Mariners' new Nintendo sponsorship powers up fans' hopes for the future

The only disappointing aspect of the Seattle Mariners' big reveal on Thursday is that Julio Rodríguez did not put on the other hat.

For anyone who's catching up, the Mariners announced a new sponsorship deal with Nintendo that will result in the team wearing patches on its jerseys starting this season: the classic Nintendo logo for the home whites and Nintendo Switch 2 logos for the road grays.

Hence the brief ad in which Rodríguez could have chosen the Super Mario hat out of his locker, potentially unlocking further powers to go with his five tools. Alas, he did not, and it remains to be seen if the new patches have any power-up properties of their own.

Then again, I digress. More so than what the new Nintendo deal means for Rodríguez and other Mariners players, truly of interest here is what it means for the Mariners franchise.

Shocker: The Mariners are getting money from Nintendo

This new Mariners-Nintendo sponsorship is the most visible pairing of the two entities since at least 2016, when Nintendo of America sold most of its stake in the team to John Stanton. The company had owned the Mariners since 1992, notably saving the team from a move to the Tampa-St. Petersburg area of Florida.

The second, more important, thing to know is that the Mariners now have a revenue stream that wasn't there before.

As Adam Jude of the Seattle Times noted, the Mariners had been one of the last holdouts as teams across the league had increasingly adopted uniform patches in recent years. Some of these sponsorships pay quite well, with the New York Yankees notably getting $25 million per year to wear patches for Starr Insurance.

The Mariners aren't getting that much to rep Nintendo. According to Mike Mazzeo of Sports Business Journal, the pact is worth a more modest seven figures per year.

“We didn’t run after the last dollar. But it was worth the wait, because we were always looking for the right partner,” Chris Voight, the Mariners' Senior Vice President, Corporate Partnership, told Mazzeo. “We didn’t just want to take any offer. We just wanted to have the right fit.”

Voight did insist that the Mariners' deal with Nintendo is "not at the bottom." That implies it's at least worth more than the $2.8 million per year deal that the A's have to rep Las Vegas on their jerseys.

Every little bit helps

This is all happening at an interesting time for the Mariners. The team is not coming off the most inspiring offseason, resulting in Justin Turner going on offense, Jerry Dipoto going on defense, and fans decidedly backing the former.

Turner was not out of line in taking the Mariners to task for not adding "an impact bat or two." On paper, that is exactly what the team needed to do after going through 2024 with one of MLB's best pitching staffs but, sadly, one of its worst offenses.

In reality, Dipoto had a reported $15 million budget for new players and ended up using just $10.5 million of it on Jorge Polanco and Donovan Solano. Even if he grants Rowdy Tellez a roster spot and triggers another $1.5 million in salary, Dipoto will still have come in under budget.

The team's frugality is not its reality because that is the way things must be. The Mariners pull in more revenue than most teams, with Forbes ranking them 13th out of 30 MLB teams with a 2023 intake of $396 million. Despite that, they've spent the last five seasons in the bottom half of the league in payroll and are projected to be there again in 2025.

Clearly, there isn't much use in fans begging Stanton to pull out more money from the team's wallet. Yet as frustrating as that is, it can only help that said wallet just got bigger.

True, "seven figures" is not enough to upgrade the Mariners' annual budget from lilliputian to gargantuan. But even if Dipoto's spending money for the 2024-25 offseason was, say, $20 million instead of $15 million, he would have had enough for a bigger splash on a Christian Walker, a Joc Pederson, a Michael Conforto or a Tyler O'Neill.

Take this for what it's worth, as it's hardly a promise that a few extra million dollars courtesy of Nintendo will ultimately jack up the Mariners' payrolls. Yet spring is nothing if not a time for optimism, and fans should be thrilled that they have yet another reason to be high on this year's outlook.