Mariners kick 24 years of frustration to the curb with overdue AL West title

The Seattle Mariners are champions of the American League West. It's a beautiful thing, and the weight of it really hits when you remember that there are 20-somethings in the Pacific Northwest who have never felt this feeling before.

There will be time for it to sink in, but now it's time to let loose. It wasn't even a week ago that the Mariners winning the AL West was only a "maybe" thing, as they first had to go through the team that had won the division seven times in the last eight years. Once that was done, what was a matter of hope became a matter of time.

Thus will history record: It was on Wednesday, September 24 at precisely 9:05 p.m. PT that the Mariners completed a 9-2 win over the Colorado Rockies and reset the counter since their last AL West title from 8,771 days down to zero.

There is still unfinished business for this team. As soon as tomorrow, they can clinch the AL's No. 2 seed and, with it, a first-round bye and home field advantage at T-Mobile Park for the Division Series. After that, you can take it from Cal Raleigh that nobody will be satisfied until the Mariners achieve franchise firsts by making it to and winning the World Series.

The Mariners are finally, mercifully AL West champions again

For anyone too young to remember, the current feeling in Seattle was almost standard once upon a time. Only three clubs won more games than the Mariners between 1995 and 2001, and nearly 20 percent of those came just from the '01 team. It wasn't quite a dynasty, but the promise of one was real.

Even with Ken Griffey Jr., Alex Rodriguez, and Randy Johnson long gone by 2001, the combination of Ichiro Suzuki, Bret Boone, Mike Cameron, and Freddy García felt like proof that the Mariners had the right combination of a magic eye and the Midas touch when it came to team-building. What, exactly, could stop the wins from coming?

Well, the New York Yankees turned out to be the answer for that 2001 team. And then the Mariners just sort of faded and spent the next two decades in a sort of baseball wilderness, winning 93 games in 2002 and 2003 and then averaging 75 per year from 2004 and 2019.

This could be called the franchise's "Trivia Night" era. The Mariners had their stars, with Félix Hernández standing out as arguably the best pitcher in the AL for a decade. But those 15 years were mostly a comedy of errors performed and managed by a circus of whats-his-faces. Willie Bloomquist was there. Jack Zduriencik literally said "I'm hip hop" at one point. The rest is hazy.

It was a bad time, alright, but it's gone now.

Since 2021, the Mariners are the only AL team to top 85 wins annually. It takes an actual identity to pull that off, and this is a moment to appreciate how the one crafted by Jerry Dipoto has evolved. What he's done with the pitching pipeline is a work of genius. Offensively, what was Julio Rodríguez's team is now Julio Rodríguez's and Cal Raleigh's team.

What Dipoto and the franchise at large had to get over was only ever doing anything in a cost-effective way. The setbacks of that approach were devastating, whether we're talking the trade of Kendall Graveman in 2021 or those of Paul Sewald and Eugenio Suárez in 2023. Both represented cases of the Mariners throttling down when it should have been pedal to the metal.

This is finally, mercifully what is happening this year. Say what you will about how the Mariners played last offseason, but the additions of Josh Naylor and Suárez have already justified the ample boost in payroll relative to last year. To wit, the Mariners would literally not have made the playoffs on Tuesday without Naylor.

The AL West title is now a matter of fact for this team, and its World Series vibes are as real as can be. FanGraphs has them as the runaway favorite to win the Fall Classic, giving them a 21.1 percent chance. It's not a promise, but it's best thought of as a blessing — sort of like the literal spell someone put on the Mariners a couple weeks ago.

When the Mariners made the playoffs in 2022, it was a coming-out party. Yet all that really did was set the stage for the culmination, for which the AL West clincher is hopefully just the start.