions such as marathon practice sessions and incessant meetings, saw things evolving, especially when he prepared for his first stint with the Chiba Lotte Marines in 1995, the year Nomo debuted with the Dodgers.
“That was the year after Ichiro was Rookie of the Year for Orix in 1994,” Valentine said. “Every night, all the coaches got together and looked at video and looked at charts, trying to figure out one guy, Ichiro.
“He showed me what he could do. I asked him for an autographed bat and told him that he was one of the best players I ever saw.”
Later, when Valentine was managing the New York Mets, he unsuccessfully lobbied his front office to pursue Ichiro.
“I was told at the end of the day, that they didn’t want a singles hitter in the outfield,” Valentine said mournfully. “And I said, ‘What if you get 200 of them?’ I swear. And he got like 240 of them.”
AT TIMES, IT has been far from certain that the paths that came together through Ichiro on Sunday would indeed merge. That part of the story isn’t overlooked in the yakyu exhibit.
It’s depicted in a couple of very different ways that relate the baseball sliver of the story of the years during and after World War II, including the post-war period when the United States occupied Japan under the supervision of Gen. Douglas MacArthur.
One object from the war years is the most melancholy relic in the exhibition, and indeed perhaps in the entire Hall of Fame.
It is a handmade, wooden home plate that once was part of Zenimura Field at the Gila River in Arizona internment camp during the war. The field was built by Kenichi Zenimura, a baseball advocate born in Hiroshima who spent most of his childhood in Hawaii.
The home plate is a a solemn reminder of how the forces that too often keep nations apart can’t be overcome by baseball alone. But if baseball can’t keep nations from conflict, conflict can’t keep people from baseball.
“It was the anchor of the Gila River community, and that’s how we like to describe it,” Lara said. “During these tragic, incredibly hard times at this camp in Arizona, it was the anchor that brought the community together, around a single baseball diamond that they built with their hands.”
After the war, when the occupation of Japan began, much of the country, and especially Tokyo, was in ruin. The battle for the ideological soul of the country was well underway in those early years of the Cold War, and the influence of communist Russia was of chief concern for the Americans.
MacArthur thought that reigniting the dormant cultural elements of Japanese society might help to calm things down and help make some headway in turning heads from the encroaching communist influence. With many of the country’s cultural institutions in rubble or ashes, sports, especially baseball — which can be played outside and a sport the Japanese already loved — was the answer.
Author Robert K. Fitts describes the sequence in “Banzai Babe Ruth.” League play resumed in 1946. Things improved enough that in 1947, Japan celebrated Babe Ruth Day at the same time that the major leagues were honoring the dying slugger. Quality of play began to recover but the overall fervor around yakyu still fell short of the pre-war years.
In 1949, on a suggestion from MacArthur staffer Cappy Harada, the project was turned over to Lefty O’Doul, who had fallen in love with Japan on a 1931 tour with other major leaguers and played a key role in helping convince Ruth to join the 1934 tour.
O’Doul, manager of the San Francisco Seals, brought his Pacific Coast League squad to Japan after the 1949 season to tour the country. The Seals were welcomed with a parade and, over the course of four weeks, helped boost the morale of a struggling nation. One evening before a game, for the first time, the flags of the United States and Japan were raised together, bringing many fans to tears.
Japanese journalist and historian Tadao Kunishi sees the O’Doul tour as one of the turning points in the evolution of Japanese baseball, especially in its gradual move toward becoming more like the American game.
“During that time, Japan was still doing the rebuilding,” Kunishi said. “We did not have much entertainment, and baseball is outside. So many movie theaters were burned down, so they cannot play, but baseball is outside, and anybody can go there. And really [Lefty] O’Doul brought the joy of watching baseball.”
A veritable baseball Forrest Gump, O’Doul always seemed to be in the middle of baseball history. He pitched for John McGraw. He converted to hitting and one year batted .398 in the National League. He managed and mentored life-long friend Joe DiMaggio, whom he brought along on a later, much-celebrated tour of Japan. He saw the potential of Japan as a baseball nation from the start.
“He said it was just a matter of time that Japanese ballplayers are going to be playing in America,” said Tom O’Doul, Lefty’s cousin. “And they’re going to be playing American baseball because they’re good and they respect the game. And that’s what happened.”
Though you don’t need to attribute the eventual boom in Japan — baseball and beyond — entirely to Lefty O’Doul and baseball, those tours proved to be a turning point in the ongoing exchange in the sport between Japan and America, which had seemed hopelessly severed.
THE THIRD CENTERPIECE of the yakyu exhibit, along with Nomo and Ichiro, as you probably have guessed, is the display for Shohei Ohtani, who is in the midst of a Hall of Fame career, and thus years away from joining Ichiro in the Japanese and the American plaque rooms. But he will get there.
Ohtani’s display looms in the back of the room behind Ichiro and indeed, from a certain angle as you stand there and look upon Ichiro’s uniform and bat and shoes and batting glove, a little lower to the left and against the wall behind him, you see an image of Decoy, the most famous dog — and literary muse — in all of baseball.
As for the player himself, Ohtani’s display is a stunning piece of museum technology. Depending on which angle you take to look at his image, you might see him pitching or hitting for the Los Angeles Angels, doing the same for the Dodgers, or celebrating the end of Japan’s victory in the 2023 World Baseball Classic, which he clinched by fanning Mike Trout for the last out.
The rise of Ohtani is also a chief part of the legacies of Oh and Nagashima and Nomo and Ichiro. By now, 74 players have made the transition to the major leagues — not all with resounding success, but many have reached All-Star status. All you have to do is look in the financial ledgers and the contracts that have been dolled out to the likes of Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Roki Sasaki to know how Japanese stars are valued today.
For his part, Ichiro does think that the differences between yakyu and MLB have softened, but they still exist — and they should.
“It usually takes a few years for Japanese baseball to pick up the things that happen in major leagues,” Suzuki said. “It’s definitely getting closer.
“I don’t think that Japan should copy what the MLB does. I think Japanese baseball should be Japanese baseball in the way they do things, and MLB should be the way they are. I think they should be different.”
And yet in so many ways, Ichiro himself was the bridge. He was yakyu and he was baseball.
Ichiro, who will generally give frank answers about himself and his thoughts about baseball, almost always deflects when asked about the thoughts or impressions of others. He still does it.
When asked about his role or his sense of how Japanese fans are reacting to his induction to Cooperstown, he says he doesn’t know. When asked about his relationship to the current Japanese stars in the major leagues, he says that he sees them at the ballpark when they come through Seattle.
He doesn’t get any more detailed when asked about the path that he has opened up for other Japanese stars, but he does open up a little when discussing his role in spreading knowledge to the next generation of players on both sides of the Pacific.
“The players need to tell the younger players about the game,” Ichiro said. “That’s a responsibility that those who have played this game have. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to help in that aspect, but it’s something I’d really like to do.”
As much as anything, Ichiro’s legacy is helping to bring the paths of two different baseball cultures together.
“We used to say that yakyu and baseball are different games with the same rules,” Kunishi said. “Now yakyu and baseball is the same game and the same rules.”
As far as legacies go, that’s not bad, even if the process remains ongoing. In the meantime, Ichiro will be there, connected with Cooperstown and Japan alike, making sure that no aspects of all the history he has been a part of will be lost.
LSU leading rusher Caden Durham is doubtful for Saturday night’s game at Ole Miss because of an ankle injury, sources told ESPN.
Durham was injured in last Saturday’s 56-10 win over SE Louisiana and has been limited in practice all week. According to sources, he is still dealing with the injury and did not run well in the team’s final walk-through Friday.
Durham had been listed as questionable on the SEC availability report on Thursday.
Durham easily leads the Tigers with 213 yards on 52 carries. LSU’s second-leading rusher, Harlem Berry, has 87 yards on 15 carries. Sophomore Ju’Juan Johnson is expected to see more action, as will junior Kaleb Jackson.
LSU’s offense is No. 111 nationally in rushing, averaging just 116.8 yards per game. That’s the second-lowest average in the SEC behind South Carolina (80.3).
The good news for the Tigers is that quarterback Garrett Nussmeier appears to have worked through a torso injury and is back in form. LSU has the country’s No. 30 passing offense.
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Dan Wetzel
Back in November of 2015, when his Clemson program was still barreling toward a national title (it would win two of them), Dabo Swinney spoke about the life cycle of a business.
“You’ve got the birth. You’ve got the growth. You’ve got plateau. You’ve got decline. And you’ve got death,” Swinney said. “Those great businesses out there, those great programs, they don’t plateau.
“So how do you do that?” he continued. “You have to constantly reinvent, reinvest, reset, learn, grow. You change. You have to do that. You don’t just change to change, but you have to always challenge yourself each and every year and make sure, ‘OK, this may be how we’ve done it, but is it still the right way?'”
The business of college football in 2025 is different from 2015. Direct revenue-sharing, NIL and the transfer portal have not just altered the way rosters are assembled, but even how individuals and teams need to be coached.
It’s like most businesses and industries. Nothing is static. You either enthusiastically welcome that, or, in Swinney’s words, “You’ve got death.”
Mike Gundy is very much alive; he just is no longer employed at Oklahoma State, where over 21 seasons he became the program’s all-time winningest coach. He and Swinney have much in common.
Both are in their mid-to-late 50s (Swinney 55, Gundy 58). Both built up underperforming programs through their own force of will — a combination of competitive drive, innovative schemes and personal charisma. During the 2010s, few were better.
They have also been among the most vocal critics, and least enthusiastic embracers, of the new era of the sport. It shows.
Dabo’s Tigers, hyped as title contenders in the preseason, are 1-3 with losses to Georgia Tech and Syracuse. Gundy, meanwhile, was fired after a 1-2 start that included a humbling loss to Tulsa.
In his final news conference before being dismissed, Gundy bemoaned pretty much everything new.
“It’s like being in an argument with your wife,” Gundy said. “And you know you’re right. It makes zero difference. You’re wrong. You might as well just get over it, give in, and things are going to be much smoother.”
It seems that defeatist attitude and begrudging acceptance of new dynamics bled into Gundy’s program.
Anyone can add a player through the portal. But if you don’t accept and understand the portal, if you aren’t spending time passionately trying to make it work best for you, are you getting the right player? You can’t go in with feet dragging.
Swinney is a traditionalist; often for admirable reasons. He wants to be loyal to players he recruited, preferring to believe in and develop them rather than just transfer in a better talent.
Times change, though. You can lament it. You can pine for the old days. Or you can adapt so you don’t wind up like a typewriter repair shop.
Establishment coaches often rail against transfer culture, painting players who jump around as disloyal or running from a challenge. That might be the case for some, but for many others, the portal is a chance to prove their worth by working up the ladder from smaller to bigger programs.
Big programs recruit based on sophomore and junior years of high school. A lot of guys fall through those cracks. Maybe they hailed from small towns or hadn’t hit growth spurts, or their parents couldn’t afford throwing coaches and nutritionists. Maybe they didn’t get invited to the “Elite 11.”
Yet, once in college, they worked and worked and improved and improved, generally at smaller programs without the fanciest of locker rooms or some unearned sense of greatness based on “tradition.”
Others might have failed at their first school, or got spurned by a previous coach. Now, on their last chance, they are fighting the way they always should have.
As with old-school recruiting, coaches who love the portal are probably going to get the best of those players over coaches who just tolerate the portal. Diamonds are everywhere.
Syracuse and Georgia Tech didn’t have more “talent” — and certainly not higher-ranked recruits — when they beat Clemson. Same with Tulsa and OSU. They didn’t have better facilities or higher-paid assistants.
But they might have had what Dabo and Gundy used to exude in excess — an intense drive to win. High school recruiting rankings don’t matter to the scoreboard.
Gundy couldn’t make it work in the new era. Can the extremely talented Swinney? A lot of coaches can’t. It’s not an age thing, though — Indiana’s Curt Cignetti is 64 and thriving. It’s an attitude thing. It’s about fervently attacking new possibilities.
Reinvent, reinvest, reset, learn, grow.
It can’t be like holding your tongue in a fight with your spouse.
Mike Gundy already tried that approach.
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Alden Gonzalez
SEATTLE — It had been 24 years and five days since this city experienced its last division title, a wait that turned its baseball fans into one of this country’s most tortured. Babies were born, grew up, went to college, got a job, and their beloved Seattle Mariners still had not finished atop the American League West. Maybe this is how it was supposed to happen. With a nucleus that finally righted itself — after stumbling time and again — in the most emphatic way possible. With a dominant, soul-cleansing, late-season series sweep of the franchise’s greatest nemesis. With Cal Raleigh punctuating a division title with his 60th home run Wednesday night.
With, of all things, some help from the supernatural.
Three weeks ago, when the team was struggling and hope seemed lost, Steven Blackburn, a 26-year-old lifelong Mariners fan, found a witch. An Etsy witch, to be exact, which is precisely what you might think it is: a self-proclaimed sorcerer providing services through the popular e-commerce website.
Blackburn and one of his best friends had often joked about using an Etsy witch to fix some of their biggest problems and first thought about contracting one to help the Mariners some time around June. The Mariners weren’t playing quite bad enough then — but by Sept. 5, after a stretch of 15 losses in 21 games, they were. Blackburn searched for witches willing to cast generic spells, found a user going by the name of SpellByLuna and asked for an incantation that would turn around the Mariners’ once-promising season.
Said Blackburn: “Best $16 I’ve ever spent.”
The next morning at 5 a.m., Blackburn, an RV mechanic who lives about 30 miles north of T-Mobile Park, received a message that the spell had been cast. Later that night, All-Star center fielder Julio Rodríguez took over a game the Mariners absolutely needed, homering twice and making a leaping catch in a 10-2 victory. The next day, the Mariners blew out the Atlanta Braves 18-2. They’ve lost only once since, firing off 17 wins in 18 games since “Luna” unveiled the conjuration. Fans now show up at the ballpark in witches’ hats and, at times, full-on witch costumes. The organization has wrapped its arms around the concept, referencing the Etsy witch on social media and inviting Blackburn to the ballpark on Fan Appreciation Night earlier this month.
“It’s been super crazy,” he said. “I did this Etsy thing as a joke. I didn’t expect it to be this big.”
Blackburn wasn’t old enough to enjoy the 116-win 2001 team that claimed the previous division title and advanced into the AL Championship Series. His most vivid memories were of Mariners teams of the 2010s that featured the likes of Kyle Seager, Robinson Cano, Nelson Cruz and Félix Hernández, none of which advanced into October, and of younger groups that came up painfully short in 2021, 2023 and 2024.
Blackburn fully acknowledges the absurdity of it all. But when certain things happen — Mitch Garver hitting his first triple in six years, journeyman infielder Leo Rivas delivering a walk-off home run, Victor Robles diving from out of nowhere to make a game-saving catch — he can’t help but believe there might be something to it. The 2025 Mariners look like the franchise’s deepest, most talented collection in a generation, headlined by a transformative individual season. They have the tortured fan base, the conquest of a bitter rival, and even a little magic around them.
“It just feels like we’re almost destined,” Blackburn said. “It’s been 48 years that this team has been around. This feels like it’s about time.”
IT WAS THE first day of June when Mariners general manager Justin Hollander first reached out to Amiel Sawdaye, assistant GM of the Arizona Diamondbacks, to inquire about Eugenio Suárez and Josh Naylor. The trade deadline was still more than eight weeks away and the D-backs still maintained reasonable hope that they might contend. But Hollander vowed to stay in touch.
Under Jerry Dipoto, in his 10th year overseeing baseball operations, the Mariners had built a reputation as aggressive dealers. Trading promising prospects for veteran players on the verge of free agency, though, was the type of move they steered away from. But Suárez, a third baseman on a 50-homer pace, and Naylor, a first baseman who can hit for power, put the ball in play and even steal bases, addressed the team’s two biggest holes at a time that demanded urgency.
Raleigh was in the midst of a historic season. Rodríguez and the majority of the team’s best pitchers — starters Logan Gilbert, George Kirby, Bryan Woo and Bryce Miller, relievers Andres Muñoz and Matt Brash — were in their mid to late 20s, representing what should be the apex of their careers. And the failure of these past two years, both of which saw the Mariners finish a game shy of the playoffs, had revealed something about the follies of pragmatism.
“You can sometimes take for granted how good you think your team is and how likely or not likely you are to make the postseason,” Hollander said. “We felt like this year’s team had the potential to be the best of any of the other teams.”
So Hollander continually scribbled reminders to call Sawdaye on the notepad he keeps beside a computer on his office desk. He checked in every week or so, just to make sure nothing had changed. The Mariners had interest in acquiring both players in a package deal, but when the call finally came near the end of July, the D-backs revealed their plans to separate them. Naylor arrived on July 24 and brought a type of edge the team needed. Suárez, a beloved figure from a previous stint in Seattle in 2022-23, followed on the night of July 30 and brought the type of vibe that soon became crucial.
Later, sources told ESPN, the Mariners were on the verge of acquiring star closer Jhoan Duran from the Minnesota Twins. But when the Philadelphia Phillies upped their offer, the Mariners relented.
They still came away with two corner infielders who lengthened their lineup and made them a more dynamic unit than they’ve been in recent years, one not solely reliant on Raleigh and Rodríguez. Since then, the rotation has gotten healthy — minus Woo, whose pectoral injury is not expected to impact his postseason availability — and rounded into the type of form it displayed amid a record-setting 2024 season, posting a 2.50 ERA over these past 18 games. The bullpen — not only Muñoz and Brash, but Gabe Speier, Eduard Bazardo, Carlos Vargas and Caleb Ferguson, the veteran lefty acquired after a deal for Duran fell through — continues to look devastating.
Said Rodríguez: “We can do it all.”
“We’ve got athleticism, we’ve got team speed, we’ve got power, we’ve got starting pitching, a back end of the bullpen,” Dipoto said. “It’s very rare in our lives you get all those things hitting at the same time. And here in the last few weeks, they are. And they showed — they’re on a mission. And I don’t think that mission stops with making it to the postseason.”
THE LAST TIME the Mariners hosted a playoff game, it was Oct. 15, 2022, and to their fans, it became the most excruciating day possible. Seventeen innings went by without a run being scored. A Washington Huskies college football game started and ended during that time. Then Astros shortstop Jeremy Peña led off the top of the 18th inning with a home run to center field. After 6 hours, 22 minutes, the Mariners’ 2022 season — the one that ended the longest active playoff drought in North American professional sports — was over.
Heading into 2025, the Mariners had existed for 47 years and made the playoffs only five times. The best group was assembled in 2001, two years after the franchise’s most iconic player, Ken Griffey Jr., left to join the Cincinnati Reds. The Mariners tied the Chicago Cubs for the most wins in modern baseball history that year, then got trounced by the New York Yankees in the ALCS. Twenty-one years went by without another Mariners team in the playoffs; 24 went by without a division championship.
That 2001 season didn’t just mark the last time the Mariners had won the AL West; it marked the last time the people of Seattle had seen its team score a run at home in the playoffs, let alone win a game.
“We all know the history,” Rodríguez said. “We all know the hunger that this fan base has. That’s one thing that motivates us.”
The Mariners emerged from this year’s trade deadline with a 9-1 homestand, validating every belief that they had morphed into a powerhouse. They were 67-53 by Aug. 12, tied with the Houston Astros atop the AL West. Then the Mariners started to slide again. They went 2-7 on a trip through Baltimore, New York and Philadelphia. They bounced back by winning four of six at home but followed by dropping two of three in Cleveland.
Then they went to Tampa and lost back-to-back games to the Rays, after which Dipoto and manager Dan Wilson held a team meeting largely to emphasize that this was a talented, accomplished group that didn’t require any one individual to carry it. Suárez spoke about the importance of staying within themselves, J.P. Crawford emphasized the need for resiliency.
It didn’t work; the Mariners gave up eight runs in the first two innings of the finale, lost again, flew to Atlanta and were dominated by Braves ace Chris Sale on a Friday night, falling 3½ games out in the AL West.
Then, suddenly, everything changed.
The Mariners at one point won 10 in a row for the first time in more than three years. In one four-game series against the Los Angeles Angels, their pitchers set a major league record by accumulating 62 strikeouts. Over a 16-1 stretch, leading up to when they clinched the division, they outscored opponents by a combined 68 runs.
Maybe it was sorcery. Maybe it was the mustaches so many of the players and coaches started rocking when things went poorly, no matter how absurd some of them looked. Maybe it was the bag of crunchy Cheetos Dipoto began delivering to radio play-by-play voice Rick Rizzs on a daily basis, a callback to an old slump-busting ritual that reemerged on that Saturday in Atlanta because, as Dipoto said, “When he gets Cheetos, we score runs.”
Maybe it was a team that grew through struggle and finally learned how to overcome.
“We never give up,” Rodríguez said. “I feel like there’s a lot of people that break under pressure, and I feel like us as a team, we stick together. We’ve had some tough stretches, but I feel like that made us stronger. We were able to break through that. And we stayed together through that.”
DURING BATTING PRACTICE at Daikin Park in Houston last Sunday, Crawford wore socks that read: “Do Epic S—.” Then he came to bat in the second inning and hit the grand slam that basically took the archrival Astros out of the game, catapulted the Mariners to an emphatic three-game sweep and put them in position to capture their long-awaited division title.
The Astros’ ballpark is the site of the Yordan Álvarez walk-off home run against Robbie Ray in Game 1 of the 2022 AL Division Series, a moment from which those Mariners never recovered. It’s the home of a team that had claimed seven division titles over the past eight years, continually pushing Seattle into the background. And it’s a reminder of a year like 2023, when the Mariners arrived in Arlington, Texas, on the second-to-last weekend of the regular season trailing the division by only a half-game, were swept, and later watched the playoffs from their couches.
This time, though, it felt different.
“You could just feel the energy around in the clubhouse,” Crawford, the Mariners’ longest-tenured player, recalled. “Like, ‘Oh s—, it’s go time.’ It was cool.”
The Mariners never trailed in that series. Woo, Kirby and Gilbert combined to give up one run in 17 innings, during which they struck out 18 and walked two. Eight Mariners hitters drove in at least a run. The Mariners went into Houston tied for the top spot in the AL West and came out of it leading by three games, while holding the tiebreaker, with six remaining. Before their home series this week against the last-place Colorado Rockies was over — an eventual sweep, putting their winning streak at seven games — the Mariners had clinched a playoff spot, sealed the division, and earned a first-round bye, guaranteeing home-field advantage in the ALDS.
Given the opponent, the time of year and the ramifications, that series against the Astros might have been the most important in franchise history.
“We knew that was what had to happen,” Raleigh said. “It’s no secret — the Astros have owned this division for a long time. And to go out there and do it at their place, it meant a lot. It’s not just a random three games somewhere. They’re a really good team, they’re really tough. To do it in that fashion was special to these guys.”
The Mariners have fallen just short of the playoffs by stumbling down the stretch in each of the past two years. In 2023, an incredible August was followed by a brutal September that prompted elimination on the second-to-last day of the regular season. In 2024, the late-season firing of longtime manager Scott Servais was not enough to save a season that saw the Mariners blow a 10-game lead in 31 days and find themselves once again chasing over the final month. They grew from it.
“I just think that over the years, besides when we got to the playoffs in ’22, there’s always been so much pressure on us to get to the playoffs,” Kirby said. “And I think all of us were just like, ‘Screw that. Take every game one game at a time, do what you gotta do to get ready today and help the team.’ I think the vibes were so good. Normally, we feel all this pressure, but we just went out there and did our thing.”
When the final out was recorded Wednesday night, and the AL West had been secured, Wilson stood on the top step of the dugout and attempted to take it all in for a moment. Before he was thrust into the role as manager near the end of last August, Wilson spent a dozen years as a stalwart catcher during the best run in franchise history.
The Mariners made the playoffs four times with Wilson behind the plate from 1994 to 2005. Experiencing the emotions of it again felt “weirdly familiar and weirdly unfamiliar,” he said. He’s in a completely different role now, but he remembered the feeling so vividly. Of an entire city coming alive. Of a baseball team mattering so much. Of the excitement over what lies ahead.
“It brings back a lot,” Wilson said. “And it just feels really good that T-Mobile was as loud as it was, and as positive as it was, and that these guys are the reason why.”
A NAVY BLUE felt board is plastered on one of the walls inside the home clubhouse at T-Mobile Park, displaying Polaroid pictures of grown men donning the award handed out after every win: a pair of gold-plated testicles hanging from a chain and inscribed with a trident, appropriately called the “Nuts of the Game.” Thirty-eight pictures hung on that board this week. Only five of them featured Raleigh, who has taken on the responsibility of handing it out.
“He never gives the nuts to himself,” Crawford said. “He’s always looking out for someone else. It’s never about him. In reality, it should be.”
Raleigh will head into the final weekend, a home series against the Los Angeles Dodgers, with a realistic chance of breaking the AL home-run record of 62 set by Aaron Judge in 2022, and just as big a chance of beating him out for this year’s MVP Award. That the switch-hitting Raleigh, famously known as “The Big Dumper” for his prominent posterior, has achieved these offensive numbers — a .954 OPS, 60 home runs and 125 RBIs — while starting 118 games at catcher is akin to “asking Josh Allen to play middle linebacker on top of being the quarterback of the Buffalo Bills,” Hollander said.
The Mariners have played a major league-leading 14 games that lasted at least 11 innings this season, which only means longer nights for their best player. Their staff is composed of pitchers who throw a lot of sinkers and splitters, pitches that are often thrown in the dirt, which also means more blocking. Raleigh has made 4,385 block attempts this season, more than all but five other players. He has squatted to receive 8,715 pitches, fourth-most in the majors, over 1,063 innings, third-most. He has also absorbed countless foul tips, made countless pitch calls and spent countless hours dedicated to the task of getting opposing hitters out, all while hitting like few others.
“As a catcher, you come off the field at the end of the night being both physically and mentally exhausted,” Wilson said. “To be able to do that night in and night out and produce like he has offensively — it’s never been done like this before. We can honestly say that.”
Raleigh has produced 12 more home runs than the previous record for a primary catcher, set by Salvador Perez in 2021. Not long after clearing Perez, he passed Mickey Mantle for the most home runs by a switch-hitter (54 in 1961) and Griffey for the most home runs in Mariners history (56 in 1997 and ’98). He did it while coming off a Platinum Glove season, during a year in which he has made his right-handed swing every bit as lethal as his left-handed one. But in Seattle, there’s an appeal to Raleigh that stretches beyond production.
“He feels like one of them, and the way he interacts is insanely humble,” Dipoto said. “And when you talk to him, it’s not an act. It’s who he is.”
Raleigh started the scoring on Wednesday night with a first-inning home run, his 59th. Seven innings later — on the first pitch of his last at-bat, with 42,883 fans once again serenading him with MVP chants — he finished it with his 60th, tying a major league record with his 11th multi-homer game this season.
“Sixty,” Raleigh said later that night. “I don’t know what to say. I didn’t know if I was gonna hit 60 in my life.”
Earlier this spring, ahead of putting pen to paper on a $105 million extension, Raleigh met with the Mariners’ principal decision-makers to express his desire to win with this group and hoped to learn that they shared his ambition. What followed was the best offensive season a catcher has ever produced, at the center of a baseball team that, depending on what happens over this next month, could be the greatest this city has ever experienced.
“To do it in this fashion has been crazy and exciting and fun and everything that I hoped and dreamed it would be,” said Raleigh, who snapped the Mariners’ playoff drought with a walk-off homer three years earlier. “This is a great, great, great moment for this organization and city. We know we still have more work to do; we’re really excited to have that opportunity.”
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