Google confirms 2025 was the year everyone became a Mariners fan

The Seattle Mariners didn't have trouble winning hearts and minds in the Pacific Northwest this season. That'll happen when a fanbase that had been waiting 24 years for a division title finally gets one, and the experience of getting there was far from boring. It was, to use a technical term, a Hell of a lot of fun.

Now we know the rest of United States of America was paying attention, too.

Google revealed its "Year in Search" for 2025 on Thursday and, lo and behold, the Mariners were the No. 1 trending sports team of the year. It's the kind of thing that'll make you do a double-take, but it's true. They beat out every other team in MLB, as well as the NBA Finals champion Oklahoma City Thunder — take that, Adrian Houser!

Google confirms that everyone became a Mariners fan in 2025

What we have here is a "what," not a "why." There is no clear-cut explanation for what caused the Mariners to blow up on Google in 2025. We can't rule out the possibility that it was some kind of elaborate prank. Heck, it might have been one person who went into a coma on February 9, 2000, frantically trying to find out what happened with Ken Griffey Jr.

What seems safe to assume, though, is that the rest of America got wise to what Mariners fans saw daily between March 27 and October 20: an extraordinarily interesting baseball team.

Cal Raleigh was at the center of it all, of course. When you hear there's a catcher who goes by the name "Big Dumper," you're going to Google him at least once. When you also hear this same guy is a Farva lookalike on a path to 60 homers, well, you might just develop a habit.

The Mariners Google craze can't have been all Raleigh. It must have helped that Julio Rodríguez also ended up having an awesome season. It might have helped even more that the Mariners were one of the stars of the MLB trade deadline, scoring Josh Naylor and Eugenio Suárez to secure themselves as one of the big winners of the summer trading market.

What the actual data shows, though, is that Mariners fever really took hold in September and peaked in October.

That was when it was all coming to a head. Raleigh got to 60 and the Mariners clinched the AL West on the same dang day. A couple weeks later, the Mariners outlasted the Detroit Tigers in ALDS Game 5, a five-hour, 15-inning epic that is one of the most dramatic baseball games in recent memory. Then came the ALCS, where they had leads of 2-0 and 3-2 over the Toronto Blue Jays that put the team on the cusp of its first ever World Series berth.

Obviously, that didn't pan out, and we prefer not to talk about what happened in Game 7 around these parts. You have to admit, though: the way the Mariners' season ended was yet another in a long line of just plain interesting events.

What we can say for sure is that anyone who took a fresh interest in the Seattle Mariners in 2025 is more than welcome to stick around. The team is in full-on "run it back" mode coming out of 2025, and all signs point toward this year being a mere warmup for something even more special in 2026.

You're not going to want to miss it, no matter how you choose to tune in.